A Game Dev’s Story – Part I: Discovering the Future

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 9, 2012

They say that a good dramatic story has the hero set out on his or her journey after “two nudges and a push.”  I don’t know that I’m all that heroic or dramatic, but I guess the beginnings of my story as a game developer also has two nudge and a push.

My first significant encounter with computer games that nudged me in this direction was one that I didn’t even play myself. In the fifth grade, I was shown the output on a ream of dot-matrix printer paper from a TRS-80 by my friend Craig.  It was the output from a game of Adventure (AKA “Colossal Cave Adventure.”) I’ve talked on Armchair Arcade’s podcast and here at TotRC about how this one, brief reading of excerpts from this simple adventure game forever changed my perception of entertainment and computers.  It made me see that worlds could exist within computers. It made me see the possibilities of interactive stories (which was reinforced that same year when I began devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books).

Nudge #2 was caused by my same friend, Craig, a couple of months later. He had a birthday party at a major arcade / entertainment center. His mother gave us each a big stack of tokens and set us loose. There were bumper cars in this place that I didn’t even look at. I was fascinated by the video games. My favorite was Star Fire, a sit-down cabinet with explosions that vibrated the entire compartment as you shot down what were obviously TIE fighters from Star Wars. This was total wish fulfillment in 1980.  Now, I’d played video games before, so this wasn’t new. But somehow this experience clicked with me. I had become a video game fan. A casual one. I was telling my brothers about this awesome game, and was anxious to play it – or some of the other games I’d tried – again. Video games were now on my radar.

(WHAT? No sound on the video? No thunderous explosions? No Earth-Shattering Kaboom? *Sigh*)

Then came the push. For this one, I may need to explain a little bit. I was adopted by my stepfather, so when I talk about my dad, that’s usually who I’m talking about. The guy who gave me my DNA I call my “father.” Weird difference, but that’s family relationships in the modern world, right?  The summer following the above experiences, I was on a road trip with my dad to a conference in New Mexico, followed by delivering a car to my brother at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, finally ending with me spending a month with my father in Adieville Illinois. If you ever heard of the place, then you are one of a very few.

Anyway, this road trip had some serious downsides, not the least of which being my mom and dad running into marital problems which he discovered over the phone while we were ensconced in a hotel room in New Mexico. They did end up resolving it – mostly – and stuck together for a few more years, but it was a pretty trying time for us both.

For about three or four hours a day during the three-day conference I was on my own at the hotel.  I had just discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and had my books with me for the trip, so I entertained myself designing dungeons and imagining adventures I could share with others. But then I found the Game Room at the hotel.

The Game Room was pathetic, really. It had three games – Asteroids, Star Hawk, and some crappy game I don’t remember and didn’t play much. But I spent a good deal of time (and money) playing the other two, and watching other people play, and analyzing the vector-graphics screens. I tried to understand the internal rules of the games. At first, Star Hawk was my favorite – probably because of the first-person 3D effect that I loved in Star Fire (and have enjoyed ever since…).  But I slowly gravitated towards the vastly more interesting (and complex) gameplay of Asteroids.  I watched a few experienced players play the game, and discovered how my simple strategy of staying near the center and only moving to avoid collision was inferior to the ones these players employed to rack up scores over 100,000. They were always moving, and always taking advantage of “wrap around” effect of the borders to shoot objects on the other side of the screen from comparative safety. And of course, they’d take care to avoid destroying the final asteroids so they could rack up the big points hunting down saucers with reasonably clear battlefields.

At this point, I was actively hunting down “electronic games.” Arcade machines, hand-held games (like the popular Football game everyone had at the time).  The games were not only an escape from boredom and some emotional trials, but they were simply fascinating in their own right. In Addieville, a little tavern & sandwich shop called Bobby’s Hi-Lo held an Asteroids machine and Pac-Man. Pretty much every quarter I had went into those machines, often to the strains of country music coming out of the juke box (Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” is forever paired with the thumping background sound, saucer warbling, and “pew pew pew” noises of firing guns from Asteroids in my psyche from that month.)

It was also during that month that I came across the realization that these games were made by somebody. My father had remarried (which proved to be very short-lived as well), and my step-sister had told me that her uncle made computer games. HOW, I asked her. How does somebody do that? How would one tell a computer what shape and size to make the space ship, or how lasers were supposed to fire, or how the game world rules were supposed to work? Or more specifically, how could *I* do that? She didn’t know. Neither did I. To me, computers were still room-sized machines with reel-to-reel tapes and punch cards, an impression left from seeing too many old, bad Sci-Fi shows.

My impression of computers was somewhat reinforced when my father took me on the job to repair a computer system that had been involved in the launching of Skylab (which had disintegrated in the atmosphere a year or so before). While he worked, I played with a punch-card system. Punch-cards were long obsolete, but this installation still had them (probably unused). I still didn’t understand exactly what a computer was, exactly, but I began to realize with this ancient technology that the punch-cards were used to create instructions for the computer.  And these instructions could be as much for playing a game as for calculating launch parameters for a space station.

And I’d had my first taste of how that could be done. Could I actually make these games I loved to play? I had visions of making my own version of Asteroids. Or Star Fire, but with 3D imperial cruisers from Star Wars that you could shoot chunks out of as you flew around. Or a game like Adventure, but with Dungeons & Dragons – style rules and combat!

It may have been that very afternoon that I had him drive me to the library (in a neighboring town, as Addieville had nothing other than a tavern), and I checked out a book on programming. I checked out another one upon returning home to the Washington DC area at the end of the summer. Both books were impenetrable, discussing opcodes for mini-computers like the PDP-11 or something.

