What Endings Would YOU Change?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 23, 2012

Okay. So Bioware will be changing Mass Effect 3‘s endings (probably) by popular demand. I jokingly added a new ending to Frayed Knights in response (though I like the new ending better). Apparently some more indies are jumping in and doing the same, now. It’s a silly stunt, but it’s fun, and hey… isn’t that what games are supposed to be about?

But this isn’t entirely a new thing.

Bethesda retconned part of the Fallout 3 ending with DLC. I never played the DLC, but after that ending (which I felt was forced), I wasn’t particularly inclined to play the game any further. That and Microsoft Live sucked bitterly and wouldn’t work for me at all when I, in a moment of weakness, thought I *might* buy the DLC. All I can figure is that they were trying to be all edgy or something, and it just came out sounding forced and lame.

Portal had an extra few seconds tacked on to its ending some time later to make way for the sequel.

Some sequels have kinda-sorta retconned the previous games’ endings. The latter part of the Ultima series seemed to do a lot of hand-waving to invalidate everything you did in the previous games. While not quite the same as going back and actually changing the previous games’ ending, they did serve as a pretty significant modifier.

So here’s a thought: If you had great power to reverse time or re-release a game with a changed ending, what would you change? What endings would you modify, and how would you change them so that future or past gamers would have a better experience?

Me? Well, I’ll try and snake the good ones…

Ultima 9. I probably shouldn’t talk on this one, because I haven’t actually played it, though part of the reason I didn’t play it was because of how it ends the story.  The other part of the reason was extreme bugginess, and the fact that it’s really, really hard to get running on modern machines. All it would really take, in my mind, is getting rid of the whole “Guardian is the dark half of the Avatar” crapola. That one thing pretty much invalidated everything you did since Ultima IV.  The original Bob White storyline sounds like it would have done the trick.  Though I’d kinda have preferred keeping Britannia around.  Apparently the original Garriott-penned plot had you fighting the Guardian on his home world — meaning the whole Guardian-is-dark-half-of-the-Avatar crapola was never the original plan. An evil counterpart to the Avatar? Sure. Sounds great. But literally his dark side? Like, becoming the paragon of virtue is literally what caused all this evil to come into the world? Ridiculous.

Maybe what we really need is for someone to buy up the Ultima license (HAH! You might literally have to pry it from their cold, dead fingers as they go bankrupt…) and just retcon Ultima 9 with a complete do-over. Maybe Ultima 8 as well…

Diablo 1. The whole “I coulda had a V8” ending. What. The. Freak.  You pry the gem from Diablo, and he morphs back into the original form of the body he took over – some poor kid with a giant hole in his forehead where the gem had been.  And then, mysteriously, your character says, “Oh! Nevermind that’s how Diablo came to be, it looks like the gem is supposed to go… right… here!” *THWACK*. If I were an adventurer, let me tell you, this would be the very LAST thing that I would do. I’d be dumping it into the bottom of the ocean, dropping it in the nearby lava, or just about anything else BEFORE I tried to blunt trauma the thing into my cranium. And, as we know from the sequel, that didn’t end so well for us, either.

Wing Commander: Prophecy. Another one I wouldn’t mind pretending Never Happened, story-wise. Mainly, I’d have written Christopher Blair (formerly known as “Blue Hair” in the original games) out of the episode entirely. But leaving it ending in a cliff-hanger for a sequel that never really happened? Okay, there were online episodes – “Secret Ops” – that I never finished playing (they were really dull) which had very little story associated with them.  But overall, Prophecy committed the sin of wrapping up too little of the story. Not that there was much story, as I recall. It’s been a long time…

Wow – from this list, I guess my take-away from all of my most disliked endings involve killing / maiming the player’s avatar (or former avatar) at the end. Sure, it sounds all cool and martyr-y and stuff, but it usually isn’t. I imagine it is possible to do it right, but most examples come off as being cheesy imitations of far better stories, written by a hack who imagines him or herself as a better writer than they really are. I think the only way it can be done is if it is truly the player’s choice, and he is allowed to explore the alternatives.

But really, the question is for you: What endings would you change, and how? There are lots of older games with crappy, tacked-on endings. Here’s your chance to indulge your imaginations and try to improve upon the classics!

Filed Under: Design, Mainstream Games, Retro - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights Gets a New Ending!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 22, 2012

So in the spirit of a dare, and the whole Mass Effect 3 ending / protest fiasco, some indies (of which I only know of two – ourselves and Frozen Synapse creators Mode 7 Games) decided to have a little fun with the whole thing. We, like Bioware, caved to external pressure (mainly each others’ dares) to create new endings for our games.

Yes, I know. I sold out. I caved. I compromised my artistic vision.

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon now has an alternative ending with this new patch!

Okay, now, I thought of doing something trivial with it. An extra exclamation point or something. Or something totally goofy. But I decided to play it (relatively) straight, and create an ending that functionally leaves the party exactly where the original one does. Mostly the same information, the same resolution, but Florentine is a participant in the new dialog.

Actually, I think I like the new ending a lot better than the original. It’s a little more satisfying, and I think all the same exposition is given out in a slightly more concise form. However, I’m all about choices, so at the end of the game, if you have installed the patch, you will be invited to play the alternate ending, or the original. So if you really want, you can re-play the final scene and choose the other ending the second time! Woot! No extra hoops to jump through! Beyond, you know, beating the game.

And the next time someone asks me if Frayed Knights has multiple endings, I can truthfully answer, “Yes. Yes, it does.” So that’s one bullet point for me! You know, marketing guys collect those things like baseball cards…

Oh, and don’t forget that you can also get the free Frayed Knights Strategy Guide, even if you don’t have the game. ‘Cuz in spite of all the joking around, Frayed Knights does have a serious strategy side, intended for real RPG fans.

The patch is small, and only works with the full version of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. You can download the update containing the new ending here:

Frayed Knights Alternate Ending Patch

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

How Wizardry Was Made

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 21, 2012

Ever wondered the story behind the making of the original Wizardry game?

I eat this stuff up. I really do. I always have – long before I was a game developer.  The behind-the-scenes stories of the people making these games is a big deal for me. I guess I’m weird that way. Of course, I know now that 90% of the stories behind the making of games is pretty dang boring. “I sat down, I coded, I kept coding, I took a break, I coded some more, had lunch, came back, coded some more, fixed some bugs…”

But there are some fascinating highlights. Especially in the very early days, when nobody really knew what was happening in the growing hobby that was computer games…

Making Wizardry at the Digital Antiquarian

There’s more to the story than just this, but it’s a good start. You can also read about how the company, Sir-Tech, was formed. And about how Apple Pascal came about, which was the language used to code Wizardry. The author is not done with the story yet, however, and promises future posts that will look more closely at the game itself, and on its impact. If you can’t wait, The CRPG Addict has a series of articles about his modern play-through of the PC version of Wizardry I.

Some really interesting tidbits:

#1 – Wizardry was intended to be episodic — with modules getting released (or even made by players). Yes, they’d envision Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures or Neverwinter Nights way back in 1979 or so…  But then, Eamon had already been doing that for a while.

#2 – They actually sold a demo version of the game at one convention (Boston’s AppleFest), containing the first three levels of the dungeon.

#3 – The “Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord” were so named because Gary Gygax threatened to sue them over the “Dungeons of Dispair” title they were originally going to use.  Too similar (probably intentionally) to Dungeons & Dragons (D of D instead of D & D, I guess).

