Ron Gilbert Back Into Making Graphic Adventure Games
You know, I really didn't have much reason to be interested in the upcoming Penny Arcade game, except for the fact that it's being developed in Torque (my game engine of choice). But now I learn that they've managed to get Ron "Monkey Island" Gilbert involved! And it'll be episodic!

"Gabe" (Mike Krahulic) said today:

We had our first meeting with Ron pretty early in the design process. Tycho and I were getting the story fleshed out and we had some ideas about the design and over all pace of the game. We laid it all out for Ron and then he picked up a whiteboard marker and started teaching class. I’m not sure how many people can say they got a game design 101 course taught by Ron Gilbert, but that’s exactly what Tycho and I got that day. His insights into the way you move the player through an interactive story so that they get to explore the world but don’t loose the narrative were incredible. He was drawing diagrams and helping us really visualize the game in a way that had never even occurred to us. We’re ridiculously lucky to have him on board and helping us with On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One.

I like Penny Arcade, though the humor gets a little crude for my tastes at times. But with Ron associated with it, I'm gonna have to at least give it a try. Graphic Adventure Gaming may be coming back home at last....

Hothead hasn't announced a publisher. They are a self-owned company in British Columbia focusing on (according to their website) "unique, addictive titles specifically targeted to underserved markets." Does this sound indie to you? It kinda does to me, too. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Either way, coolness.

Forums. Because They Are There.

Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 AM (Permalink) links to this post   

 
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened First Impressions
I discovered the roleplaying game "Call of Cthulhu" back in the early 80's, when it was one of the first major horror-themed dice-and-paper roleplaying games (if not the first). It was principally written by Sandy Peterson, who later went on to do computer games like Doom, Quake, and Age of Empires. I'd always hoped he'd do a Cthulhu-based computer game, but so far... no dice, though there have been a couple of games since then that have been inspired by Lovecraft's stories. Because of the game, I discovered Lovecraft's horror stories, which generally involved a very smart (or at least competent) protagonist discovering to their horror the truth about the dark things that go bump in the night, and end up somewhat insane at the end of the story.

I'm a more recent convert to the stories of Sherlock Holmes, having recently read The Hound of the Baskervilles and finding it to be way, way better than I'd imagined (and better than I'd remembered some of the Sherlock Holmes short stories I'd read many years ago).

And now, there's a game that combines the two. Tuesday night, I bought Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, a 3D adventure game that pits Sherlock Holmes against Cthulhu. Literally, though probably not directly. I am not kidding, and it is actually pretty cool so far. And if the game DOES end up in a one-on-one cage match between Holmes and Cthulhu, I'm sorry Sherlock, but my money is on the Great Old One.

Now, first things first. Some Bad. The game is something like 2 gigs in size, which is a monstrous download. And I didn't see an option to order a CD-ROM / DVD-ROM version here in the U.S., though I'm not sure its unavailable. But that was an all-night download. Not a big deal, but if you don't have broadband, you better hook up with a friend with broadband and a CD-ROM Burner or you aren't going to be the least bit happy.

Speaking of CD-ROM Burners... I hope you can get them to work. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened uses a protection scheme by StarForce. Yeah, those crazy Russians who think crippling your machine is their right by virtue of you paying money to one of their clients. Oh, and who also think that they have the right to support pirates of your game if you choose NOT to lock down your game with their software.

I have no idea why Starforce drivers have to be installed when the game doesn't even ship on DVD-ROM (Though, at least they do provide a URL where you can go to download the uninstaller. Gee, how thoughtful... Too bad they weren't thoughtful enough to INCLUDE IT WITH THE INSTALLATION. ) Anyway - if I'd known StarForce "protection" (which somehow in my mind equates to paying the mafia for "protection") was on the game, I'd probably have reconsidered my purchase decision. But now I can warn you.

Maybe this was actually a clever plan by Frogames, the developer, to get you into the mood to play a game about horror and psychotic cultists. Installing those drivers certainly made me feel horrified and vulnerable. But if that doesn't bug you enough to scare you away (and there are plenty of people out there for whom that would be enough), then here's a quick dump of the first half-hour or so of playing the game.