I remained clueless. But I had received my “push” out the door, and was now on a quest. I wanted to be able to make these games myself, as that was the only thing that sounded more exciting than playing them. I started reading magazines (and software catalogs), trying to come to grips with the possibilities of these machines. Not that I actually had access to a computer. I could dream.

I guess my talk about video games and computers must have been loud and constant, as later that fall my dad came home from work one night with a ridiculously cheap home computer. It was “for the family,” in theory, but in reality… it was for me. I was about to learn!

… To Be Continued

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

Darklight Dungeon Eternity Released!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 8, 2012

The email I received says the game officially releases on the 9th, but from the looks of the website, it’s available now if you cannot wait. I would rather not wait. If I wasn’t in crunch mode, I’d take tomorrow off to play this game:

Darklight Dungeon Eternity.

I’ve played a bit of an early alpha of this game, back when it probably shared a lot more in common with its predecessor than it does now. The new game is a ground-up rewrite of the original engine, and I can attest that even ten months ago it was a lot of fun, and was a bit more interesting than the original game.

And this sucker is BIG. It is FIFTY LEVELS DEEP. Fifty. Levels.  This is a serious dungeon crawler! I spend several hours in just the first three or four levels in the early alpha, so said serious crawling will probably not be resolved in a single, Red Bull-fueled weekend. Zoeller says there are over 200 monster types, 120 mage spells, 600+ items, 24 skills, and several unique combat feats.

The dude is seriously trying to hustle onto Frayed Knights‘ turf here. Though I love him for it. Did I mention that this game is big?

It should be noted that some rooms – like the one pictured above – will span two “levels” (or more) of the dungeon. And the levels aren’t otherwise strictly ordered for linear progression.

There is no concept of character ‘class’ – which is appropriate for a single-character game. It’s a skill-based game, and you will need to share increases between physical skills and magic. Among the many special “zones” in the game – underwater, gas-filled, etc. – there are zones where spellcasting is supressed, and areas where only magic can harm foes. It may not be necessary to defeat enemies in each of these areas – there’s usually an opportunity to dodge monsters while moving around, or escaping a fight – it’s nice to not be totally vulnerable in these situations.

Anyway – this looks to be a really fun, old-school style indie dungeon crawler in the western RPG tradition.  Go download the demo – which offers something like ten hours of gameplay for free to try things out – and see what you think.

Darklight Dungeon Eternity is for Windows only, I’m afraid. You will need .NET 3.5 and the latest version of DirectX to play it.

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Brief History of Zork

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

I think many readers will already be familiar with this story, but there are some interesting details to be found therein:

Eaten By a Grue: A Brief History of Zork.

I’m glad it wasn’t called “Dungeon,” though I think the legal threat by TSR over the name is extremely lame.

I still can’t figure out why I don’t have the patience for text adventures anymore. They’re perfect for casual play – you can leave them up and running in a window somewhere and poke around with them during a lull or compile or something. And to hear it, some of the IF titles out now could probably give the Infocom greats a run for their money at the very least. But I just haven’t gotten back into ’em.

But dang if reading about them doesn’t fill me with nostalgia.

Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

My Worst Bug Ever

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 7, 2012

Since I’m in crunch mode in le day job, I’m going for “easy” here with postings on the blog (mostly). So here’s a slightly modified reprint of a story from almost six years ago on the old blog. And yes, I have a tough time believing I’ve been doing this for that long. But since this year is the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64 (GAH!!! I have a tough time believing I’ve been doing THAT for so long…), it seemed an appropriate time to dust this one off.

My Worst Bug Ever
I’m gonna tell you about a bug that destroyed a game.

Not destroyed as in, “ruined the player’s experience so that the game was no fun.” I mean as in “put a gun to its head and blew its codey bits so that it was never seen or heard from by mortals again.”

The Setting: The Commodore 64
To explain how this worked, I’m first gonna have to talk a little bit about the memory architecture of the Commodore 64, the scene of this particular crime. I’ll try not to be too technical here.

Everything that happens on your computer happens in memory (AKA “RAM”). You may store stuff out to your hard drive, but in order for the computer to actually do anything with it, it has to be read off of the hard drive (or CD-ROM, or USB memory stick, or whatever) and put into memory.

The C-64’s memory was laid out so that information that was on the screen occured in an area from memory location 1024 to memory location 2024. Think of it as a big block on street. Technical note: This was actually where the character data was stored… the screen was 40 characters wide by 25 lines. 25 x 40 = 1000 characters. So area 1024 to 2024. The color data was stored elsewhere, and there were lots of other fiddley bits in other memory locations you could squirrel with. Like creating custom character sets so that the letter “A” actually looked like a sword. And so forth.

The program memory was the next block down. Starting at location 2048. The program memory was where the actual code for running the game resided. Where I was programming in BASIC. In-between the screen-character memory and the program memory was this little chunk of memory that the system used for other things, and I don’t recall what it was used for. But it’s not important to the story.

The important thing to remember is that the character memory and the program memory were next-door neighbors, with the program memory just “below” the graphics memory.

The Set-Up
Back in those days, we stored everything on 5 1/4″ floppy disks. The Commodore 64’s 1541 disk drive was notorious for being both slow and flaky. It was crapping out on us, so my Dad had to take it in to get it repaired. This was on a Thursday, I think. He was supposed to be bringing it on Friday. So all day Thursday, and then all afternoon Friday, I was without a disk drive.

Bored Thursday night, unable to play any games without my drive, I decided to work on a game. A cool fake-3D game slightly reminiscent of the maze arcade game (“Space Paranoids“) in the movie TRON. I got some stuff hacked together, and left the computer on, since I couldn’t save my work until the disk drive was back.

Friday came, and I worked on the game some more. I was starting to get a little antsy about having a power outage or something, because by this point I’d put several hours into developing this game. I’d hate to lose it. Finally, 6:00 rolled by, and my dad came home.

