PC World Interview – More on Warhawk and Twisted Metal

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 21, 2011

Wow, you get a double-dose of ancient history from me this week! More Warhawk and Twisted Metal goodness!

PC World has published an interview with me about the early days of Playstation game development.

This interview has a few discussions in common with part 1 of my Matt Chat interview. Kinda funny how they coincided like that. But most of the content of both interviews is different. And in both cases, I run off on tangents to cover interesting (IMO) side-stories the interviewer wouldn’t know to ask about. I don’t know if that makes me a bad person to interview or not.

Those were exciting times, but I don’t know if I could go back to that lifestyle again. It was pretty rough on my family back then. It was my “dream job” at the time, but I got pretty burned out after a couple of years of that.

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

Matt Chat Interview – With the Rampant Coyote!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 20, 2011

I feel like an old-timer going off telling stories that nobody wants to hear or something. But I appreciate the chance Matt Barton (author of “Dungeons & Desktops” – the history of computer RPGs) gave me to participate in his show.

This is part 1 of our interview, where I talk mainly about making games in the “good ol’ days” – Twisted Metal, Warhawk, Jet Moto, etc.  But the last bit takes us to Frayed Knights, and the challenge of making indie games.

As always, if you like this video, please send Matt a tip (and share it with others).

And if you REALLY like it, please feel free to check out Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon.

If it didn’t put you to sleep and you have any follow-up questions on my rants in response to Matt’s questions, please feel free to ask away.

I should add here, too, that while Aveyond really found a strong audience with women, it is NOT, IMO, a “girl’s game.” It was designed to have a more broad appeal than just the traditional audience, and it won over a lot of people for whom it was their first RPG.  The Aveyond series – and several others of similar style – are very “gender inclusive,”  and in so being have tapped into a brand new audience. But I’m a grumpy old-school gamer GUY and I really enjoy these games too.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Indie Evangelism, Interviews - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Ten Reasons *Not* to Become an Indie Game Developer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 18, 2011

Considering going indie? Hey, I’ve been calling myself an “indie evangelist” for years now (before it was cool!). I’m always encouraging folks to make their own games. I think it’s awesome! You don’t need to quit your day job (in fact, at first, you’d best not…) and live in a cardboard box to do it – it’s quite possible to be a part-time indie.

But I recently read “Seven Reasons You Don’t Want to Work in the Videogames Industry” (tip o’ the fedora to indie RPG maker Moumita Paul of Over Cloud 9 Games for the link). It made me grin (or was it wincing?). So I thought that in the interest of fairness, I do feel the need to take a small break from the cheerleading and pay attention so some very good reasons why you might NOT want to go indie and make games for the world.

So here we go…

#1 – You like having “spare time.”

I find that one of two things generally happen to part-time indies: Either game-making devours what used to be “spare time,” or the games never get produced. Sure, we all find the time to play a few games here and there, and maybe watch a television show or two, but making indie games is a hobby / side business that – if you are serious about it – will devour your spare time like some voracious indie Pac-Man. And it will still take four times longer to complete than you imagined in your most conservative estimates.

#2 – You want to get rich making games.

There are lots of ways to make more money in your spare time.   Some of ’em might even be very lucrative. But making games probably isn’t one of ’em. Sure, there are plenty of great success stories, and if you persist at it you could turn it into a sustainable part-time or even full-time business. But as “get rich quick” schemes go, indie games are down pretty low on the list of likely candidates. Somewhere below “become fry cook at Burgers A-Go-Go” and just above “Buy a metal detector and comb the park for buried pirate treasure.”

#3 – You don’t want to deal with that business & marketing crap.