#4 – The manual bragged about how the game consisted of over 14,000 lines of code. I think I had that many lines of code in my inventory management system alone in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. But that may just be because I don’t write efficient code…

It’s a fascinating insight into the story of creation of not just one game, but the whole genre.

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

Hanako Games on Endings…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

My post yesterday was more about the relationship between game designers and the players over the unsatisfying stories (or story endings) in games. Georgina Bensley (Hanako Games) more specifically talks about story endings… of books, film, TV shows, and of course games. Why they sometimes End Badly. It’s an enjoyable essay:

I Whine About Games: Endings and the Rage They Inspire

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Didn’t Like Ending, Please Change.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 20, 2012

There’s a lot of sound and fury around the ending of Mass Effect 3 right now. I haven’t played it yet, and I probably won’t be playing it for a while, so I’m simply commenting on secondhand information for part of this. And I’m not worrying so much about keeping myself spoiler-free (I’ll also warn you that these links may contain spoilers.) From what I can tell, the complaints seem to revolve around three issues: 1) The player’s choices in the game seem to have very little effect on its conclusion, 2) It’s very hard/tedious to get the “best” ending unless you play multiplayer, and 3) even the “best” ending is very unsatisfying and a downer for the entire series.

Okay.  You know what? I hated the ending of Fallout 3. It’s especially stupid when you have a super-orc or robot companion that should offer an easy alternative to a ‘terrible decision’ you are supposed to make. I guess there’s some DLC for it that kinda retcons it a little bit, but after completing the game and getting that ending I simply felt like I was “done” and had no more interest in playing further (or buying DLC). I had a blast playing up until that point. But then I voted with my wallet.

But for ME3, gamers are campaigning to get Bioware to change the ending – and Bioware has stated that it is considering doing so. Maybe in some premium DLC that you can buy to get the ending of your choice. Okay, that latter one strikes me as cynical (especially if I theorize that this might have been their plan all along – which may be a sideways interpretation of the quote at the second link above that they intended the endings to “get players talking.” ).

But I have to wonder. Is this just a vocal minority here? Or are gamers getting to the point where they feel their $60 payment entitles them to dictate the terms of a $60 million game? I mean, I do feel entitled to a few things when I buy a game. Like, that it will actually run on my machine and be (relatively) bug-free.  I’ve only returned games a couple of times in my life, and both were for technical reasons (although Trespasser, despite running at only 2 frames per second on my relatively decent machine in a certain level, was quite simply so horrible – and buggy – that the unplayable frame rate was really more of an excuse that a motivating reason).

Within those constraints, I pretty much assume that as a retail-level customer, I get what I get. If it sucks, I will perhaps be reluctant to patronize the publisher / developer in the future. Maybe it’s just me, but I remember Karateka and Loom being far too short, Twilight: 2000 crashing 100% of the time before the final section of the game (on two different machines and two completely different play-throughs), and several games with completely lame, tacked-on endings. I can’t say I was fine with these problems, but while in some cases I felt like I’d gotten less value for my money than I’d expected, it wasn’t a big deal.

These sorts of things do affect my future purchase decisions, but I certainly don’t take it personally. I might offer suggestions (especially if I was included in a pre-release test) for improving the game or future games, but I certainly didn’t feel like I should start some kind of online petition to make demands of the developer. That’s just… weird.

As a developer, there’s a little bit of a fine line. On the one hand, you do have a financial and social motivation to Give The Players What They Want. So I can kinda understand Bioware saying, “Uh, hey, we’d really like to keep our jobs ‘n stuff, so if we miscalculated this badly and making new endings would make you happy, then we’re all for it.”

But on the other hand, there’s an artistic / creative desire that’s equally strong to do something different that doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator and formulaic expectations. Oh, wait, that’s what the indies do. Sometimes. But … uh, sidestepping that particular tangent … I can understand the talented crew at Bioware really wanting to break the mold a little bit, and tell stories that have a bit more meat and meaning to them.

The problem in this particular instance – going beyond the “gamer sense of entitlement” issue – is the core issue that game designers are shared storytellers with the player. This is not a linear, writer-is-in-control storytelling medium. In the past, the designers did a pretty good job of letting player choice influence the plot and certain events – setting expectations – which made a clamping down on ending options to “bad” vs “worse” naturally pretty jarring.

So I guess that while I can understand the sentiment, I don’t understand the reaction. Again, I haven’t been really thrilled by any Bioware game since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, so I’m not exactly an expert here.

I’m just kinda curious. Is the sense of gamer entitlement really getting out of control? Or did Bioware really screw up really bad? Or is this really just a tiny vocal minority getting an inordinate amount of press for acting up?

 

Filed Under: Biz, Geek Life, Mainstream Games - Comments: 19 Comments to Read

How To Ruin the First Fifteen Minutes of Your Game…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 19, 2012

I’m not going to name names, but there’s a particular indie game I picked up last week that I was pretty excited about. It was a huge game, so I ended up having to download it overnight. But it looked cool and sounded fun. I was excited to try it out. Unfortunately, the day I was going to try it out, things were a little busy. But I found myself with a small block of time and eagerly prepared to try it out.

I installed it. That took a while. All of this Microsoft run-time component crap that needs to get updated on the back-end. Okay, this is a modern suckage that I’ve learned to put up with. No big problem, it’s common enough that I don’t fret much over these things. Installation is always a problem. But since things had to be downloaded or whatnot, this took several minutes.

The problem is that after the installation is done, I only have a few minutes to play. I’ve got places to go. It’s part of being an adult gamer. But hey, fifteen minutes should be plenty of time to check out an indie game, right?

I sit through the company logos as the game starts. Ugh. Yeah, again – as an indie, sometimes beggers can’t be choosers, and the price of a cheap license for various engines and libraries (graphics, physics, sound, etc.) is often displaying their logos. They have to advertise somehow, I guess. Still, no biggie, but it takes me a little while to get to the main menu, which isn’t exactly bounding with alacrity either. But, finally, I’m at the menu. I figure out how to start a new game. And away we go…

Almost. I actually watch the introductory cut-scene. After all, I want to know what this game is about. It’s got a comic-book style intro, and it takes a few minutes to watch all the way through. I’m fine watching these once.  But now I’m about four or five minutes into the game and I still haven’t actually played the game or truly seen what it is about yet.

But now, finally, the game begins. It’s the tutorial level. There is lots of explanation. I don’t know if it’s possible to skip or speed through these tutorials, because I am actually trying to pay attention so I can learn how to play and enjoy the game. But the clock is ticking. Another five minutes pass. I’m supposed to be out the door Real Soon Now in the real world.

I experience some action sequences! And a little bit of freedom to explore between tutorial sections! Woot! This is a lot cooler. I take some time to explore and experiment. Some experiments don’t end too well, and I take damage. But the graphics are pretty, and the gameplay seems decent from what I can see. I run into some more tutorial sections. And I spend some more time exploring and experimenting.

Now I’ve had ten minutes to play around in the first level of the game, because I’m not rushing it. Games should be explored and experimented with, right? I don’t know how many more tutorial sections I’m facing, now, but I don’t seem to be near the end of the level. But it’s time to go. I have to be somewhere at seven o’clock. I bring up the mid-game menu and…

There’s no save button. There’s a “quit” button which warns me that I’ll lose all unsaved progress. But as far as I can tell, no way to save my current progress.