Without the Disk Drive. Turns out the shop wasn’t able to fix it yet, and they weren’t open on the weekend, so he’d have to pick it up on Monday.

That meant I was going to be the entire weekend without a disk drive. No saving my game… no loading anything else up. The computer was pretty much useless for the entire weekend. EXCEPT, I reminded myself, for continued development on my game.

The Final Stretch
So I got back to work on the game, and worked on it off-and-on through Saturday and Sunday. I got it so you could drive around the maze (in sort of a stepwise fashion as seen in the old Wizardry and Bard’s Tale games). And I got the enemy ships (which vaguely resembled Recognizers from Tron) to appear. They didn’t really move yet – they were static targets. When I got home from school on Monday, I was almost afraid to TOUCH the computer, for fear that I’d accidentally type “new” or something and delete this game on which I now had over 10 hours of development invested.

Still, after the homework was done, I found myself a little bored. It was around 4:00 in the afternoon, my dad wasn’t going to be home for a couple of hours, and where our house was located we had lousy TV reception. So I shuffled off down to the computer. I’d put a couple more hours into the game, then my dad would come home with the repaired disk drive, I’d save the game, and then life would be back to normal again. I could waste time that night playing Ultima III.

The Gun Shot
It happened with a gunshot. A laser-gun actually.

I had a gun at the bottom of the screen that would fire up, towards a targeting cursor. The algorithm to have the laser (or “bullet”) fly to the target was mostly simple. You find the X,Y position of the target on the screen. You find the X,Y position of the bullet (which starts just above the launcher). You subtract the target’s position from the bullet’s position. That’s called the offset, and from that you can figure the direction of the bullet. Move the bullet in that direction every frame.

Now, I was using integer math, so I had to do some funky stuff to get it to fly in something resembling a straight line. One trick I did was recalculate the offset every frame, so the bullet might fly in a slightly crooked path, but would always eventually get to the target.

And then I’d just repeat every frame until the bullet’s position was the same as the targeting cursor’s position. Then I’d see if the targeting cursor (or laser) was over a valid target, and if so… boom.

Okay, it’s pretty primitive stuff. I was something like 13 or 14 years old when I did this, so cut me some slack! 🙂

So I tested the game again with the gunshot, about an hour before my Dad was supposed to get home.

I saw the laser appear briefly over the top of the gun, and then that was it. Something was wrong. I waited to see if anything else would happen to help me understand the bug. After a few seconds, I hit the “break” key.

And got a garbled message.

I tried to list my program, and saw nothing but a bunch of garbage. It was impossible to execute, or to even fix, as the computer was not responding correctly.

WHAT HAD I DONE?

Solving the Crime
It took me only a minute to figure out what had happened.

I had made two mistakes:

#1 – I’d calculated the offset between the target and the bullet improperly. Instead of subtracting the bullet’s position from the target’s, I’d done it the other way around. So the bullet actually tried to fly in the OPPOSITE direction of where it was supposed to go.

#2 – I hadn’t written any defensive code to make sure that the bullet was restricted to the screen’s position. This isn’t something you wanted in final code (as it would slow the game’s processing down), but it would have been nice during development.

So my gun had actually fired BACKWARDS. Instead of flying up towards the targeting cursor, it had flown…. down. And since I was directly modifying memory to display the blast, it had fired down out of screen memory, into program memory. It had ripped through program memory, cutting a bloody (well, as bloody as bytes of code can get) swath through the entire thing. In fact, it might have been a double-barreled hit, as I was also directly writing to color memory at the same time, and that one had gone out-of-bounds.

Eventually, either the image or the color had ripped through the area of RAM that held the actual operating system code that normally got loaded on boot. Thus the garbled error message.

There was nothing left worth saving. Four days of work. I knew the risks, I took the chance, and I still blew it.

An hour later, my dad came home with the newly fixed (or was it simply replaced?) disk drive.

It’s so nice to have learned these lessons at an early age. But even though the game was crap, I was probably close to “done” on it anyway, and it would have been long gone by now, the memory still gives me pain.

Filed Under: Game Development, Retro - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

The Year I Discovered PC Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 6, 2012

I didn’t really have a DOS-based PC until 1991. By this point, the era of my beloved Commodore 64 was pretty much over, and while I really wanted an Amiga, its time was also rapidly coming to a close. This weekend, I stumbled across some music from Falcon 3.0 – the Spectrum Holobyte game from 1991. I was surprised how it brought back feelings, nostalgia, and excitement from that era of gaming. Sense memory and all that, I guess.

It really was an incredible time to be a PC gamer. The PC was in the midst of a surge of titles as publishers decided that it was the horse to bet on. It enjoyed four significant but then-recent changes that had turned it into the ultimate gaming computer. First of all, VGA had become standard. Suddenly, games could explode with sixteen times the number of colors of the previous standard, and of most previous computers. Secondly, the Adlib and Sound Blaster sound cards had also become ‘standard’ enough that even their competitors maintained compatibility. This meant pretty decent sound, for once, and even digitally recorded sounds or voices could be used in games for the increasing base of Sound Blaster users. Thirdly, the 386 CPU was really pretty dang powerful and overshadowed much of what had come before. Finally, expanded or extended memory managers had become common as most computers shipped with more than 640K.

All of these combined to make the DOS-based PC (the earlier versions of Windows was simply a layer on top of DOS that slowed down performance) the best non-console gaming platform. A couple of years earlier, and most titles simply included the PC as a platform for a port, but by 1990 the PC had become the lead platform for almost all computer game companies. With all the new technological power, game developers were able to really push things as they hadn’t before.