Yes, you can make indie games for the sheer joy of it, dump them out somewhere on the web and take joy where you can with the dozen or so strangers who stumble across it and play it without comment. But if you are actually intending to have your hobby finance itself in any way, you are going to have to devote (an often inordinate amount of) time to business-y and marketing stuff.  Even if someone else is handling the nuts-and-bolts of it for you, there’s a lot that you’ll personally have to do to get your piece of the ad revenue share that isn’t purely devoted to making-your-game, from making decisions on what web-hosting solution to use to development monetization strategies. When you thought you’d want to pour your soul into making games, you probably didn’t expect this soul-sucking aspect, did you?

#4 – You want to persist in the illusion that making games is an artistic Nirvana of fun and creativity.

Making games is awesome. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve, and I’ll probably be doing it until they stick me in a coffin. And there’s a wild, wonderful stage at the beginning of each project where making games is everything one might imagine it to be. It is exciting, fun, creative, and wonderful. But if you actually want to complete a game intended for public consumption, you will hit a surprisingly long, painful, challenging stage where making games isn’t all fun and games. It’s WORK. It takes discipline. Progress is slow. You’ll spend a couple of hours tracking down one little stupid bug that you can’t be sure you’ve fixed until you’ve spent another three hours of testing. It’ll be a painful slog. This is where 95% of the indies quit. And, sadly, they think they are at the 80% or 90% complete stage, but they really aren’t even halfway there. This is a rude discovery for some people. If you are one of those people, please forget I said anything – making games is all rainbows and lollipops.

#5 – You want to believe that you are God’s gift to game design.

Back in high school and college, before I had to really put it on the line, I was the world’s best game designer.  It’s true! I was a legend in my own mind. I knew games and stuff. I could critique AAA games with the best of ’em, and tell anybody who cared to listen where the designers went wrong.  Then… something weird happened when I become a professional game developer. My skills mysteriously degraded when it was *ME* making those game design decisions, and those decisions were far, far more complicated than they’d been when I was critiquing games from the comfort of my own armchair.  Somehow the game in my head was always far cooler than the one on the screen, which had to be controlled with real IO devices instead of just responding to my obvious thoughts and desires. My experience is not unique. Actual game development does this to everyone – it’s a horrible, mysterious power.  Don’t do it if you want to remain superior to all game designers in the field!

#6 – You are doing it to make your ‘dream game’ a reality.

Your ‘dream game’ is probably best left in your dreams. Because – if you are anything like me – your ‘dream game’ would actually require a team and budget to make Electronic Arts go broke making it, and you don’t even realize it. Especially if the description of your “dream game” begins with the words, “It’s just like <Insert name of big-budget but technically obsolete AAA game that inspired you> but with <insert radical experimental addition that would at least quadruple the development cost, unbeknownst to you>.”  What you will get to do, instead, is fulfill a lot of little dreams, and see your imagination take form on the screen. If that’s not good enough, and you absolutely HAVE to have your Halo / World of Warcraft / Modern Warfare killer of your dreams, maybe being an indie isn’t for you.

#7 – You don’t want to learn new things.

I started making games professionally in 1994. That’s been… uh, a long time. I’m still learning new things almost daily. Being an indie means you must wear multiple hats (like the “business and marketing”  hat in #3), and nobody starts making games as an expert in every one of these areas. Nobody emerges from the womb coding mad C# objects, writing scintillating dialog, drawing fantasy art to rival Frank Frazetta, designing levels with Blizzard-league quality, and animating 3D characters of Pixar quality. Even if you contract out help to do some of these things, you are still going to have to gain some minimal levels of understanding, because you are ultimately the place where the buck stops.  Hey, I worked on the port of a pro-wrestling game for the Sega Dreamcast back in the day, and had to learn way more about professional wrestling than I ever wanted to know. If I could do that, then you can learn a little bit of scripting or color theory.

#8 – You only want to hear compliments for your efforts.