The game opens with Watson in his bed (without covers - no wonder he's got a sleep disorder) having nightmares about cults and monstrous horrors. Obviously, the dude has been through some rough stuff and has lost a few sanity points dealing with Cthulhu Mythos. Those of us who have played the Call of Cthulhu RPG know what's going on here. Anyway, he wakes up, and then you hear his mental dialog about how this all began.

Flashback to two years earlier. The camera runs along the cobblestoned streets of London as opening credits fade in and out. The sign "Baker Street" is clearly visible, and the camera moves to a door with the famous address, "221b". The camera moves up and zooms on the world-famous detective, gazing out the window.

A cutscene follows, with Sherlock expressing a peevishness at not having any cases to be found that challenge him. Watson assures him one will turn up, and suggests he takes an evening stroll to the local bookstore. And then the game begins (or is it, "The game is afoot?")

The game is played in the first-person perspective, with you as Sherlock Holmes. At least so far. Maybe you get to play as Watson (or --- wouldn't this be cool --- CTHULHU! Now there's an idea I'd happily pay $30 for...) later in the game. But thus far, it's kind of an FPS game (First Person Sleuthing). Interesting things start to happen very shortly, as a man's dissapearance reveals some strange and disturbing hints that something a little more disturbing than a phantom hound is may be involved in this disappearance and several other related missing persons cases.

I'm hardly a scholar on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work, but so far the dialog in in the game seems to be pretty close to what I'd expect in a Sherlock Holmes story. The voice acting can be somewhat painful at times, but at least the voice of Sherlock Holmes is pretty competent.

The 3D graphics aren't close to cutting edge, but they are nice, relatively sharp, and very *useable* in a game where much of the gameplay revolves around you being able to spot anomalies as clues. The 3D representation of London is very attractive, I should add, if sparsely populated (a good thing, if unrealistic - I can't imagine trying to sort through a bustle of people trying to find the people I am supposed to talk to).

Gameplay-wise, there is some funkiness with getting stuck on collision volumes. And like many other adventure games I remember from back when they were popular, you do get into certain situations where you are trying to guess what else you need to do so the game will let you progress. When I quit my first session last night, it was after I had obtained several clues, including two that needed to be inspected under a microscope. But the game wouldn't let me return to 221b Baker Street because I hadn't gathered enough evidence yet. Nor would it let me follow some footprints through a gate because I had "no reason to go there." Apparently Sherlock is a bit more methodical than myself, and can't jump to any conclusion like, "Hmmm... footprints.... through a gate. I wonder if I should follow them through that gate?"

Ah, well. Maybe Sherlock knows something I don't know.

It's not a high-budget, "AAA" game by any stretch. Fortunately, I'm not a AAA snob. Assuming I can figure out what Sherlock's hang-up is, I'm liking the game so far. There's detail where it's important, particularly in the clues, reports, and documents that Holmes acquires during the course of the game.

And - though it's only been hinted at so far - it's about FREAKING CTHULHU!!!!! Cthulhu by gaslight, baby! Lovecraftian horror! Even if there's not a single supernatural event that takes place during the entire mystery - it's all death-cultists and superstition and bizarre rites without any evidence of the existance of the tentacle-faced god who's gonna devour the Earth for breakfast once he's finished sleeping in - it's just too cool of a concept not to enjoy.

Anyway, I'll report back on it once I've had more time to sink my teeth into it. I confess, part of the thrill I'm getting from the game (warts and all) comes just from playing an adventure game again. Those have been in short supply of late (well, except by some indies, who apparently have been cranking out text adventures at a rate that Infocom and Scott Adams in their hayday couldn't imagine).


(Vaguely) related half-heard, half-imagined memories of insane mutterings of a disturbing nature overheard in the darkness that seemed to throb with the pulse of evil:
* The Top Ten Graphic Adventures of All Time
* Sherlock Holmes Investigates Cthulhu
* Indie Interview With Mike Rubin
* A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different


Read Or Post Comments on the Forums

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:27 AM (Permalink) links to this post   

 
Mike Rubin On In-Game Cinematics, Indie Style
For those with a somewhat more technical bent (and any of us working with the Torque Game Engine, and anyone interested in what indies are doing in the "Adventure Game" genre), Mike Rubin has an outstanding article on the trials and tribulations of working on in-game cinematic sequences for his upcoming 3D Interactive Fiction title, Vespers 3D.