Then, even as today, I tended to pick up games a little late. Back then, it was mainly because I was a poor student with little money, so my games often came from the discount rack, or borrowed from friends when they were done.  I got to play catch-up on some really incredible titles from the late 80’s through 1990, marveling at how much things had changed from the Commodore 64 era. I was able to discover a few older games like Neuromancer, Ultima V and Ultima VI, Wing Commander I, Loom, Monkey Island I, Mechwarrior, and Pool of Radiance. I learned about shareware, and played a couple of amazing roguelikes.

1991 also saw a ton of great releases that are still remembered as classics. While I didn’t play them all as soon as they were released, this was clearly a time to be excited. Check out this list of the goodies that came out in 1991 (clearly skewed to my own personal preferences):  Civilization, Gunship 2000, Space Quest IV, Out of This World (1991 for DOS, I’m pretty sure…), Leisure Suit Larry 5, Wing Commander 2, Defender of the Crown, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, Eye of the Beholder 2, Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, Scorched Earth (another one of the awesome shareware games that were really starting to kick butt in this era), Catacomb 3D (the largely unknown predecessor to Wolfenstein 3D), The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Bard’s Tale Construction Set, Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood (okay, nobody but me seemed to have played this one, but I loved it), Falcon 3.0, Lemmings, Police Quest 3, Spellcasting 201, Elite Plus, The Magic Candle II, Twilight: 2000 (again, I seem to be the only one who played it, and I did enjoy it up until the broken finale), Monkey Island 2, Commander Keen IV-VI, Duke Nukem, F-117 Stealth Fighter (Sort of a sequel to or deluxe version of the “F-19” game from a couple of years earlier), and some of the final games of the SSI “Gold Box” D&D series.

By 1992, I was hooked, devouring gaming magazines (mainly Computer Gaming World). The flood of  soon-to-be-classic titles kept coming: Wolfenstein 3D, Aces of the Pacific, Ultima VII, The Magic Candle III, Wizardry 7, Ultima Underworld, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Control II, Might & Magic IV (not that I played it back then, but everybody was talking about it), Alone in the Dark, Dune II (the prototype for the RTS genre),  and … well, you get the idea.

So I’m dropping a lot of game names here. The point is (if there is one) that there was a lot happening in this time on the PC. We hadn’t even arrived in the era of true CD-ROM distribution (let alone hardware accelerated 3D, or high-speed Internet outside of the college campus), but the games were already doing some pretty amazing things. And even then, there was some interesting cross-pollination between computer games and the console realm. The indies were beginning to make a good showing for themselves, under the “shareware” term. Games were literally driving hardware sales for the PC – a trend that continued throughout the decade.

It’s not as if the supply of games for the PC has really diminished that much – except for certain genres. Back in early 90’s, RPGs and adventure games were kings. Flight simulators of various kinds were all but a license to print money for the publishers. Civilization took the popular formula of Empire and turned it into one of the biggest games – and biggest franchises – in history. And of course, there was the Space Combat Sim, a genre that really hit its peak in the first half of the decade. But we also saw several games that would be termed “casual” sitting on the shelf next to the “core” games. There was no real distinction. Genres blended and expanded.

And yeah, there were plenty of crap games back then, too. Fortunately they are mostly easy to forget. For the most part, the actual experience of gaming is a lot better now. Besides the massive tech improvements, games today are generally an improvement on those older experiences. They are far easier to install and run, and have a lot fewer issues with configuration or compatibility.  They are generally streamlined in a good way, and much easier to “pick up” and play. They’ve been built with the advantage of hindsight, built upon the foundations created by these earlier games. But in a lot of ways, they’ve also lost a bit of that raw energy and creative experimentation that also characterized the era, in my mind.

That early era of PC gaming was what made me consider making video games my career. I wish I had a better way of tapping into the feelings and energy of that era today.  This was an era that really inspired me. When I think about trying to recapture that “old school” RPG experience, I’m really talking about trying to bottle that feeling.

Was 1991 or 1992 the best year to get started playing PC games? It really worked well for me. Although if you take a look at the indie scene today, with around EIGHT HUNDRED entries into the IGF this year (if you combine standard and student entries – although admittedly many of them are not for the PC), it seems pretty easy to argue that today, twenty years later, things are looking better than ever.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Crunch and the Part-Time Indie: Five Tricks to Getting Your Game Done Without Self-Destructing

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 3, 2012

I don’t know when I was introduced to the concept of “crunch time” as a kid. Somewhere between stories like Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine and other tales of heroic efforts on the job, I came to see it as being the hallmark of the driven, passionate professional. Although in all those stories (or in the movie Gung Ho), it sounded kinda cool and … well, heroic.

Then I got to go through that experience myself.  Repeatedly. You know what? It ain’t so cool, except maybe in hindsight.

I mean, I don’t think Twisted Metal or Warhawk or really any of the games I’ve ever made could have happened – or at least not been as good – without the insane hours we put in to make them happen.  So I guess I’m glad we did what we did. But it was brutal. I remember at the beginning of October realizing that I’d almost literally missed the entire summer. I’d enjoyed few weekends, and no time off except for the fourth of July.  I’d arrived at work at dawn and left after dark every single night so I only saw the sunlight through the windows and on the lunchtime excursions down the street to grab food. All of us had shortened tempers, hygene occasionally slipped, and we lived under a constant level of near-exhaustion.

And that first time was probably the “best” crunch mode I’ve ever worked under, largely self-imposed rather than management-imposed. I’ve had far, far worse since then. I still think “crunch mode” is a valid tool for short sprints, but it’s no way to manage a game project. Or any other project. After 2-3 weeks, productivity sinks back down to pre-crunch levels, no matter how many hours they put in at the office. Seriously – crunch mode sucks, and there’s really not much cool or heroic about it. It’s just… something that has to happen, sometimes, and you do what you have to do. But it can seriously degrade your quality of life.