If this is the case, your target audience is your mom. Because unless people just ignore your game entirely, you will get criticism. A lot of it will be constructive and useful, if damaging to your pride. But some of it will be amazingly venomous anonymous hit-and-run spewage that wishes death upon you for daring to foist a game upon them that cost them nothing but time, but somehow they want those three minutes extracted back out of you through your fingernails, and they will continue to berate you for your stupidity. ‘Cause, you know, they are like you were back in reason #5, having not been corrupted by actual game development themselves, and they can tell you in great detail everything you did wrong. And they will tell everyone else who listen, too, attempting to provide as much public humiliation as they can generate to punish you for the sin of trying to make something of value to other people.

#9 – You really want to work for a giant studio working soul-sucking hours on uninspired clones and sequels of mega-hits.

Maybe the above article link actually sounded like heaven to you. I think once upon a time some aspects of it might have appealed to me, too. I’m an indie, so I obviously have some kind of masochistic streak, which might explain that reaction when I was young and stupid. But uh… yeah. ‘Nuff said. It used to be that I’d recommend working for a big studio for how much you could learn there, and it’s still not terrible advice. But times have changed and things have gotten so big and specialized, it’s a lot less true than it was when I got my start. But I admit, there’s still some appeal to having your name in the credits of a blockbuster best-selling game, even if it is only as the guy who created all the bathroom fixture models (with exploding toilets!).

#10 – You don’t want to experience the joy of creating something cool for others to enjoy.

The total kick in the pants for me in game development is seeing people enjoying your game, and talking about your virtual world. Strangers emailing you to thank you for your efforts, and to tell you about their experiences playing you game. Knowing that what you have shared with others has brought them some entertainment, joy, inspiration,or provoked thought. Connecting with an audience, no matter how small. There’s nothing quite like it in the world.  Maybe if you are cut from the same cloth as J. D. Sallinger, you’ll have an allergic reaction to this. But I have trouble imagining it.  Games are meant to be played, and I love being able to provide that for others. Maybe it doesn’t cure cancer or anything, but making somebody smile and giving them some happiness and fun for a few minutes or hours is what it’s all about.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 18 Comments to Read

Out of Alignment

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 17, 2011

A lot of hate has been directed at the D&D alignment system since… well, since the beginning. The two-axis graph mapping someone’s personality with respect to good vs. evil and law vs. chaos has been a source of confusion, concern, and venom for over three decades now.

Personally, I think part of it is because some people get mad because they find their own personality traits described as “evil.” 🙂

(And I’m only mostly joking on that. While they are thankfully not the norm, I’ve met a few gamers in my time – especially back in the high school days – with a lack of social skills or empathy that bordered on sociopathy.)

Any system that you use to try and categorize behavior is going to have some broad flaws, tons of corner-cases, and outright exceptions. People are just not that easy to lump into boxes. They are wonderfully, quirkily complex. Almost nobody fits perfectly in a single category: Chaotic good, conservative, liberal, “blue,” INTP, “Type A,” Socializer, Achiever, etc.  Sometimes people will deliberately modify their behavior to “fit in” with a particular label that they prefer, and tend to project a black-and-white strict categorization upon others, but I think most people have some sort of a blend of most if not all aspects of any categorization in their personality.

Yes, even Chaotic Evil. I’m not sure it’s possible to drive in traffic without feeling a hint of temptation for what you’d do if you could use the dark side of the force.

Me, I always liked the alignment system in D&D. I felt it provided as adequate a framework as any, if treated in a flexible manner. And even in high school, I enjoyed playing with (and twisting) the stereotypes. While I admit I showed a bit more favoritism towards “Good,” I was fascinated by some of the source materials that described NPCs and communities as being evil which were not listed as antagonists. What did this mean? How did this work? If anything, these little ideas helped encourage me to flesh out more interesting characters in my adventures.

How does a “chaotic evil” community work? If you read some of the stories of some of the towns in the “Wild West” of U.S. history in the late 1800s, you may get an idea. They weren’t necessarily a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” like Moss Eisley Spaceport, and they weren’t necessarily even “lawless.” But the law and legal proceedings could be capricious, and fear of consequences only barely kept the baser of human instincts in check… and often not even then. While most members of the community might not be evil and might be quite law-abiding, the nastier elements had control over the local culture, if not political power. Chaotic Evil? I don’t know if you’d call them that, but it wouldn’t take much to tweak that model for fictional purposes.