My wife calls down. “It’s time to go,” she reminds me. As if I wasn’t already acutely aware of the time issue.

I return to the game, and cast about frantically for something that looks like it might be a “save game” marker of some kind. Instead, I get another tutorial section that pops up. DAMN IT! I don’t want to skip it, as I don’t know what information I might be losing if I *do* manage to find some way to save my progress. Another thirty seconds of me frantically scanning text, trying to commit it to memory, and then I have to hit the pause menu again because the Bad Guys are attacking again and I don’t have time to fend them off.

Nope, still no option to save.

I accept the penalty – my unsaved progress will be lost, which means I have to start over again from the very beginning. And I leave.

Now, logically, I understand that the next time I play, I won’t have to go through the entire installation / update process, that the logos weren’t really that long to sit through, that I can hopefully skip through the intro cut-scene, and that I can probably move through the tutorials a lot faster the second time through. And that I won’t need to devote quite so much time to experimenting and exploring the first level unless I really want to. So I probably only have to suffer through two or three minutes of repetition.

But emotionally, what I feel is: The whole fifteen minutes (twenty, including installation) I spent playing this game was utterly wasted, and I have to start all over again from scratch.

I probably will. Eventually. But all this weekend I had opportunities to pick up the game again and start over, and I didn’t. I felt zero desire to play, in spite of how cool and pretty it was. I never really got to the point where I felt I was really playing instead of being led through a training course. I never quite got to the point where I was having fun. I was teased with excitement, but now have to return to the “back of the line” to repeat the obligatory training before it will let me have fun. Oh, and I now know that I cannot just play the game whenever I find myself with five extra minutes and a hankering with fun. No, this game will require an investment of time… maybe longer than fifteen minutes!… should I have the desire to play again, as I may not be able to exit whenever I want without losing all my progress.

Hmmmm… no, not feeling much love right now.

There are several things wrong with this scenario, and some of them aren’t really easily fixed. But I’ll focus on three that are common, preventable problems:

#1 – Save anywhere. Good grief, developers – this isn’t the Nintendo era when manufacturers had to use endless level-repetition to stretch out a two-hour game into something that seemed remotely worth the cartridge price tag. I don’t even necessarily mean literally ‘save anywhere’ – just make saving the game convenient, rather than a test of how macho your players are. I have up macho when I had children.

#2 – Don’t require huge tutorials from the get-go. Yes, I know, glass houses and all that. But here’s the trick: Try to make your game fun before the player has learned everything he needs to know to play your game. There are entire games where the mechanics consist exclusively of hitting a single button.  Then layer additional abilities (and / or explanations) on top of that. Your goal is to have the player make progress and start having fun as quickly as possible. Going step-by step through a lengthy tutorial level isn’t that.

#3 – Reward exploration and experimentation. This game didn’t directly penalize it (though I did hurt myself as much as I helped myself doing so), but the lack of a saved game certainly counted it against me under the circumstances.

 

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 25 Comments to Read

The New CRPG Heyday…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 16, 2012

I’ve talked about how 1991 was a wonderful year for discovering PC games. And I talked about how 1991 was kind of the center-point of what I’d consider the “Heyday” of CRPGs. +/- 2-3 years on either side.

I think one could make the case that we’re in a new one now. Pardon me while I go off for a bit with some giddy optimism:

Exhibit A – The Indies: The list I posted yesterday of upcoming and recently-released indie CRPGs.  When I started getting involved as an indie game developer a few years ago, RPGs were still a very rare indie endeavor. There was Spiderweb, and precious few others. And now look at things! Yes, we’re a little flooded by RPG Maker titles, which like anything else are 95%+ crap, but even at the traditional ratio there are some real gems being produced every year. And the variety of other styles of RPGs! Yes, I’ll insert the obligatory Frayed Knights reference – I’m quite pleased with that one – but when I started that one I didn’t expect the quality and quantity of competition. We’ve got big and small indie titles that are coming out far faster than I can play them (warning bells!), and many are quite good. And when we bring consoles (particularly XBox Live Indie Games), and mobile devices, things are even more clearly exploding in popularity. There are several indie titles that I’m looking forward to more than any mainstream release. Which brings us to the next point.

Exhibit B – Mainstream: During much of the last decade, mainstream CRPG fans who preferred single-player experiences – particularly PC gamers – often had a bit of a wait major between releases. The wait has definitely shrunk  over the last five years or so. While we can argue over the meaning of role-playing game and how far these mainstream games have moved to being conventional action games and shooters, the mainstream games professing to be RPGs are more plentiful and happily show off their big or bigger budgets.  While the purist in me may gripe, they are still plenty of fun (and sell plenty of copies…)

Exhibit C – Expanding Middle Zone: Somewhere between an indie working solo on a game in his basement and the latest EA-owned Bioware release costing eight digits to produce, you’ve got this nebulous, fuzzy zone of games that don’t seem to be truly indie or mainstream. Torchlight. Bastion. The Witcher II. My traditional view of indie is more along the lines of “self-funded, not a large publisher,” but things have gotten more and more complicated as the industry has grown, matured, and started weaning itself from its dependence on the big publishers.  But obviously, these guys are also making RPGs, and succeeding at least moderately well at it. And speaking of interesting funding methods…

Exhibit D – Crowd-Funded Games: This week we got a double-whammy of a traditional graphic adventure game by Double Fine getting crowdfunded to something like 8x their goal, reaping a budget of almost 3.5 million between Kickstarter and private offers. This led Brian Fargo of InXile to try crowd-funding for the Wasteland RPG license he’s been unable to do anything with for years. The response has been almost as impressive, with the game’s original $900k budget getting met within 24 hours, then easily exceeding a million the following day. This is for an classic style, turn-based, party-based RPG. The kind that the industry and media have mocked for over a decade.  I don’t want to overstate this, as this is hardly going to make EAexecutives commit seppuku over their failure to recognize a vibrant potential market or anything. A million or two bucks is still pretty “niche” in the modern games industry. And it’s not like a no-name indie (like me) could march up to Kickstarter and treat it as an ATM to grab six-digit funding. It is not going to happen, folks. But do I think this is a good development that is going to send positive signals around the industry about traditional RPGs and their fans? You bet! Will it be repeated? Sure. Not regularly, but I doubt Wasteland 2 will be the one-and-only.

Exhibit E – Baldur’s Gate Resurrected: While Baldur’s Gate is not quite as old as Wasteland, it’s still a classic franchise that has had a fork stuck into it by the industry to tell us all that It’s Done. Bioware is no longer making those kinds of games. But now somebody is. Not just those kinds of games, but literally the Baldur’s Gate series. Overhaul Games (a division of Beamdog) – which includes some ex-Bioware folks – has negotiated the rights to re-release an enhanced, modernized version of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, including all expansions and some brand-new content. New platforms are planned. And a Baldur’s Gate III is planned, as well. Obviously, someone has faith that there’s a new audience that would enjoy these classic games, and that old fans would enjoy a cleaned-up, enhanced version to revisit. And a new game in the series using updated versions of the old technology. Hey, it apparently worked for the Monkey Island adventure series, so why not the most famous of the D&D-licensed game series?