Now, arguably, being a part-time indie means kinda-sorta perma-crunch. The part-time indie is effectively working two jobs – their “day job” and their side business. Where does that fit in?

It’s different, though exhaustion and a diminishing of social life can still be consequences. Working 60+ hour weeks – 40 at the day job, 20 making games – may still be the order of the day, and I still don’t find it easy. It’s a context switch – I find that working two totally separate jobs for 60 hours is a little easier on the brain and body than doing a single job the same amount of time.  But I’m still not great at it.  If I was better and more disciplined, maybe Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon would have been completed a year earlier.

There are a few of tricks that have worked okay for me in the past. Once this day-job crunch is over, I’m going try to work on these a little harder in my own life to get back into the swing of things.

#1 – Establish a rhythm. The human body (and mind) are built to adapt to situations, but they can only adapt to things that are predictable. Establish a rhythm of life – eat, sleep, work, even play, and after a few weeks it will be a lot more comfortable. I know – I’m the kind of personality that balks at the idea of regimenting my life. But if I want to have the time to both make indie games *AND* enjoy the other important things in life – time with family, friends, and actually playing games – I have to do this.  This doesn’t mean the schedule can’t be flexible. But the exceptions can’t become the norm. You need to have a regular schedule that becomes a rhythm.

#2 – Make a task list, and review it at the beginning of your development session. I have a very difficult time switching gears from coding-and-testing to “management” or design. Task transitions can turn into speed-bumps in my productivity, and I’ll linger overlong on one task because I am unsure as to what I should do next. It’s much easier for me to make a “short list” of immediate tasks that need doing over the next day or three all at once – doing it all while I’m in a “management” frame of mine. Then I review this “short list” as my first task of the day / session, so I am reminded of everything I intend to accomplish from the get-go. I try to plan out tasks a couple of days in advance, so if I happen to get done more quickly than expected (which doesn’t happen often enough), I can just keep going rather than having to switch gears and pick new jobs from the master list.

#3 -Plan your distractions.  The Internet is one of the greatest tools ever invented for both improving and destroying productivity. Twitter and forums and blogs and instructional websites can be extremely motivational and educational (as I hope this particular blog can be), but they can be a distraction that completely destroys all hope of ever getting anything done. One thing I’ve done in the past which has proven pretty successful is to stick to  a plan for when I can spend some minutes checking email and Twitter, or play a quick game of Slay or something. Either at the completion of a task, or after a period of time (say one ten-minute break every hour). Otherwise, the browser’s only use is for reading reference manual pages, if necessary. That way I turn a potential distraction into a motivating tool.

#4 – Impose Deadlines. There was an old joke in the computer (and games) business that if it weren’t for trade shows, nothing would ever get done. Those looming, “big event” deadlines really do help with the motivation and focus on getting the critical parts done early.  It works for solo or small-team indies, too! Plan “events” to act as deadlines. What kind of events? Well, how about a weekly (or monthly) blog update? Or if you participate (or have organized one), how about an “indie night” where indies are presenting their works in progress? Or a “Screenshot Saturday” on Twitter? This should be something you should commit to and be held accountable (if only by your own team, friends, family, or whatever) for. It should hurt if you slip in some way. For this reason, keep them *reasonable* while still being aggressive.  You want to grow accustomed to success, not blowing deadlines because they are never possible.

#5 – Don’t sleight the day job. For me, the day job finances my indie thing. It pays for the necessities of life. That means it gets priority, as much as I’d rather be putting all my time into making Frayed Knights 2. But it’s also liberating, as I don’t depend on the game selling thousands upon thousands to keep the bank from foreclosing on my home.  Eventually, there may come a time when that relationship changes, but until then I always give priority to the job that pays the bills. ‘Cuz I’ve found the stress of unemployment outweighs the advantage of having more supposedly free time.

So that’s what works for me. Anybody have some additional suggestions to help keep part-time indie development from becoming a death-march style slog?

Filed Under: Biz, Production - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Some Indies are Dickweeds

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 2, 2012

As I tried to explain earlier this week, there is a big difference between being inspired by a game and making something similar, and ripping it off “practically pixel for pixel.” It’s the difference between advancing the art (or industry), and cannibalizing it.

While I don’t know this guy or the context in which he gave this talk at a local indie meet-up, on the surface (and, most likely, below the surface), he comes off as a total dickweed. I’m embarrassed by the indies laughing and giving him minimal applause at him at this meet-up after he insults them all.

Okay, I’m a die-hard capitalist pig-dog and proud of it, but man – guys like this rub me the wrong way. Okay, maybe he’s actually a magnanimous guy who decided to portray himself as a villain to encourage fellow indies to step up their game and WORK HARDER to try and beat the crap out of him in the marketplace. If that’s the case, and I doubt it, then I’ll withdraw my dickweed comment.

Money’s not everything. If it was, we indies would probably be doing something else, and I personally would not be making old-school RPGs for a niche audience. But the best revenge would be to blow this guy away in the marketplace with good, original games. Eventually – and I’m seeing this happen sooner rather than later – people are going to get sick of the nickle-and-dime-you-to-death treadmill that is the Facebook game business. While it’s never going to go away – any more than any other of the business models for games have gone away – the bubble is going to burst. Just like it did for ‘casual’ games. And probably guys like Zynga are still going to be there, strong enough to weather the storm if they were smart about it, but nowhere near the powerhouse they are today. But guys like this? I dunno.

And then there’ll be the next big thing a few years from now.