So I had fun with the alignment system. Sure, I had plenty of evil villains who fit the evil villain stereotype. But I also had the players a little dumbfounded when they discovered that the funny, fun-to-be-around NPC was really pretty dang Chaotic Evil. If you were on his good side – easy enough to do – he was great to be around. But he thought nothing of doing terrible things to those on his bad side.

And lawful evil – that’s plenty of fun to play with as well. Like the pretty-boy “dark lord” who was polite and soft-spoken, had plans and dreams that could actually be somewhat tempting to anyone, but who adhered to a philosophy that the ends justified the means, and his ends weren’t particularly altruistic and virtuous in the first place. This didn’t make the players hesitate for a second (to my recollection) trying to defeat him, as he was still quite clearly The Big Bad, but putting a human (and almost likeable) face on the Foozle made for a much more interesting story.

Likewise, the paladin who is clearly not “lawful stupid” nor blind to reality, who does his best (but occasional fails) to adhere to a higher law out of principle even though he knows the short-term consequences may not be favorable (or even unjust) can be a fascinating character.

Anyway, the point is – I always considered the D&D alignment system to be a valuable tool, while I guess some folks saw it more as a straitjacket.  As a DM, I’ve always been pretty flexible with letting players play their own interpretation of alignment, only rarely stepping in to warn about serious deviations. And even that is more often a call for the player to roleplay an appropriate justification.

But does this apply to computer games? Particularly single-player RPGs – is it of any value to designate a player-character’s personality along an alignment system? Does it work at all?

I think it can. I’m just not fond of how it’s usually implemented. The Bioware approach doesn’t appeal to me very much, where a few actions get ‘flagged’ as being automatically good or evil (or lawful vs. chaotic) and sliding your character’s path in that direction. I’m not sure what’s more annoying – getting dinged evil for doing something that (from my vantage point) seemed perfectly justifiable if you have a slightly different interpretation of the events than the scenario designer, or NOT getting awarded appropriate “points” for going out of your way to do something heroically (or anti-heroically) good / evil. The arbitrariness of both the timing and type of reward gets frustrating.

In Ultima IV, however, I thought it worked well.  Far from perfect, but well enough. In that game the awards were pretty consistent for common actions, and there was generally an understanding (if you checked with Hawkmoon often enough, but certainly implied from the initial character generation questions) that most actions had a give-and-take among the virtues. There was rarely (if ever?) a single “virtuous” path versus a “non-virtuous” path.  It was predictable, controllable, and the power was in the hands of the player to strike the right balance or decide where to focus their efforts. While still obviously mechanical (and felt incorrect in some spots), it seemed to represent the nuances of the real world better than some of the more recent efforts.

So is there still a place for alignment (or something like it) in single-player RPGs? I think so. If done right, I think it could provide a much richer game experience.  But handled poorly, or as an afterthought, it still sucks.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Modern Game Journalism: The Movie (Trailer)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 16, 2011

Mega64 is at it again. Here’s the trailer to the movie you hope you will never see…

Modern Game Journalism: The Movie – The Trailer

 

It’s funny ‘cuz it’s true… painfully, painfully true. Sometimes Mega64 is just annoying, but this one cracked me up for some reason.

The subject of “game reviews” has been argued across the Internet so many times and with such vehemence by now it’s almost a joke all by itself. The bottom line is that any process that can be gamed (and that’s about all of ’em) WILL be gamed. Given sufficient motivation, people will game the process until it is completely useless and destructive to its intended purpose.

 

 

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Joust A Minute!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 15, 2011

The National Geographic Channel (for those who have it) is running a reality mini-series about real jousting that premiers tonight:

National Geographic: The Knights of Mayhem

Okay. I love watching the real jousts. They’ve had them here in Utah for several years now at a couple of different medieval / renaissance festivals. Over the summer, I watched one as it was being taped by National Geographic. It was definitely the most action-packed joust I’ve seen – they were obviously pushing themselves for the camera.