Exhibit F – Retro Gaming A-Go-Go:  Retro-gaming has never been easier to do (nor as easy to do legally), through a number of competing digital content providers. And RPGs are a big part of that. At least that’s what I tell myself when I look at the huge pile of classic RPGs in my Steam, GamersGate, and GOG.COM accounts. I don’t know how I’m going to get through playing them all…

Exhibit G – RPGs are Getting Talked About: Many of the above games are getting a lot of virtual ink spilled talking about them.  People are talking about RPGs – from Mass Effect 3‘s endings to the success of super-cheap Cthulhu Saves the World. The Legend of Grimrock has gotten plenty of media attention for an indie ‘retro-style’ RPG, and Wasteland 2‘s crowdfunding success has garnered quite a bit of conversation in the last couple of days. Has the tone become more positive lately, treating RPGs a little less like the fat kid in class when picking kickball teams in elementary school? I dunno. Maybe.

So what does this all mean?

None of these things, taken in isolation, are earth-shattering developments for CRPG fans. And even taken as a whole, they aren’t accompanied by the songs of angels ushering in a new golden age. But I think they are indicators of a positive trend-shift for CRPG players.  Particularly for those willing to put up with less-than-cutting-edge graphics. I think what it does signify is a growing maturity in the industry. There’s now room for this kind of thing. Ten year ago, not so much.

The big problem that has almost always plagued RPG development is that it takes a lot more effort to make the end-product than most other genres. This means that the ROI (Return On Investment) on RPGs is generally going to be a lot lower, simply because you have to spend 3x the resources to produce that complex of a game that’s comparable to other genres in terms of apparent quality (and number of sales). This leads to the perennial question among biz types as to whether or not the market for RPGs remains viable. It seems that for now, the answer has returned to “Yes” (it changes about every 6 years).

And as a gamer – well, there is a hell of a lot to play right now. Retro, indie, mainstream, console, mobile, PC — these are pretty good times to be a CRPG fan. I don’t think it’ll last – nothing ever does – but for right now you’ve got no excuse for being bored. It’s like it’s 1991 all over again.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Indie RPG News, March 2012

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 15, 2012

Okay, I’m way overdue in doing this, so it’s gonna be quick and to-the-point. Well, okay, maybe not as quick as I’d like, because I’ve got a hairy backlog. Hopefully my next installment will release news while it is still new. But in this world of indie RPGs, so much is “undiscovered” that what is or isn’t ‘news’ can be pretty subjective. But here are some interesting things happening in indie RPGs over the last *cough*threemonths*cough*:

The Legend of Grimrock – This game just makes me happy. I hope it is as good as it looks. It’s a modern-tech throwback to the Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder style RPGs of around 1990.  An April release is planned, and the first release candidate just entered testing.  This one is a day-one purchase for me.

Demise: Volume 2 Ascension is now in pre-release. All purchases of this first-person perspective single-player and multi-player RPG include a copy of the original Demise: Rise of the Ku’Tan.

Wasteland 2 – It’s being funded through Kickstarter. Just over two days in, and they’ve met their $900k funding goal, and are (as of this writing) just crossing the million dollar funding threshold.

The Book of Legends – Just released from Aldorlea Games. I have to admit, Aldorlea’s titles have really shifted to higher quality over the years. This one looks quite impressive. And large. The Demon of Fear is awakening in the land, but the alchemists have constructed an impressive artifact to put him back to sleep. Unfortunately, it gets stolen…

Victim of Xen – Another JRPG-style game from new (to me) indie studio Smolders, Victim of Xen is a story about a young man named Will who is turned into a woman by a witch. Apparently Will isn’t so happy about this turn of events, and embarks on a quest to find a way to break the spell.

Sword & Sorcery: Underworld Gold – Word from developer Charles Clerc is that this game seems to be heading into its final stages. From the sounds of it, it went from being a graphics revision to a pretty significant overhaul of the entire game. It’s heavily based on the earlier Might & Magic titles for flavor, so those of you familiar with those classics will feel pretty much at home with Underworld. I’ve played (but not completed) the original release, but put it on hold awaiting the massive upgrade. I can’t wait.

 Tomes of Mephistopholes – New indie RPG in development, from the makers of Steel Storm: Burning Retribution. Tomes of Mephistopholes is a first-person action-RPG with  randomly-generated persistent worlds. It looks more like an FPS with RPG elements to my eyes. But then again, so does the Mass Effect series…

Darklight Dungeon: Eternity – Have I mentioned recently that this game has been released? It’s been out a few weeks. I’m still playing, though I have only gotten a little over a tenth of the way through this 50-level dungeon crawler. And I’ve been slaughtered by Asmodeus. Yeah. That’s old-school. It’s a great little game to just do some hacking and slashing with for fifteen minutes at a time.

Blood Rune – In the style of the old “Gold Box” D&D games, this indie RPG switches from first-person view to an isometric view for combat. It’s taking the approach of using smaller adventure “modules” rather than a single, giant campaign. I like the idea a lot. I’ve considered something like that many a time. I have high hopes that this one will see the light of day.

91 – A “New Old RPG,” this is a roguelike set in the modern era with some “modern” game design sensibilities.

A Sirius Game – This cute,  “piratey” adventure with strong RPG aspects was recently released.

Verlies – A recently-released, hopefully frequently-expanded RPG seems to be a straightforward hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. It features a first-person perspective and random dungeon generation.

Age of Fear: The Undead King – Version 1.4 of this fantasy turn-based strategy game was recently released. If you are into tactical, turn-based combat, this is something you should really check out. It takes a more free, open-ended approach to the battlefield than most other games, so you don’t move by squares or hexes.  Also, the sequel, Age of Fear: The Chaos Lord is currently well into development. The picture to the left is a sneak-peak of a bit of it.

UnderRail – formerly “Timelapse Vertigo,” this futuristic dystopian RPG taking place mainly in the subway tunnels underneath the no-longer-habitable surface of the world. Some of the latest updates include computer use and hacking.  It’s looking pretty dang interesting.  You can get a lot more information (and screenshots) in this thread on the Rampant Games forums (you’ll need to contact me in order to get posting permissions on the forum).

March to the Moon – This is another game that is more “action” than RPG, but I’ve been playing the betas (though not nearly as much as I’d like), and having a blast with this very goofy shooter with “RPG Elements” as you level up and gain new powers. And costuming options.

Pitman – A recently-released roguelike with 3D graphics and a board-game aesthetic. It looks cool. I’m just gonna direct you to the video:

 Telepath RPG: Servants of God – It’s out, it’s been recently updated, and it’s plenty of fun.  If you like your combats tactical, and get really pissed off when the dice go against you, you should check out this RPG. It has an unusual setting, sort of a steampunkish alternate reality Middle Eastern setting, voice acting for many roles, and a solid soundtrack. But the focus of the game – besides interesting decisions – is really the tactical combat. There’s no randomness – you hit what you attack, and the damage is fixed. It’s all in how you manage your team and manipulate the opposing AI.

Neo Scavenger – This is a web-playable post-apocalyptic indie RPG from Blue Bottle Games, where the human race is struggling to survive in a world torn by warfare and supernatural threats.

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land – this Lovecraftian iOS turn-based strategy/RPG by Red Wasp Design is doing quite well and garnering some great reviews.  I was told that they are hoping to port it to the PC soon.