Filed Under: Biz, Casual Games - Comments: 19 Comments to Read

Utah Indie Night – January 2012

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 1, 2012

The January Utah Indie Night was held on the very last night of January, 2012. The venue was new: the game development lab at Neumont University in South Jordan.

The first part of the meeting was taken up by long-time local game developer Les Pardew and others talking up the proposed Digital Media and Entertainment Act. It’s an interesting idea – basically a low-interest venture fund backed by state funds at very low risk (so no taxpayer burden) that can be accessed by companies and projects in the digital entertainment field (this is primarily film projects, but also applies to post-production, and games) that will be doing most of the work here in the state. The goal is to build the infrastructure and talent pool to grow these industries in this state. I’m not 100% sure how I feel about it, but I’m supportive of at least getting this bill out to the floor so it can be debated & reviewed. When a lobbyist is telling us how awesome it will be and how it will have a negligible impact on the state, as much as I’d like to believe him because it would be helpful to the industry, I still try to take what he says with a grain of salt. Or a small Siberian salt mine.

Les mentioned the “old timers” in the Utah Game Dev scene which, sadly, refers to me. I remember how it was in the mid 90’s, and Utah was looking like THE “up and coming” center for game development. Particularly with the closing of my former employer, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. It doesn’t seem to be dying, really, and there are still a lot of active game studios (indie, independent, and satellites of larger publishers)  around here. But it isn’t growing either. I’d love to see things pick up more here, one way or another. One thing is for sure, though, and that is that the industry has changed a LOT since I started my career here.

The Utah showing for last weekend’s Global Game Jam was briefly discussed – we had something like 10-12 entries.  I haven’t hunted down a link to the local entrants, but we apparently had 10-12 projects submitted. Awesomeness!

After the (sadly, too long) presentation on the Digital Media and Entertainment Act, we got to the games. I was in a real gaming mood, I think. The Neumont University gaming lab has several very large wall-mounted TVs where we could plug in our demo systems. This was a lot of fun.  There’s nothing quite like playing games on a really huge screen.

I ended up spending way too much time hogging up Curtis Mirci‘s March to the Moon game, which I’ve played and enjoyed before.  It’s a goofy little action game with RPG elements, and I mean goofy. Programmer art, and completely over-the-top, and exactly the kind of fun I was looking for.  Good ol-fashioned shoot-em-upiness with absolutely no taking of itself seriously.

Link Realms  was also on display, as is often the case, and they keep making great improvements to the game. It’s definitely one of the better-looking indie games here or anywhere. They have a new video for this incredible “sandbox MMORPG” showing some of the newest (or upcoming) additions to the game – principally some PVP features:

I also played a turn-based tactics game temporarily called “Tank Commanders” (I think), and saw a few more promising titles. I didn’t take notes, so I don’t remember their names.  One student project was a platformer about a guy in search of pizza. I think it used the Unity 2D game tutorial dude as the main character, but the rest of the artwork really impressed me. Another was a platformer-puzzle based game for PC and iOS that looked like it took place aboard a moving train.  As usual, I spent about as much time talking with people there as I did playing.

Anyway, while the game dev lab at Neumont was a little crowded with the really nice turnout, I wouldn’t mind having it there again.

Filed Under: Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

A More Vile Form of Copying

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 31, 2012

There’s a form of copying that’s far more pernicious than piracy.

They say the key to creativity is hiding your sources. It’s mostly true. Even as Chris Crawford argued nearly 25 years ago, creativity and originality is a spectrum with one idealized end that lies only in theory. But the other extreme is all too real. It’s one thing to create games that are inspired by favorite titles. We make ’em, we play ’em, we even loudly request that “someone” create a modern remake / clone of these beloved games.  In general, that’s reasonable and acceptable to gamers and developers. Even encouraged. But there’s a fuzzy line that should not be crossed, and because it’s fuzzy developers and publishers usually try their best to stay well away from it.

But every schoolyard has a bully or two. And we’ve got ours.

I am not joking with indies when I quote Howard Aiken and tell them not to worry about anybody “stealing” their ideas (because, as Aiken says, if your idea is any good you’ll have to ram it down their throats). That’s usually true. Until an indie is successful at ramming it down people’s throats, that is… by generating tons of success, media buzz, or simply executing extremely well and grabbing attention from the industry.

At that point, unfortunately, it seems that small but scrappy indies become nothing but prey for the big publishers. We’ve seen it before with ‘Splosion Man and Capcom. And now it looks like we’re seeing it again with well-funded LOLApps:

Copycat Companies Might Not Lose Lawsuits, But They Should Lose Our Respect, Argues Kevin Dent

Or everybody’s favorite “bad guy” Facebook game king, Zynga:

Zynga’s Cloning Protection Racket

I would hope that indie companies would do their due diligence when dealing with these companies and refuse to do any business with them after this kind of crap. A publisher that pulls this kind of stunt should find itself left completely alone, with any third parties avoiding them like the plague that they are. As a creative industry, we should have zero tolerance for this kind of plagiarism, particularly amongst publishers whose business require a relationship of trust. If that trust is betrayed, that business should be at serious risk, and the publisher should become a cautionary tale for the rest of the industry.

The lesson to smaller, independent developers (“indie” or not): Be very, very careful dealing with publishers. Not paranoid – there are some great opportunities out there. Just be careful. And do your best to publicize the shameful, unethical behavior, and let players know that about the original games.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

A Sirius Game

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 30, 2012

I wanted to do this last week, but with crunch-mode in full swing and some other high-stress demands on my time, I’m lucky to not have had to put the blog on hiatus.

Anyway, for now, I wanted to point out a little action / adventure game “with RPG elements” released by a friend of mine at Over Cloud 9 Games – “A Sirius Game.”