I didn’t know they were turning it into a reality series. While the jousting is a lot of fun, the reality series angle could get a little scary. Or more entertaining, depending on your perspective.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Show Me The Sales!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Show Me the Games is having a special promotion for the next two weeks. Planet Stronghold, Magical Diary: Horse Hall, Frozen Synapse, Gratuitous Space Battles, Scoregasm, Evochron: Mercenary, and other great indie games are steeply discounted for the next couple of weeks. And yes, even Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon has a discount. It’s a newer game than most of the others, so it’s not that steep of a discount.  These aren’t a limited supply of discount codes being given out – this is a plain ol’ temporary promotion for the next two weeks.

You can check ’em all out at http://showmethegames.com/sales.php

Or you can pick up Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon at a 15% discount just by using the discount code “SHOWGAMES” at the purchase screen. ‘Cuz that’s what you were really after, right? Still, this is a great opportunity to load up on some great games. And yes, many of them are NOT and will never be on Steam!

Now, what’s cool with Show Me the Games is that it is a non-profit portal (like the currently-in-beta Indievania)… it simply links directly to the developers’ sales pages.  The developers combine forces for promotional purposes and so forth. But if you buy from SMTG, you are cutting out any sort of publishing / distributing middleman (unless you count payment processors like BMT Micro, which I don’t.)

Filed Under: Deals, Frayed Knights - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Might & Magic VI Retrospective at Matt Chat

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 14, 2011

I was a latecomer to Might & Magic VI. Yes, sad to say, but it’s true.  Although it’s not that sad. Discovering these older gems years later is like finding an antique that was gathering dust in your attic that you later discover is worth tens of thousands of dollars to collectors.  The only big problem with the game is the Doom-style 3D engine, which causes me a headache if I play it too long in a single session.

Matt Barton takes some time to play through the first bit of the game and comment on what makes it so dang awesome.

He also mentions the interview coming up next week, which I’m looking forward to with a measure of enthusiasm and dread.

As always, if you enjoy his interviews and commentaries, consider sending him a tip. Or using his affiliate link for GOG.COM (I should get one of those myself, I recommend them enough!).

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Neuromancer – The Movie?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 11, 2011

I discovered the novel Neuromancer just shortly after the 80’s had faded. Then I discovered the (by then, old) adventure / RPG based on the book, which was somewhat surprisingly quite good in spite of failing to capture anything close to the tone of the novel. For those who haven’t played the game or read the novel – the novel is dark, somewhat gritty science fiction that created the sadly short-lived “cyberpunk” genre. The game was a pretty humorous take on the source material.

But almost as exciting as the game was the note in the manual that Neuromancer was soon to be a motion picture from “Cabana Boy Productions.” That was in 1989 or so when the game was published, a couple of years before I picked up the game, so while I hoped it would be true, I wasn’t exactly holding my breath.

I got excited when I heard that William Gibson’s short story, Johnny Mnemonic, which takes place in the same world (a couple of years earlier) was made for the big screen. I always thought (and still do) that this short story would make a killer movie. And if it did well, then Neuromancer couldn’t be far behind. Unfortunately, they did a terrible job of it, and the movie sucked, and probably did poorly in the box office.

When the movie, The Matrix hit the silver screen and made a bundle and stole the thunder from a new Star Wars movie in 1999 (and even starred Keanu Reeves, who’d also starred in Johnny Mnemonic), I thought, “Hey, The Matrix was obviously heavily inspired by Neuromancer. Maybe this will pave the way for someone to finally make that movie!”

It’s been twelve years, so I’d kinda given up on that hope.

But… maybe… just maybe… it’s finally gonna happen. As in, they’ve been in pre-production since May, though it sounds like they are still working out the kinks, funding, etc.  My take on this is hopeful, but I’m still not holding my breath.