Every time I read about the progress on this game, I get more and more excited for the final result.

Anyway, I've shamelessly swiped a screenshot to lure you over to the article to check it out.

Vespers 3D: Adventures In Cinematics

Enjoy!


(Vaguely) related evidence that I should take a vow of silence:
* Indie Interview: Mike Rubin
* Vespers 3D Progress
* Utah Indie Developer Night Report: Winter 2007


READ OR POST COMMENTS ON THE FORUM

Labels: Adventure Games, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:50 AM (Permalink) links to this post   

 
The Top Ten Graphic Adventures of All Time
According to IGN, in ascending order, these are the top ten graphic adventure games of all time.

#10: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
#9: Myst
#8: Police Quest II: The Vengeance
#7: Shadowgate
#6: Sam & Max Hit the Road
#5: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
#4: King's Quest V: Absense Makes The Heart Go Yonder
#3: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
#2: The Longest Journey
#1: Grim Fandango

Aw, man. This makes me nostalgic for the early 90's. When Sierra was king of the hill, mainly for their adventure games, and LucasArts wasn't far behind.

Do I have a problem with this list? Hey, these lists are supposed to foster debate and discussion, right? And yeah. I do. Kinda. I can't believe the first Gabriel Knight game isn't on there somewhere. Since I never played Shadowgate, I don't care if that one gets bumped... :) I would also expect to see the first Alone in the Dark game to be on the list somewhere. Maybe it had too many action elements to be considered part of this august group for purists, but it was an adventure game. And it did have graphics!

And, I'm now sad to say, I never played the Longest Journey. I'm amazed it's in the second-place slot. In my heart, Monkey Island 2 is the second best graphic adventure game of all time.

Grim Fandango - I agree wholeheartedly with it being #1. This game just worked on so many levels. It was just amazing. For such weird characters (they were almost all skeletons), I sure found myself caring about them and their story. Alas, this game doesn't agree too well with modern operating systems, so few people can appreciate it now.

Check out the full article HERE.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post   

 
Adventure Gaming Alive and Well?
GamaSutra has a fascinating interview with Emily Short, author of the acclaimed adventure game... er, Interactive Fiction, Savoir-Faire, as well as MANY OTHER titles.

What's remarkable is that while the text-adventure may no longer be a (very) commercially viable option (according to the article, Ms. Short did get a commission to write the game, "City of Secrets" by a band), its really just as alive and kicking as ever. Maybe more so.

From a game development point of view, Ms. Short makes a very interesting comment about testing and debugging, and the improvement in practices and discipline as the IF community grows and matures:

"I also make heavier use of automated testing these days. The traditional attitude is that you should get a bunch of beta-testers to hammer on your game until it seems to be in good shape, then release it. You might keep one script around to play through your game and automatically make sure the winning end is reachable and produces a consistent transcript, but that's about all. This is changing -- recent development systems are designed more with debugging in mind, and lately there's more mention in the community of version control and regression testing. We haven't reached a point where there's any real sense of best practice about this kind of thing, but we're making progress on it, and the tools are improving."

Check out the interview here:
Inside Interactive Fiction: Interview With Emily Short

Besides the fact that this interview is appearing on a website geared towards mainstream game development, there's also the little issue of Sam & Max. GamaSutra also has the transcript of a recent podcast with Telltale Games co-founder Dan Conners. According to Conners,

"It's been a huge success for us. The team is happy on every level -- the level of quality of the product, the ability to deliver on the Sam & Max flavor has been great, and we're really happy with the response from the audience. We continue to have people get introduced to Sam & Max on a daily basis. There's always new fans coming over because the games are so accessible.

"GameTap's distribution has introduced us to a whole new level of people who are outside of the game world and might not have heard of Sam & Max before. We even saw a commercial for Sam & Max on The Colbert Report one night, so it's getting good exposure on that level. From a financial standpoint, it's definitely a profitable endeavor for us, and what more can you ask for than that, really?"

Fluke? A new golden age of graphic adventures following in the footsteps of Sam & Max? Something else entirely?