I know I’m missing some new / recent activity on the indie RPG front, so I’ll start collecting more tidbits to talk about quite possibly before the month is out. I would also like to note that this is something of a big deal, as JRPG-style games are in the overwhelming minority for a change. It’s probably my own fault, as I have probably missed a dozen or so that were recently released.

 

UPDATE: Changed the developer for Victim of Xen. The actual developer is Smolders.

Filed Under: News - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part VII: Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 14, 2012

Okay, I had a short hiatus with this series simply because there were far too many interesting and newsworthy things to post about over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got a small backlog of blog posts to go out, and topics to discuss, which is actually a pleasant change of pace for me.  Usually I’m panicking the day before trying to come up with a topic. 🙂

Last time, I’d just come back to school following religious service, and switched my major to computer science. I wasn’t home too long before my best friend asked me if I was going to ask her to marry me. Yeah, you can re-read that to parse it better if you want, but that’s how it went down. We were officially engaged a couple of months later (much to the surprise of my mother, who wasn’t expecting it, and to the non-surprise for her parents, who totally WERE).  We were married that summer, and lived on grants and student loans for a semester until she graduated, worked as a substitute teacher and later a second-grade teacher, until I was able to graduate.

The summer just before we were married, I lived with my future in-laws, earning higher California wages to save up for lower Utah cost-of-living.  I didn’t know anybody, was engaged to be married, and didn’t drink or party. My fiancee was back in Utah attending classes so she could graduate a semester earlier. I had very little social life. But I did pull out a little portion of what I had been saving as entertainment money. And, with my father-in-law-to-be’s support, I built a computer. A 16 mhz 386-SX with a 40 meg hand-me-down hard drive (which was undersized even at the time).  My fiance’s sister had some games I could borrow, and the entertainment budget primarily went to buying more games. As it wasn’t much, it usually went to buying bargain-bin specials, but I’d been out of gaming for a while, and so they were new to me.

My future sister-in-law had Ultima V. I never finished it, but I got pretty far that summer. I also discovered a roguelike called Moria, which I played quite a bit and was amazed by the depth of the game relative to the RPGs I had been playing in the C-64 days. Neuromancer was one of those bargain-bin games that became an obsession for a couple of weeks (especially as I was a big fan of William Gibson’s books).  Infocom’s Journey seemed really cool at first, but I never got too far. Loom was brilliant, but if it weren’t for the fact the second diskette had been faulty and needed to be replaced by LucasArts, we would have finished it the first night. It was ridiculously short. A-10 Tank Killer and SU-25 Sturmovik largely fed my flight sim appetite (I picked up another simulator that I never did get into very much).

On top of this, I taught myself C and C++. I was going to go to classes that taught these languages my first semester after this, but I got started a little early.  It was rough going, particularly in the era before the World Wide Web and thousands of helpful articles and forums, but I managed. Having experience with BASIC, PASCAL with Objects, and Assembly for a couple of different processors really helped speed the process. The languages change, but the basics of programming are pretty consistent.

The real mind-blowing experience of that summer was Wing Commander. It was NOT a bargain-bin purchase, so it was a major purchase that I had to apologize to my fiancee for. In retrospect, it was sort of an investment. I studied that game in depth. I lived it.  I didn’t have much better to do, and Wing Commander was the kind of game I’d dreamed of back in the C-64 days. Even today, I feel it had a better mix of simulation – vs. – story than any of its sequels. I’d memorized damage power, shield and armor levels for the different ships (even for the Confed corvette, a ship that appeared exactly once in the game, in an early escort mission, and was never used again). I studied the AI. I studied how the game rendered the 3D world – using rotated, scaleable sprites rather than more bland polygonal models used in most 3D games.

Between Wing Commander and Ultima, I got a really silly idea. I still had a couple of years left to graduate, but I figured it wasn’t too soon to start tailoring my education to optimize my choices for future employment.

I called Origin, and asked to speak to the Human Resources department.

In a short, ten-minute interview with a rather perky-sounding lady, I was informed that Origin was really looking for people (right now) with CD-ROM experience, as that was the technology of the future and would finally stop pirates cold. (Yeah, that’s what they thought.) I was also told that I didn’t need a computer science degree to get a job as a programmer at Origin, so she really didn’t have much to offer as far as course suggestions.  She didn’t suggest that I quit school to come work for them, but she definitely left that as an implication. yes, C and C++ experience was important… something that I didn’t have much of at that moment.

C. C++. CD-ROMs. College degree optional. I thanked her for her time, and filed this away.

In the intervening years, I played a lot of games. Origin continued to amaze me. PC gaming technology dramatically improved each year. Ultima VII, Wing Commander 2, Ultima Underworld, Wolfenstein 3D, Falcon 3.0, Wizardry 7, the Eye of the Beholder series, Monkey Island 2, Gabriel Knight, Civilization, Empire, Master of Orion, Frontier: Elite II, X-Com, Epic Pinball, Wing Commander Privateer,  and of course Doom were favorites of mine during this time. School offered very little in terms of courses directly related to games, but whenever I got to choose the type of application I’d write for a project, I’d make something game-related. While it was more work for myself, it also made the assignments much more fun.

A couple years later, with my degree nearly in-hand, I’d not quite followed the Origin H.R. representative’s advice. But two years was a very long time in technology, anyway, and CD-ROMs had become pretty boring, standard technology. Origin had been bought out by EA, but my wife and I were still talking about the possibility of relocating to Austin. In my spare time, I was playing lots of games, but also writing games of my own. My peers all dreamed about getting a job making games, but were settling down for interviews at good ol’ stable and boring business applications companies, or doing network administration (the hot field as I approached graduation).

Me? I was making game demos for a portfolio. I figured I’d have to settle down at a boring job making front-ends for databases or something eventually, but I didn’t want to settle there until I’d given my “dream job” a shot. I started with some local game companies, as at the time Salt Lake was enjoying a boom in the game development industry. I figured I’d start out locally, and widen my net when I struck out here.

I graduated from school, and found myself no longer a student, and without solid job prospects. With a shock, I realized that I was now “unemployed.” I had a little bit of time to find a job, but the clock was ticking. My wife was now pregnant, and so I didn’t have much time to hold out for the “dream job” before I had to find something.

I’d heard of a new start-up from some students of an Artificial Intelligence class I was the Teaching Assistant for. They weren’t hiring yet, because they’d had no funding. I called them up and periodically bugged them as I got close to graduation, but they were still in a holding pattern until the funding situation worked itself out. In the meantime, I’d finally lined up an interview with a local, smaller studio that was primarily doing game ports or art subcontracting for consoles.

The interview went pretty well, but the head of software development wanted to see more. He invited me to work on what he thought was the strongest of my game demos for a week, and “make it fun.” He wanted to see what I’d do with it. My mind boggled. I spent the rest of the day pondering the meaning of “fun.” What would impress him?

Curiously, my answer then… and it’s a lesson I probably need to re-learn from time to time… wasn’t purely mechanical. It was also presentation. Graphics, animation, sound – all conveying excitement, drawing the player in, and encouraging them to engage emotionally with the game. Of course, I also polished the mechanics and put together a better “vertical slice.”

It got me the job. But over the course of the same week where I agonized over making a game “fun,” I got an interview with the new start-up, called SingleTrac. I showed them my little portfolio. Unlike the other studio, the demo these guys were most interested in was a 3D tank game that was playable over null-modem that I’d written for my networking class. Especially considering I’d written the polygon rasterizers from scratch.  THEY were working on 3D games for a brand new console coming out from Sony, they told me.