Science Fiction World’s Neuromancer update from earlier this year.

Bruce Willis to be in Neuromancer?

I could see Bruce Willis as Armitage, but definitely not starring as Case.

So could Neuromancer work today, now that it will seem like it’s merely imitating films that beat it to market but in reality heavily borrowed from the original book?

I think so. I think that an adaptation to film shouldn’t be a literal retelling of the book’s story… almost no book-to-screen adaptations can survive that port without some significant changes. But I think the story remains pretty solid and could be a lot of fun. I just pray that they do a better job than they did with Johnny Mnemonic.

I expect that if they do, and it does well, we’ll see another Neuromancer game.  And I expect that it will be more true-to-style to the movie than the first game. I also expect it to suck compared to the original. But that’s just my youthful optimism speaking.

Filed Under: Books, Movies - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Indie CRPG News: Sword and Telepath Drox Servants of an Underworld Golden Operative

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 10, 2011

Okay, I’ve been working 12-15 hour days at The Day Job this week, so pardon me if I’m getting a little punchy and goofy on the article titles.

First off, the demo / preview of Telepath RPG: Servants of God has been updated. And it’s still available for pre-order with beta access. The new version has a bunch o’ new features and a lot fewer bugs.

Steven Peeler has some additional information about his upcoming RPG, Drox Operative. The latest updates discuss crew considerations and more on ship components.

Sword & Sorcery: Underworld Gold continues it’s massive overhaul. Now there’s a video. I try not to be a graphics snob (those who live in glass houses and all that), but dang if the new version doesn’t look much more inviting…

Great stuff!

I just need time to play! When hell week is done, I’m sorry Bethesda, but as much as I want to play Skyrim I think I’m going to be playing some Telepath RPG and doing work on Frayed Knights (both on an update to the original, and for the sequel). I’ll get around to Skyrim eventually.

Filed Under: News - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Adventure has Ever Been With Us…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 9, 2011

Okay, more of an open-mic kinda thing here, but I thought I’d ask some questions today, if ya’ll don’t mind.

#1 – Do you play modern adventure games (graphic adventure games or Interactive Fiction) today? For example,  the Blackwell series, Gemini Rue, the Sherlock Holmes series, Scratches, Blue Lacuna, Telltale Games’ titles (Monkey Island, Back to the Future, Sam & Max, etc.)?

#2 – Did you play (and enjoy) adventure games  in the past, during their PC hayday (pretty much up until the late 90’s)?

If you do play the newer adventure games, what attracts you to them? Why do you enjoy them?

If you used to play them but now do not, why not? Have you tried and they failed to excite you anymore? Was it the games that changed, or was it you?

If you have never played them (or tried playing but never liked them), why not?

As for myself, I *do* play some modern adventure games, although they don’t thrill me as much as they used to.  I think I *want* to like them a lot more than I do. I have enjoyed some of the Telltale games tremendously, but I play for the humor and story more than the puzzles.  And the puzzles in Telltale’s games are pretty easy. Maybe I just like solving easy puzzles.  I like the mild dopamine buzz or whatever that comes with problem-solving, but I’m too lazy to put much effort into it. 🙂  I dunno.

I don’t know that I’ve personally changed all that much – there are several adventure games from the 90’s that I never got too far in, too. Most of the ones I completed and loved the heck out of were always the ones with the strong (and usually humorous) story but not particularly difficult (IMO)… the Monkey Island games, Loom (that one was *too* easy, we finished it in about one night),  Grim Fandango, Neuromancer (unless you consider it an RPG – it was kind of a hybrid), Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, Eric the Unready, the Tex Murphy games, etc. There are outliers, like Phantasmagoria (I didn’t consider the story in that one to be very compelling), Zork, and a couple other text adventures I’m not sure I remember the names of.

So I guess for me… I’m a sucker for a good story and easy, maybe. I’m one of the lowest-common-denominator-types, I guess.

Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: 18 Comments to Read

The Problem with Programmer Graphics…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 8, 2011

I saw this on my calendar the other day. I can relate.

For many (most? all?) people, failing to obtain a minimum threshold of quality – or even failing to match the particular style they prefer – causes this sort of reaction. They’ll never look past the graphics to see the game underneath. Actually, that’s true of awesome graphics, too. Sometimes they are used to disguise the fact that the publisher is selling the same game they’ve been selling to customers for years.

The big-budget approach is to just make the most mind-blowingly awesome visuals possible, throwing time and money at it so that it will appeal to almost everybody. And you have to admit, it’s working. Games are mainstream now in a way that they could never be in the 8-bit era, and a big part of it is the more realistic (or at least more appealing and… comprehensive?) graphics. But for indies with shoestring budgets and tight schedules, it’s not quite so easy. And some people will be turned off no matter what you do. And I think a lot of it is just whatever you are used to.

Me? I grew up in an era where those of us who played games had no problem looking at a collection of a few dozen pixels that resembled nothing so much as a bipedal duck and letting our imagination see a dragon. I don’t know if I could do that today, though. But maybe I can. After all, I’ve played my fair share of Minecraft and VVVVVV…  And I don’t have much problem with other the “8-bit” style some indie games have adopted. There’s a difference between quality and pixel resolution.

Maybe it just means my standards are too low (though even I have my limits), but I’m pretty happy with being able to do that.

Filed Under: Art - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

A Game In 0 Hours…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 7, 2011

I tried. I didn’t quite succeed. But I did come out with a game I consider somewhat fun with a little extra work.

I participated in the 0-hour game jam. The idea was to make a game in the hour that exists before Daylight Savings Time turns the clock back… that missing hour between 2 AM and 2 AM. As usually happens, I misjudged the amount of time it would take by a significant fashion. In fact, after just over two hours, I finally had something remotely approaching “playable” but not much fun…

Slings and Arrows, 2-hour prototype

What was I trying to make? Well, the next day I couldn’t help myself. I had to keep tweaking it and getting it closer to my final vision. Here is the semi-final result with a few extra hours of effort. It still needs sounds, special effects, and probably some kind of UI command to restart the game instead of just refreshing the page. But it’s a lot closer to what I INTENDED to build during the 0-hour game jam:

Slings and Arrows, version 0.9

I haven’t been able to get past level 10.

As for the final gameplay prototype (the second link), I’m pretty happy with it. I like how in the beginning of the game it’s really pretty mechanical: You deflect the rocks and dynamite, and dodge the arrows. Easy. But then later in the game, you have to make some decisions at high-speed. Something may get through, so you either have to “super-spin” or pick something to go through, and you usually don’t want it to be the dynamite. You may not be able to dodge the arrows, especially if they are heading towards an unprotected side of the fort, so you will have to suck up the penalty. I confess I can’t see what I’d do with this thing to make it anything resembling a commercial product, but for such a quick-and-dirty prototype I think it’s pretty fun.

As far as the experience:  I spent too long on the art assets – believe it or not, those crappy little projectile sprites took me about 5 minutes each, which is about 3 minutes too long on each one. When working under a 60-minute time limit, that crap really counts! I’m still learning Unity, so that probably slowed me down a little, too. But probably only by about 20% or so. Really, my scope was, once again, too frickin’ large.

The whole point of these kinds of game jams is, in my mind, sort of like a training exercise. It’s like playing your scales. You can put your skills to the test, evaluate how you perform under pressure, hopefully learn a bit, and try out some new ideas or get some practice working with a particular engine / API.  Or all of the above.