I don't know. I have been taken to task by Jana and other friends for not having downloaded and played all the available Sam & Max episodes yet. (It's on my list! Honest!!!!)

But I digress.

Check out the interview with Dan Conners here:
Q&A: Telltale's Connors On Episodic Gaming's Future

I don't know if it'll turn into a sustained trend or not (it sure seems to be the case with text-based IF). But it's nice to see that thanks to the indies, rumors of the death of entire game genres have been greatly exaggerated.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:59 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post   

 
Top 20 Freeware Adventure Games of 2006
Independent Gaming has a round-up of the Top 20 Freeware Adventure Games of 2006. For the puzzle-solving impaired, they have included a walkthrough for every game, as well.

Many of them look a fair sight better than many adventure games I played and enjoyed in the late 80's. I tried the Indiana Jones game briefly, and it seemed to retain the flavor of the old LucasArts SCUMM engine games, albeit a overly wordy in the intro. The Missing sounds really intriguing. Unfortunately, some of these games are just "works in progress" released as demos to the public. But free is a good price, and now I just have to find the time.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Adventure Game Revival on the Nintendo Wii?
Gamasutra has an interesting article by Scott Nixon about the possibility of reviving the Adventure Game genre by moving over to the consoles - specifically, the Nintendo Wii.

Would this work? Do gamers just need "more interaction" from the WiiMote controller to make adventure games exciting again?

I don't know. But the idea is at least intriguing. Check out the article and judge for yourself:

Bring Out Your Dead! Can Nintendo Breathe New Life Into Adventure Games?

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Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:51 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Vespers 3D Progress
Mike Rubin has written a great article on the current progress of Vespers 3D, the 3D Indie Interactive fiction game I interviewed him about last year. Even if you aren't a developer, you can get some insight into the challenges he's facing on the project with the parser, voice recording, and so forth.

Check out the article HERE.



(Vaguely) related blabbering:
* Mike Rubin interview part I
* Mike Rubin interview part II
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
* How Do I Get Past The Harpies?

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Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:14 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post   

 
How to Turn Façade Into An RPG
Scorpia took me to task on my little CRPG definition from last week, but the discussions we've had here and on her site and here, I'm feeling a bit more confident about my breakdown. Though Gegi also offered a really good suggestion (an addition) that you need some level of choice over your character's attributes or development of their attributes over time for it to count.

The point of my breakdown is that while things like combat systems, storyline, inventory systems, and so forth are all very important, they are NOT the defining attributes of RPGs. For story --- well, it's too fuzzy of a line to draw. Almost every game has a story, even if its just a simple one-line setup. There's definitely a qualitative difference between the story of, say, Empires and Dungeons, and Final Fantasy VII.

So as a fun design experiment, I thought about what it would take to turn a non-RPG into an RPG. Specifically, let's take one without combat of any kind and see how it might be done. As an amusing example, let's take the experimental indie game, or "interactive story", Façade. I consider it to be an adventure game, personally. A very unusual one. But that kind of gameplay. ("Action-adventure?" Since timing is important...)

So, in playing Façade, you start out by choosing a name, and then knocking on the door of some old college friends, Grace and Trip. You use typed text to hold a conversation with them, and you can also manipulate certain objects in the apartment. The game can branch many ways, but in general you discover that Grace and Trip are having marital problems. As an interested third-party, you influence them in several directions, or simply leave the status quo the way it is. And you can get thrown out of the apartment for being too rude (been there, done that!)

So lets see how to turn this into an RPG. I'm not saying this would make a good GAME, necessarily (I don't actually think Façade is that great of a game to begin with, but it's an interesting experiment).

Step 1: Identifying with the Avatar
We'll start with criterion #4 (and add Gegi's suggestion), and give you more customization of and identification with your avatar. You are already pretty much acting in the first-person perspective, which adds some identification, but the game really has you playing yourself. The person through who's eyes you see doesn't really have an identity. So let's fix that.

Lets say you have a choice of backgrounds and two attributes / characteristics. For backgrounds, maybe you can choose whether you were, at one point, closer friends with Grace, Trip, or neither. Perhaps you could also choose to be an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend of either one, depending on the gender you chose. Maybe we'll add a profession as well. So you could be John, the artist and old friend of Grace's, or Jane, a doctor and Trip's former girlfriend. Or lots of combinations in-between. You are now playing SOMEONE ELSE, not just yourself.