I received their job offer only a day after the first one. In the end, the Singletrac position won out. They’d offered slightly more money – still less than I’d have gotten with a non-games job, but it was a chance to get PAID making GAMES!!!!!!! And doing cool 3D games on a new platform sounded more exciting than handling 2D game ports on older consoles. So I accepted the position, and in October of 1994 I become employee number sixteen at SingleTrac, working on two games that would eventually become Warhawk: The Red Mercury Missions, and Twisted Metal.

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

Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away: The Heyday of the CRPG

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 13, 2012

Joystiq has an article about the year RPGs transitioned into their more “modern” form…. 1995: The Year Role-Playing Games Broke. (H/T to RPGWatch for pointing it out to me). While my knee-jerk reaction was to jump to the defense of earlier-era RPGs, the article is actually pretty straightforward with the facts and not too far-reaching on the speculation.

Those of us who were RPG fans back then may remember the magazines of the era proclaiming the death of RPGs (and the death of adventure games). In the spirit of Mark Twain, such proclamations proved quite premature, but the genre did undergo a pretty significant shift thereafter. Was it more of a reincarnation in a new form than a resurrection? I wouldn’t say it was either, because the genre didn’t really die.  Yes, it suffered a decline, for many of the reasons suggested in this article.  But as I saw it, what really happened was that the genre enjoyed a big surge of popularity in the late 80’s and early 90’s that eventually subsided… but the apparent decline seemed much bigger because the store shelves were choked with ‘cash-in’ products. That’s how it always works.

Assuming my conjecture is correct (or at least defensible), we could instead ask, “Hey, why did RPGs enjoy a big surge in popularity before that?” I think that’s a far more interesting question.  As long as I’m guessing, I’m going to throw a few more darts:

1. The AD&D License. The release of ‘official’ Dungeons & Dragons RPGs (besides some ancient handheld and Intellivision attempts) ignited the enthusiasm of hordes of dice-and-paper gamers who were not already major CRPG enthusiasts, and it had a spillover effect into other games.

2. Technology. PCs were upping the quality of the gaming experience, and technology was finally catching up with the vision. Monsters began to look like monsters, disk drives and on-board RAM were finally large enough to display decent images of monsters, and so forth. And lets not forget the impact of the more visceral experiences of Dungeon Master and Ultima Underworld, which were able to use more powerful modern machines to provide new twists on a familiar experience.

3. The Rise of the PC as a Gaming Platform. In some ways, the rise and fall of CRPGs can be tied to the rise and fall of the PC as a gaming platform.  As it gained popularity, existing genres were ready-made entertainment. Maybe we could blame the Playstation for the beginning the  decline of the PC as a gaming platform of choice for gamers (something I personally had a small contribution in causing, I suppose), and it took its most PC-centric genres with it.

4. A Development “Sweet Spot.” This is really conjecture on my part, but this seems to me to be an era where the technology, audience demands, genre requirements, and development team size all seemed to match. An RPG could still be made by a reasonable-sized team which was of acceptable technological quality that it could enjoy moderately good sales and be a big success. A few years later, the team size and development time required to make an RPG of appropriate content level had swelled to the point where RPGs always seemed to be a couple of years behind the technological curve demanded by gamers to garner sufficient sales. The action games, far easier to develop, were setting a pace that RPGs couldn’t match. That’s still an issue today, but we’ve also gone so far past the ‘sweet spots’ (which have moved with technology and industry trends, like off-the-shelf engines) into the realm of diminishing returns that its less of an issue. And most mainstream RPGs aren’t made without the promise of massive marketing and mega-sales to a broader audience than the traditional RPG ‘niche.’

As a side note, it might be interesting to map the decline of traditional CRPGs with the decline of dice-and-paper D&D’s popularity during the same time period. Is there a correlation?

Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Unicorn City

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 12, 2012

Over the weekend, I saw the indie film, “Unicorn City.” Unfortunately, it’s near the end of its local theatrical run already – being a tiny indie movie – and the only show offered was 10:30 PM at a nearby theater. But since it was (A) indie, (B) locally produced, (C) rated PG and “family friendly”, and (D) a comedy about gamers, I decided to support it. I mean, it’s an indie movie directly targeting me, I really ought to support it, right? I dragged my wife along, who was somewhat reluctant but willing, though she expressed concern about being able to stay awake through the entire movie as late as it was showing.

We needn’t have worried.

The trailer doesn’t quite do the film justice, though I don’t know how I’d improve upon it. I went in with moderate expectations, and was very pleasantly surprised.

The film – which I hope will receive a wider release later this year – is about gamers. One gamer in particular – a loser named Voss who lives in a closet in his brother’s apartment. He’s got big dreams of working for Wizards of the Coast Warlocks of the Beach, but in spite of his creative and game-mastery skills, he – like most other candidates for the job – lack leadership experience managing a team of people. So he comes up with the idea of creating a retreat / encampment / city for gamers, a full-on LARP experience, using his own game rules and training to turn it into a gamer’s Utopia. Of course, he doesn’t tell anyone it’s just a temporary thing he’s documenting in order to get his dream job. And – at least at first – he goes about it in the worst way possible, failing to plan, ignoring the needs of people around him, especially those of his two best friends – one of whom is quite obviously carrying the torch for him almost literally.

Yeah, you can pretty much guess where the plot goes from here, but that doesn’t matter. It’s how you get there that matters, and it is a hilarious ride. It’s a gamer movie. It’s a camping movie. It’s goofy without descending to the point of being annoying. It embraces its low budget by being about a low-budget bunch of heroes, which helps “keep it real” even when some plot points get a little on the absurd side.

My wife was never in danger of falling asleep. She laughed almost as hard as I was through the entire movie, and as we left the theater she asked, “That was a movie about us, wasn’t it? We were cooler than that, weren’t we?”

Ouch. In a way, yeah. The game store in the film is our game store – Hastur Hobbies.  Many years ago – when we were still in college, up until the time that children dominated our lives – I started a medievalist group in Utah Valley (Provo, where I was going to school). At the time, there was nothing in Utah that I was aware of like that, except for a branch of the SCA in Salt Lake that had shriveled due to internal politics. So we started our own group, similar to some groups I’d been affiliated with on the east coast. I created my own rules (for a while), and we turned some of the events into “quests” that were effectively LARP before the term “LARP” had really caught on. Yes, I was that guy. Nobody there would recognize me today. But hey, I started it! And we held battles and campouts in the same mountains as they did in the movie. Not the same spot, but the terrain and much of the background was familiar.

Then there were those times we got the cops called on us…

That long tangent may help explain why I fell in love with this movie. I knew these people. Not the actors, and not these people specifically, but I’ve known a lot of people like them. I saw a little bit of myself in some of them – at least myself from many years ago (mostly). While I think I’ve grown up a bit since then… it was still sometimes painfully familiar.  You take all these things from my life as a gamer, and crank them up to eleven, and THEN start escalating from there, and you’ve got a good-natured parody of a couple of chapters of my own life.