Filed Under: Free Games, Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

This Is What Indie Gaming Is About…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 4, 2011

I discovered two new indie games this last week or so that I’ve been absolutely delighted with. Nimbus, a gliding platform / puzzle game by Noumenon Games, and Inside a Star-Filled Sky, a nicely mind-blowing procedurally-generated “recursive” shooter by Jason Rohrer.

http://blog.noumenongames.com/?cat=3
http://insideastarfilledsky.net/

Neither are the kinds of games I normally gravitate towards. And they may not be your “thing,” either. But they have been excellent and a lot of fun for me. These are the games that remind me why I love indie games. As long as we have people making these kinds of games (and, of course, those indie RPGs I am so fond of…), I’m not going to worry too much about our hobby. The AAA side of the fence can keep making its endless clones of third-person shooters and sandbox gangster games and the latest tweaks on the sports franchises. I don’t care — I might play one once in a while.

But if you need me, I’ll be playing these quirky, beautiful little indie games.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Indie Competition, or Indie … Sabotage?!?!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 3, 2011

One of the awesome things about being an indie today (as opposed to, say, six or seven years ago) is the number of game-making competitions out there.  Now I still consider the single biggest and best competition out there to be the marketplace, which has always been there (and is better than ever for small developers). But I do love the idea of game-making competitions, an idea was almost unheard of a few years ago. The IGF was the only one I knew of, and it was kind of a new, weird thing that got little respect (even from me, ’cause I was a dope back then. Well, more of a dope than I am now.)

Now we have lots of competitions – some for little more than bragging rights, some that are more of a “game jam” than a competition, and some that could lead to potentially lucrative publishing deals. All of these can be pretty cool. But then we’ve also got some that may or may not be in every indie’s best interest to enter, and I’m not just talking about the waste of an entry fee.

The case in point may be Activision’s indie contest, which we’ve discussed before. I don’t know if the admiral’s warning here is appropriate, but a law student examining the rules / contract for Activision’s Independent Developer’s Contest at Do It Yourself Games suggests this may be a concern…

When Winning is Losing: How Activision’s Indie Games Competition Tricks Devs

I’d say take this analysis with a grain of salt, but be aware of the potential for trouble.  And use this to get an idea of the focus of the competition. It’s very, very different from something like IndieCade or the IGF, which really focus on the indie scene and promoting the works of independent developers. The Activision contest, to me, seems to be more of an effort to foster a relationship with small developers with potential. It’s not a place to submit completed or near-completed games. It’s for a game that you might develop a design and prototype for specifically for this contest, perhaps with an eye towards becoming a guns-for-hire “microstudio” often working for Activision in the future. If that vision works for you, awesome! This contest may be perfect for you.

Just take a careful look at the restrictions of a contest before you enter. I don’t think paranoia will do you any good, but a healthy suspicion is often in order.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment

Hardware Woes and Evolution

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

My secondary hard drive has been showing symptoms of failure for the last several days – freezing up for several seconds while reading or writing data. It hasn’t returned any corrupted data on a read yet, though one game did end up with a corrupted save after it took three whole minutes to complete the operation. Ugh. It’s made things a little tricky on my end – I’d hoped to get a couple of things done this week that have not happened as a result. I apologize. Fortunately, the replacement drive arrived and with luck I should be back to full operational capacity tonight.

I don’t know if it’s amusing or just sad how much my life and behavior revolve around my computer. But as that’s my profession, hobby, and primary source of entertainment, it’s to be expected. But when the system is malfunctioning, while there are alternatives, it really causes problems.

But on the flip side – the new hard drive is 2 terabytes. Which is kinda middle-of-the-road ho-hum storage today, with a pricetag well under $200. I remember back in 1988 or thereabouts  when my mother (a sales rep for DEC at the time, IIRC) was working on a contract for I think it was the USGS for a data storage solution that involved something like 3 tB. It was a multi-million-dollar contract for what basically amounted to a system of hard drives. I was boggled by the concept of a terabyte of storage — the hard drives of that time period were something on the order of 10 megs on the average, and not yet standard equipment for a PC.

I guess in ten years we’ll be casually sticking multi-petabyte hard drives in our machines. But will games then be taking up multiple tBs of hard drive space?

 

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



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