Tired of playing the good guy? How about playing a spoiled brat with revenge on his mind? This is how the story of Sirius begins. Disowned by his father, he underhandedly trades on his family name to get his initial contract, with an eye towards revenge. To be honest, I’ve only played a tiny bit of the game (it’s all I’ve had time for), so I don’t know how the story ends, but what I’ve played was cute and refreshingly original.

You can download the game at the following link:

A Sirius Game – Free Demo Download

And to order the full game:

A Sirius Game – Order the Full Game

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Read the First Comment

The Magic Game-Making Box

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 28, 2012

Okay, there’s a quote I love but I forget who said it – someone at Bioware I think. I thought I’d try to harness the power of the Internet to get the exact quote and who said it.

Basically, the quote goes something like this: If you were to build gamers a magical box that, with the push of a button, would create the perfect game for each gamer, uniquely tailored to their preferences and wishes, there would be a certain contingent of gamers who would go online and complain bitterly about the color of the box.

I expect most of you know all about that, though few (hopefully none) of you would actually fall into that contingent…

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Why Indies Rock – Example #488

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 27, 2012

The Day Job has gone into full-on crunch mode, making the blogging thing difficult.  I apologize. I’m gonna do my best, but it’s going to be rough going for another couple of weeks.

So today I’m just going to pass along a link provided by Craig Stern, of Sinister Design (Telepath RPG) and IndieRPGs.com. He provided it as a “perfect example of why it’s worth supporting indie developers even when comparable games are available on GOG.” The developer in question is Almost Human, the game is the upcoming RPG that I, for one, am REALLY looking forward to, “The Legend of Grimrock.”

‘Nuff said, I think.

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

Frayed Knights Takes Home the RPGWatch Indie Game of the Year Award!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 26, 2012

That loud “WOOT!” you just heard emanating from the Wasatch Mountains a little while ago? That was me.

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon just won the Editor’s Choice Award at RPGWatch for Indie Game of the Year.

Read all about it here:

RPGWatch Game of the Year Awards 2011 – Best Indie RPG

I’ll let you read the whole thing.

While we came in fourth in the Reader’s Choice polling, the race was VERY close (all four of the top choices came within 5% of each other), and the other three titles were all on Steam and had about 100x the exposure of Frayed Knights. So I still feel pretty good about that, too.

So now what?

Well, I definitely have my sights set on winning these awards (and more) with the sequel. I don’t want to talk too much about that yet, because there are some plans that are still in flux. Not whether or not it will happen, but some of the changes that are being made to the game. I will say at this point Frayed Knights 2 is shaping up to be more of a true sequel than just a “part two.” There’ll be a lot of improvements to the game mechanics and interface side of things.

More importantly, though – this first game was really an experiment. By the time I was finishing up the last of the quests and plotlines, I felt like I was finally getting the hang of how to write a Frayed Knights game. I hope to take all of that experience and really apply it for the sequels. The stories may have a little bit more serious-ish drama mixed in with the comedic plot. If you’ve played the original through the end (or at least through the part where Shiela and Florentine play a major role), you know what I’m talking about.

On the Mac front, we’ve run into some technical and life-related issues that are delaying the release of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon on that platform a bit, but things are still progressing. I’d originally hoped to release the Mac version by the end of this month. I’d originally intended to release the PC version before the end of 2009, too, so I’m notorious for missing my internal milestones like that. I don’t think we’ll be that far delayed on the Mac release, however. But at this time we don’t have an ETA. I am taking steps which I *hope* will make the Mac release of the sequels far, far easier and faster – ideally simultaneous with the PC release.

In the meantime, however, I’m gonna take a moment to look back. This was a long, hard journey, and it was made possible by the help and encouragement of friends and the community here. So here is a hearty thank-you to all of you here for the suggestions, feedback, beta testing, interest, promotion, words of encouragement, words of constructive criticism, contribution of ideas and even art assets (!!!) (including the Frayed Knights: TSOSD logo!), and a constant reminder of who I was writing this game for. You guys rock!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

What Would You Update?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 25, 2012

In the spirit of the the TWO X-Com “re-envisionings” and the hope and horror that the reports on these games have inspired, I thought I’d push a little experiment today and see what the expert gamers of this site would do in a similar situation.

Let’s say you had the option to pick a classic game that’s at least ten years old, and have it remade. Any game, any publisher. It doesn’t need to be an RPG or adventure game, though I know most of us here have a liking for those genres. Assume a graphical overhaul and UI improvements are a given.

What game would you choose? What other changes would want to see made to the game? How should the designers make sure those changes stayed “true to the spirit” of the original? Or would you care?

Me? I’d be terrified about it, but I’m going to pick Ultima 7. Knowing full well that some folks will accuse me of heresy, what I’d like to see changed beyond upgraded technology and UI would be the combat system. Something more like “turn-based with pause” from the Infinity Engine games (Baldur’s Gate, etc)  with better AI and a slower pace so things like actually casting spells in combat would have a chance to succeed.  Since nobody ever seemed to feel that combat was really that good in the first place in Ultima 7, I don’t think that sort of thing would violate the spirit of the game, or the series.  I would also like to see stat-check style mechanics supplement (not entirely replace) the elements of the game that were more twitch-driven… dodging fireballs and that kind of thing. This way even those who prefer a more thoughtful pace in their RPGs wouldn’t get badly penalized for not playing it like a an NES game. And really, what made Ultima 7 work so well was the world and the story, not the RPG mechanics… which to me always felt a little half-baked.

Anyway, that’s my candidate, and what I’d change.

What about you?