I think the “good-natured” part of it is what really wins me over. Yes, the main character is something of a loser from the get-go, and the gamers in the movie are a pack of social misfits that fulfill some popular misconceptions about gamers. The plot has some pretty major holes that require some significant suspension of disbelief to ignore. And gaming is portrayed with some silliness that a non-gamer might take to be “real,” while real gamers may hopefully take it as gentle mocking not too unlike what I did in Frayed Knights. But the like “The Gamers” movies, Unicorn City strikes me as a movie by gamers who are poking fun at something they know and love.  While the gamers are social misfits for the world at large, they are not all cut from the same cloth – they are all very unique in their quirkiness. And the character who most represents the ‘mundane world’ – Voss’s older brother, Jeff – isn’t exactly a picture of normalcy, either. Nor are the cops who keep crossing path’s with this bunch. Everybody’s a little weird in this world.

I’m probably over-analyzing this film, when it would be sufficient to say, “It’s a comedy about gamers, and I laughed my butt off.”  Perfect? Hey, what is? But it rocked. I’m going to buy the DVD as soon as it becomes available and force all of my gamer friends who haven’t seen it already to watch it.  I am sure they will all enjoy it almost as much as I did. If you are a role-playing gamer – especially one who has slung dice or done any LARPing in your life – you really should see this movie. Whether you are able to bug your local theater to screen it, catch it at a convention, or wait and get it on DVD, you should check it out.

And now I want to see it again…

Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Fallout Post-Mortem, and the Fallout that Never Was

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 9, 2012

At times like these, I really, really miss going to GDC. I can only imagine the awesomeness that was Tim Cain’s talk about the development of the original Fallout – and the really weird(er) direction it might have taken:

Kotaku: Fallout Could Have Been About Dinosaurs, Time-Travel, and Monkey Murder

“You started in the modern world,” Cain said. “You traveled back in time, you killed the monkey that would evolve into humans, you went through space travel, you went to the future, which was ruled by dinosaurs, you were exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back to the original timeline that you restored to full, and came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend.”

…

“It’s weird to hear me talk about it now,” Cain said, “but we really were going to go with this. And I think one of the other producers kinda slapped me and said, ‘There’s no way you’re going to get this storyline made, it’s not going to get through, you could work on it for years and no one would ever do it.’

Yeah, well, by the sounds of it I probably wouldn’t have been that excited about it. But our lovely industry is filled with even weirder concepts that did get made, and some of them became pretty decent hits – or at least cult classics.

UPDATE: Hat tip to RPGWatch for a link to the talk – which is a more complete post-mortem of the game. I am at work and can’t watch it yet, but I will soon! To watch it, click here.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Independent Games Festival 2012 Winners

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 8, 2012

The problems of the IGF largely derive from its current size and importance. So really, these are the right problems to have. As Brandon Boyer said in his intro to this years’ awards ceremony, they are constantly reevaluating what they are supposed to be for the indie games community. There were 50 games submitted to the first IGF. I was at that GDC (or was it still CGDC back then?), and I remember not paying much attention to these little games with the finalists standing next to the monitors looking a little lost in the chaos that was the expo floor.

Times have changed. I was one of the over 800 entrants this year with Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, which sadly didn’t get nominated for any of the categories. But I still watched (streaming) the IGF awards ceremony with my usual enthusiasm. Andy was cheesy with his Polynesian explorer analogy, nobody proposed to each other, and I didn’t always agree with the final choices, but I couldn’t help but be thrilled by the really cool indie games on display, or by the people winning the awards.

Anyway, you can check out the winners here:

Gamasutra’s IGF Awards Report

The grand prize winner was Fez, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Yeah, I could go on about “indie darlings” and the composition of the judges, but the former doesn’t mean that Fez isn’t worthy of the honor, and for the latter – well, the judges are volunteers, and anybody can volunteer ( I don’t know if that means you’ll be selected or not, but anybody can volunteer, and it sure looks like they need more volunteers ).  I was thrilled with Frozen Synapse winning the audience award, too, as 1) I am a fan of the game, and 2) It’s a TURN-BASED TACTICAL game! Yeeeeaaaaah!

But the best thing about the awards – even watching them streaming online – is that there is that the enthusiasm for indie gaming is infectious. Maybe it’s just something with how my brain is wired, but how can I not watch these awards and immediately be seized with the desire to start designing, coding, and creating? The winners are almost secondary. The bottom line – for me – is that these folks are artists doing some really, really cool things in the interactive digital medium. I watch it and remember why I love indie games.

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

RPG Design: Seven Ways to Fix Boring Quests

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 7, 2012

So while much of what I’d like to talk about today applies to any kind of  simple “quest” in a computer role-playing game, I’d like to direct your attention to the overused “Fedex,” “fetch,”  or “courier” quest type.  If you haven’t heard them referred to by those names, you’ve probably still played them. At their core, you meet an NPC who says something along the lines of: “Hi, stranger! I’m too busy to deliver this package to some dude on the outskirts of town / in another town, could you deliver this to him? He’ll pay you for it so you don’t have to come back to me for the reward, which would be far more realistic but is not Fun Game Design(tm). KTHNXBAI!” Whereupon you travel / search for the recipient, possibly in the course of other travels, hand over the delivery (or recite the message), get a reward, and… you are done.

Yeah, this isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this. Probably won’t be the last, either. But hopefully I’ll be able to offer some solid ideas here today, rather than just kvetching.

It all started out – by my best recollection, at least – with Might & Magic Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum.  Some wizard wanted you to deliver a scroll to another wizard in another city. Cool, huh? It was really the launch pad for a whole series of quests for your ultimate adventure, but it served some decent purposes. It pushed you out to explore new cities, to find and talk to other NPCs, and to get on with the game. Used sparingly and in this fashion, I don’t really have a problem with it.

As a designer, there’s a lot to like about these kinds of quests. It’s a good introductory quest for beginning players to get them used to the most basic of activities – movement and navigation, and maybe consulting the automap and quest journal. Also, as an introductory quest, it puts the player character in their place as a nobody running lame errands before they become a world-saving superbeing. It gets them introduced to other NPCs. It makes use of painstakingly crafted environments in town, causing the player to run around admiring the scenery while trying to figure out which building houses their contact. It can push the player out into the world, moving out of their comfort zone to make their delivery. And – perhaps most importantly – it is generally pretty dang easy to script up in any RPG system, making it a brain-dead simple way to add “filler” content to pad out a game. And as a player, they are an easy source of money and experience.

But they are also as boring as hell.

It’s okay to have a quest start with what appears to be  a “simple” courier quest. I mean, in a way, the entire plot of Fallout: New Vegas was a twist on a courier quest gone wrong. That whole part was buried in backstory before the game begins, but one way of looking at it was that it was a giant subversion of the trope. The plot of the classic “cyberpunk” novel Snow Crash begins with two Fedex style objectives colliding with each other – a pizza delivery guy and a high-tech skateboarding courier.  And there are plenty of examples in RPGs where a straightforward courier quest blossoms into something far more interesting.

But not often enough.

I’m not going to name names, but I was playing through a fairly recent (and overall, very good) European RPG this week and stumbled across this kind of quest again, and I was somewhat surprised by my own reaction to it. Apparently, I’m developing some kind of gag reflex, probably developed over the course of a few MMORPG sessions in the past. If I have, I hope it serves me well in the future so I don’t end up making throwing anything quite that straightforward and boring in my games.