On top of that, let's give you a choice of traits. Let's stay away from numbers, necessarily. Let's say you get to pick one trait that descibes your character - or at least how you are perceived by others. Funny, Sincere, Serious, Impulsive, Smart, Rich, Persuasive, and Argumentative.

Step 2: Your Avatar's Attributes
Now, we've got some interesting customizations for your character in the last step. Now we need to address criteria 1 and 2: You avatar's attributes need to influence the game, and there needs to be some randomness.

I'm not familiar with the AI or the nuts and bolts of the rules of Façade. But let's make things easy and say that rather than your responses always influencing the AI of Grace and Trip by a specific amount, instead it's fuzzy. So if a particular comment would normally irritate Grace by 5 points, it instead becomes a range. +/- 50%, so it can be anywhere from 3 to 7 points.

Now we've laid the foundation for your character's attributes to have an affect on the game. First off, your choice of backgrounds may influence the reactions of Trip and Grace. If you were a closer friend of Trip's, then maybe your actions will have a stronger influence on Trip, and your actions may be met with some suspicion by Grace. And so forth.

Your professional skill might give your actions a bit more credability when the conversation moves around to those topics. For example, if you are a professional artist, then any time the conversation moves around to art, you might get a bonus to your credability and the "weight" of your comments. So instead of 3-7 points, maybe you get 4-8 points for how much your words influence the AI of either character in ANY direction.

Your chosen trait also plays a roll. If you chose "Persuasive," you get a bonus to the chance to steer a conversation in a particular direction. If you choose "Funny," you have a bonus to any attempt to "lighten" the mood. Serious has the opposite effect. Impulsive reduces how much Grace or Trip get offended by your actions, since they are used to you being that way. If you are rich, there are some very definite bonuses that can occur in certain parts of the conversation. And so forth.

Step 3: Avatar Growth
Okay. We're now left with the third criterion --- your Avatar's attributes / traits must have a strong correlation with the progress in the game.

So now, we take Façade 2 and Façade 3 --- the second and third acts of the story (maybe each act takes place in a future date) and combine them together into one giant game. Between each act, you get to "level up." You get to choose one additional trait. This isn't necessarily the acquisition of a new trait, so much as it is also the perception of this trait within you by the NPCs. If you choose the same trait a second or third time, then you get two or three times the bonuses. They shouldn't be contradictory. If you choose both serious and funny, for example, you might be able to influence the tone of the conversation in either direction.

I've Created A Monster!
So now, do we have Façade, the RPG?

Well, we've now probably multiplied the content requirements by about 6x. Not only did we triple it by adding a second and third act, but we also increased the complexity by requiring that Trip and Grace respond to your chosen background information. The fact that you were Grace's ex-boyfriend could come up more than once in a conversation. And to take advantage of those professional skills, we need to make sure that the player who chose to be a doctor will have a few chances to throw their medical credentials around. That's a lot of additional conversation to create and record! Not to mention test.

We've also greatly increased the complexity of the game engine, and the AI. Adding a bit of randomization shouldn't be too hard, but figuring out all the bonuses that could apply could be a little tricky. And then there's game balance issues! Does choosing "rich" or an artist background give you undue power in the game? (Since the game really doesn't have an "objective," then arguably it doesn't.)

But I'd argue that, should we take upon ourselves this foolish task, what we've ended up with at the end is an RPG - the genuine article. There's no fantasy, no combat, no inventory system, and the storyline is extremely open-ended and untraditional.

But yes, I'd argue that at this point, we have an RPG.


(Vaguely) related steaming piles of insight:
* Non-Combat RPG: A Fool's Errand?
* The Rules of Role-Playing Games
* RPG Conversation Redesign
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Labels: Adventure Games, Free Games, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Sherlock Holmes Investigates Cthulhu
Sherlock Holmes: I recently read "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and became a fan.

Cthulhu: I've been a fan for years.

Adventure Gaming: Decline, Shmeline. Looks like there are more than a few being produced, but they just aren't marketing with the big bucks anymore. I have loved 'em for many years.