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 38 Comments to Read

Some More Classic D&D Trivia

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 24, 2012

Inspired this time by one of CRPG Addicts’ recent (and hopefully not last) posts about 1970s era CRPGs, I hunted down a few links about the really, really old-school dice-and-paper games.  I’ve written once about Original D&D Trivia, as seeing how the game has evolved and changed over the years is fascinating to me. How did RPGs come to be, anyway? Yes, I know how it happened, I was there to see some of it, but it’s the little details and stories that excite me.

I discovered a page collecting several quotes from one of the guys in many of the original campaigns. There’s plenty of fascinating trivia to be discovered here, including these little tidbits:

• The amount by which characters “scale” (mainly in terms of hit dice) came about directly from a combination of wargaming and favorite fantasy books. As the players decided they wanted classic fantasy heroes like Conan, Arigorn, and Elric in the game, they figured these guys ought to be much tougher than an average warrior. So they took the easiest approach and made these heroes equal to four regular warriors and could therefore sustain four times as many hits before dying. Then they added a new “level” – a Super-Hero – that was the equivalent of two heroes.  Then as they moved from wargaming (Chainmail) to what is now closer to an RPG campaign with Blackmoor, they thought of how a character might “grow” to be a hero… becoming the equivalent of two warriors, then three, then four, etc…

  And thus we have had the really massive low-level “jump” in power levels at low levels in D&D and D&D-inspired RPGs for decades.

• Players originally played both the good guys and the bad guys, with the person eventually called the “Dungeon Master” acting more as a neutral third party – referee and scenario builder. Eventually the “evil” players defected to the “good guy” side, leaving only Dave Arneson (the referee) to play all of the bad guys as well.
• The cleric class originated as nothing more than a counter to a player-character vampire who had gotten to be too powerful as they started giving him Hammer Film-style vampire powers when he leveled up.  That explains the Christian priest style archetype (also a la Hammer films) that they’ve tried for decades to generalize.

All good stuff. Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn’t. But I like knowing why things are the way they are (or were), especially as a designer who may want to check the underlying assumptions before he goes around changing things.

This was before my time (thankfully) so I only experienced an echo of it in the 1980s as played by other kids who had no other resources than the books and magazines. One thing that does strike me, which I’m trying to verify, is how much less the old-school games were about “hack-and-slash” than they are usually given credit for.   I think it is the computer-game imitations that really took the combat parts through the roof.  But looking through some of the very old OD&D and early AD&D modules of the era, there’s really a lot more emphasis on exploration and problem-solving.  Role-playing (according to the above-quoted player, Gronan) evolved naturally as an extension of these aspects of the game. But going through many of the old modules, the combat set-ups are often pretty boring (with some set-piece exceptions), and there are lots of “strange things” players have to figure out, and well-hidden treasures to find.

These are exactly the kinds of creative, interesting things that are more challenging to plug into a computer game, while the nuts-and-bolts of a cyclical, repeatable gameplay like combat are easy to do.

Filed Under: General - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

The CRPG Addict Hiatus – And Why Vintage RPGs Matter

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 23, 2012

Awww….

Bummer!

Hopefully it’ll be a short (or at least non-permanent) hiatus. I enjoyed many an old-school CRPG vicariously through his reports. I probably enjoyed them a good deal more through his articles than if I’d played them myself, in the case of many, many not-so-great games.  Even if this project is abandoned forever, it’s a treasure trove of recent play-through essays on more than five dozen vintage PC RPGs as it stands, which is freaking incredible.

I mean, seriously. He put in a minimum of six hours per game, and played many to completion, in the manner in which they appeared to be “intended to be played” – no spoilers, no walkthroughs, no backups or otherwise “cheating” (well, almost never).

These have been valuable insights for many reasons:

#1 – A modern perspective on vintage games: This is a guy who loves vintage RPGs, but loves modern games just as much, and thus has been able to look at these older titles without using too much of the rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia, and without disdain for anything less than cutting-edge technology.

#2 – His GIMLET rating system is unabashedly subjective, yet it manages to allow a comparison of games from different eras with each other. Most other systems tend to be far more biased towards newer games or (rarely) classic titles. I printed the article describing the rating criteria and posted it on the wall by my desk near the latter stages of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon development, as I felt his points for his system were a valuable checklist of critical elements to make a great RPG.

#3 – These articles are a treasure trove of early RPG innovation and concepts that have been lost in the modern era. And admittedly, a few of ’em probably deserve to remain lost, but that’s what happens with innovation. People always look at the successful fruits of innovation and creativity and forget about the less-successful stuff, and forget that most innovations aren’t really that great. Nevertheless, there are a lot of fascinating ideas and experiments out there that I feel were lost / forgotten for reasons other than its inherent worthiness, and could be dusted off and revisited by an enterprising indie today.

#4 – Likewise, it’s useful to see all the crap games that came out in this era. I guess I shouldn’t say “crap games,” because it seems only a few were genuine garbage. But it’s informative to see all the games that didn’t find their way into the top 10% or so “classics” that are typically remembered, and maybe get an inkling as to why they didn’t make it. In some cases, there are some real gems that apparently just didn’t have enough marketing push to succeed against their more popular brethren. In many other cases, it looks like they had plenty of potential but were hampered by one or more issues that really held the game back. Some were just poorly implemented but had some clever ideas. As a designer and developer, these are possibly more interesting to look at than the successful “classics.”

#5 – And from a broad view, it’s awesome to see what an incredible legacy there is for the genre – even restricting the subset to only those games made for DOS-based machines of the 1980s. The spectrum and quantity of titles is amazing. And in some ways, it does make me sad to see the genre as restricted as it stands in 2012, though the indies seem to be really getting it together to revive the tradition today.

Anyway, I hope this proves to be a short hiatus, as I really enjoyed getting my vicarious fix. But while my time is generally pretty tight (isn’t that true of most of us?), I do have plenty of my own vintage adventures to enjoy in the meantime!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



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