I understand why they are there. When you are working with scripting code, it’s surprising how so much boils down a few very simple interactions. So much of gameplay ends up being some variant of some very basic interactions. Kill Actor X. Wound Actor X to Level Y. Protect Actor X. Talk to X when Flag Y is set. Use Item Y with Actor X, or when Item Y is in your inventory. The latter is your basic Fed Ex quest element. But using it in something close to its raw, unadulterated form is lame and trite. It’s all about wrapping these basic elements in a dramatic and interesting story, after all – a pregenerated story of the designer’s creation, or one that develops organically that the player creates by his own actions and those of the game world and its inhabitants, or ideally a combination of both.

Let’s look at ways to make this simple quest element more interesting, shall we? While I’m focusing on Fedex style quests, these ideas can be applied to pretty much any of the classic (and, unfortunately, overused and unexciting) quest tropes found in computer RPGs.

1. The Disguise: This is still the same basic Fed Ex quest, but dressed up in a more interesting costume. This gives the basic quest some interesting and dramatic flavor, while leaving the basic substance of the quest alone. Maybe it’s something besides a message or package. Maybe the recipient needs a spell cast upon them, or for them, or needs medicine. Maybe the quest-giver is dying, begging for help from the player with their final breath.  It’s all about context.

2. The Twist:  The delivery is still the core of the quest, but it’s not that simple. There may be a trick to acquiring it so it can be delivered. It may cause the player some problems while it is in her possession – restricting movement, preventing rest, whatever. Maybe the delivery is a person who must be delivered safely (thus making this an ‘escort’ quest). Maybe it’s not so much a delivery as bait to lure the recipient somewhere. Maybe the player is hunted for as long as he has the item in his possession, or it’s illegal and he has to avoid detection from the police or town guard. Maybe the intended recipient is dead, and the player has to figure out what to do with it next.

3. The Chain: The item delivery element of the quest is just one step in a larger chain of activities.

4. The Choice: Can we have interesting decisions beyond deciding whether or not to make the delivery? Maybe even beyond the choice of to whom we deliver the package? Particularly if said decisions have durable (if not necessarily major) consequences?

5. The Subversion: In this case, what starts as a simple deliver X to Y quest has more than just a twist, but is actually turned on its head in some way. Maybe the recipient is unwilling, and the item must be stealthily or forcefully delivered to their possession (this was done in an early Thieves’ Guild quest in Skyrim). Maybe the delivery is a red herring for some larger plotline. Maybe some other adventure delivers an item to YOU, and expects payment, and you don’t have a friggin’ clue what to do with it. Maybe what starts as a simple fedex quest explodes into a comedy of errors that is both amusing and dramatic at once.

6. The Constraint: Some other criteria has to be fulfilled when you make the delivery in order to succeed. A simple (but usually annoying) example would be a time limit.  But maybe the recipient has to be at full health when he receives it. Maybe you have to be at half-health or worse (for some reason) when you deliver it. Maybe you have to be in disguise. Maybe the recipient has to be in disguise. Maybe it can only be delivered at night (another possibly annoying constraint). Maybe you can’t have another item of some kind in your possession at the same time, but you have to somehow deliver both items at once.

7. The Outside-The-Box Alternative: There are many more ways to accomplish the objectives met by a simple Fedex quest than its basic, overused form. Authors of fiction and dice-and-paper adventures don’t have to think about the constraints of standard game interactions, flags, or other scripting issues. That gives them a considerable amount of freedom to come up with alternative methods of propelling the adventure along. Sure, they fall into ruts as well – all the time – but we do have a rich legacy of ideas to draw from.  Designers can mine back-issues of Dungeon Magazine or Fantasy / Sci-Fi short stories for ideas and then figure out how to do something similar in an interactive, computer-moderated environment. Knights of the Dinner Table has a regular feature containing several plot-seed / quest seed ideas that break from the norm. These are all great sources for ideas – or at least getting the creative juices flowing so the designer isn’t just repeating variations of what has been seen in other CRPGs.

And naturally, several of these ideas can and should be combined.  As I said, some games are doing this. I know of one particularly awesome game in particular that I believe does a pretty good job at it.  And fortunately it’s not alone. But designers do need to work at it to make their quests more exciting. After all, the reason we’re playing an RPG in the first place is for some excitement and adventure, right? Shouldn’t these things lurk in even the most mundane activities in your game?

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Unity C# Question

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 6, 2012

Maybe someone here who is more familiar with Unity and/or C# can give me a hand here.

Using the Monodevelop IDE, I had the following code (somewhat modified here)…


public class RoomGeo : MonoBehaviour {

public string[] wallResources= {"wall1a","wall2a","wall4a"};

void CreateWallVisual(int index)
{
int val = m_RoomTemplates[0].walls[index].wallID;
string strname = "Tiles/"+wallResources2[val];
}

}


Okay, all is fine and dandy. I pass in a value for index between 0 and 3, and it works as expected. But THEN I make the following change….

public string[] wallResources= {“wall1a”,”wall2a”,”wall4a”,”wallcapa”,”",”",”"};


And call it with an index of 4. Should work fine, right? Wrong. Even after a “rebuild”  I am getting a run-time exception for an array out of bounds error.  At the end of my rope, I rename wallResources to wallResources2 for both the array and (obviously) the call to it, and voilà… problem goes away.

It’s like the previous array declaration with only three values was somehow “stuck” and wouldn’t get refreshed until I renamed the array.

While the problem is temporarily solved, this concerns me. Something like this is very likely to bite me again, and I might waste a lot of time trying to figure it out. Can anybody tell me what I did wrong (if anything)? My C# is rusty and I’m still a newb to Unity, so this is a head-scratcher for me.

Filed Under: Programming - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

GDC Week!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 5, 2012

It’s GDC week this week. This always makes me a little sad. I miss going, even though it’s been over a decade since I last attended. One day I’ll go back. Maybe when Rampant Games is making enough money to justify the trip.

I don’t know if I’d even recognize GDC from what it was in the 1990s. It was transforming a lot in the 1990s as well. It seemed like my first GDC, in the spring of 1995, was something of the tail end of a transformation into something different. That was the last year it “felt small” I guess. After that, the “hospitality night” of suite-hopping died out, and the expo floor became a much bigger deal instead.

I commented to a colleague once that GDC was 10% educational and 90% inspirational. It was a great chance to meet up with friends in the industry, and to get an idea for what direction the winds of industry and technology were blowing – since stuck in our cubicles we sometimes had trouble seeing what was beyond the latest Playstation dev kit update.  At the time I didn’t think I was learning that much that was truly ‘brand new,’ but many of the panels really helped me open my mind up to different approaches to doing what I was doing.  The inspiration was what pushed me to learn more, long after I’d returned home. The inspiration often came from just chatting with people on the expo floor instead of in the lectures.

And really, GDC was exhausting but just a lot of fun. I’m pretty much at the mid-point on the introversion / extroversion scale, so the big crowds really don’t thrill me much. But hanging out with people who were just as passionate about making games, and even more knowledgeable than I am – THAT is what was always so exciting for me.

We’ve talked about doing something with the popular Utah Indie Night group to create our own mini-GDC with an indie twist. Something like a single day of talks / workshops.  I’d love to see that. But as these things go, if you really want to see something like that, you also have to be willing to ante up and do the work required to make it happen. I haven’t done that yet. But reading about how the GDC got its start, it doesn’t seem like it needs much. And honestly, I think I’d prefer a smaller and more intimate setting. Indie nights help a lot (the next one, BTW, is March 29th, Utah readers!) to scratch that itch, but I would like the feeling of something with a more professional slant.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



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