Now, let's just COMBINE THEM ALL TOGETHER, now, shall we?!?!? By a company that apparently has a bit of clout, and has already done two other Sherlock Holmes games. Can't say I've played their other games, but now I may have to check 'em out.

Be sure and check out the trailer.

Apparently, it's already out in parts of Europe, and it is scheduled for UK and U.S. release around the end of February 2007. There's a German Demo (700 MB!) available already on Filefront. The gameplay is first-person perspective, but it switches to third person during cut-scenes. You alternate between playing Holmes and Watson.


Thanks to Raph for the tip!

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:35 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
The Worst Game Ever
So what was the worst video or computer game ever released? Man, the lists can be impressive. There's a lot of crap to choose from. I personally try to avoid games that I hear are truly bad, so I undoubtably have avoided some really spectacular failues. I have been rescued from pain by timely reviews or word-of-mouth.

So for me, it's going to have to be something personal. A game which, for whatever reason, spoke to me. By "speaking to me," I mean personally insulted me and all of my immediate kin, screaming profanity in my name. A game which not only sucked, but one which whispered promises of delights in my ear, but left me waking up in a bathtub of ice with my kidneys removed. A game with a name that inspires fear and anger as much as the name of a classic, beloved games fills me with nostalgic memories.

A game... like Trespasser. Yep, that's gotta be the one. For me, at least. Perhaps, this little venting of the spleen will allow me to let the healing start. Maybe.

The Hype
Trespasser was the "interactive sequel" to the second Jurassic Park movie. Which was pretty lame itself. It makes one wonder if Trespasser was Dreamwork's attempt to make the movie look good by showing how much worse it could have been. Oh, wait, they DID come out with Jurassic Park III, didn't they?

Okay. So the concept, design, and the previews made it sound awesome. You play a female character (oooh, progressive!) named Anne, voiced by none other than Minnie Driver. You crash-land on Isla Sorna, which is where the company InGen did it's primary Dinosaur R&D. Dinos have taken over the island, and you have to somehow survive and escape the island. And to make it more realistic, there was no HUD (Heads-up-display, gaming parlance taken from the miltary to refer to the stats and game information appearing on the screen that you shouldn't actually see). To see your health, you look down at your own cleavage, upon which is tatooed a heart which fades gradually as your health drops. Okay, so maybe the concept wasn't entirely without it's flaws.

The lead developer, Seamus Blackley, was an alumnus of Looking Glass Studio, and had previously worked on such System Shock, Flight Unlimited, and Terra Nova. His concept, as I understood it, was to combine realistic physics and AI to create a truly organic, open-ended adventure game. The dinosaurs would be driven by needs and primitive instincts, and the objects in the game would demonstrate real-world properties. So you could come up with your own clever solutions to manipulate the environment. This is a tall order, but considering his pedegree, I expected him to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but it should at least shake up the idea behind adventure gaming.

Oh, and while there would be firearms, it wouldn't be a shooter. Okay, good. It sounded like the ultimate action / adventure game to me. I was all ready to fall in love with it.

Now, I can be pretty forgiving of flaws or deficiencies in games. I mean, I'm a big fan of indie games, which do lack the production values and sheer sets of features of mainstream games. Not that those are really flaws, but I know many hardcore gamers have a tough time looking past things like a game with "only" 2D graphics, or, say, the lack of mouse support in Aveyond. I'm pretty lenient reviewer. I try to avoid judging a game by my expectations and comparisons to similar games (though that's impossible to do entirely), but instead focus on what it is, and what it is trying to achieve. This allows me to compare, say, Oblivion with the far-more-primitive Ultima IV. Maybe it's a flaw as a game designer. But I like to approach every game with as much of an open mind as I can.

I actually got Trespasser the day AFTER it appeared on the shelves. I was too busy at work on the day it was released, but some friends at the office (who actually had the luxury of being able to go HOME that night) picked it up with high expectations. The next day, they came to work with tales of woe, and how horrible the game was.

I protested, knowing that my coworkers were hardcore FPS fans. "You don't understand, it's a different kind of game," I insisted. "It's an adventure game, not a shooter."

"We know that," they insisted. "That's why we got it. You just have to play it. You'll see."

So I did. I bought Trespasser that afternoon, and took it home with optimism tempered by my coworkers' dire warnings. I reduced my expectations, realizing that the game was certainly going to have its flaws. But that was okay. The only thing that mattered was if the game was FUN.

The Truth Is In There
So the game started. Richard Attenborough's familiar voice explained the situation as a reading of his memoirs, and the initial setup was awesome. Washed up on a beach, an abandoned lab building or something up the hill, and all was quiet. Just like a good horror movie.

And just like a horror movie, the true horror gradually showed itself.

First off, there was the wonderful waldo-simulator that was the principle game interface. Apparenly, Anne of the Tattooed Cleavage was some kind of mutant with one very very funky arm. Controlling this arm was an exercise in frustration. Doing it successfully required the level of control necessary to consistently succeed at a claw vending machine. I saw two teenaged girls who could do that once. They pulled a plush animal out of the machine with every coin. After that, they took requests from my daughters for any plush toy near the top of the stack. I imagine they would have done pretty well at the interface to Trespasser. But they would have quit in disgust from all the other bugs.

For one thing, this mutant arm would get stuck on things. I would walk through a door, unaware that somehow my hand had gotten stuck on the door frame. I wouldn't notice this until I had walked about fifty feet, and find out I couldn't use the complicated waldo-controls to bring my arm in front of me to pick up an interesting stick. Then I'd turn around and discover that my arm had stretched out behind me the entire fifty feet. Yes, Reed Richards or Elastigirl would be proud of Anne. But unfortunately, too often I couldn't just jiggle the waldo-controls to free her hand. Instead, I'd have to WALK back to the other side of the door to retrieve my own hand.

Then there was the physics simulations. Physics in the world of Trespasser was pretty different from physics of the real world. For one thing, there was no friction in this world. Energy didn't get converted / absorbed on collisions. No. No, what would happen would be that you'd put your pistol down gently on a slight incline so you could try to stack boxes (since you had only one "inventory" slot). The pistol on this ten-degree slope would then proceed to ROLL down the slope. Not just slide, no. ROLL. End-over-end. In slow-motion. So you'd do a little stacking, trying to prevent the boxes from sliding off of each other, stop, grab your slowly rolling pistol so it didn't drop down to where the Velociraptors were hanging out, move it back up next to you, and go back to stacking boxes that refused to actually stack while keeping track of your pistol rolling at a speed of about six feet per minute.

The end result was that you were constantly juggling objects in the world that utterly refused to stand still.

Still, I persevered. I mean, this was a whole New Concept for a game, right? Surely there'd be a glitch or two. But like an uncut diamond, there was sure to be a gem of great value hidden within the ugly stone. I'd keep digging.

Unfortunately, the organic and open-ended gameplay promised by the game never really materialized. The advanced AI of the dinosaurs appeared no different from scripted AI of any other game. I mean, the velociraptors (as far as I got) were always out to kill you. Sure, there was one scene where a Tyranosaurus was preoccupied with fighting another dinosaur and you had to stay out from underfoot, but that was pretty much the extend of things. If the velociraptors were using some kind of clever pack behavior, I missed it as I saw them pacing blindly beneath me as I stood on a beam trying to prevent my pistol from slowly rolling over the frictionless edge.

And the physics puzzles? Pretty much box-stacking (with greased boxes) or stack-knocking-over. Pre-scripted. The physics was limited to very specific items only. Sure, if you ran out of bullets, you could actually CLUB the dinos with your rifle, or a fragment of a door that you smashed open earlier, which was admittedly pretty cool. But I was deliberately searching for clever solutions "outside the box," and I found very, very few. The dinosaurs weren't possible to simply fend off or outsmart. It pretty much came down to trying to shoot them with an impossibly weird aiming system (imagine trying to shoot a rifle one-handed while holding it as far away from you as your arm can reach. That's pretty much the "challenge" of the game), and then trying to club them over the head with an empty gun when you run out of bullets.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when I arrived at the town. Admittedly, my machine wasn't entirely bleeding edge, but it was more than powerful enough to handle all of the games of the era (including Unreal, I later discovered, which was lamented as a "pretty slideshow" by too many gamers with less powerful systems). But when I arrived in town, my framerate dropped to unplayable levels. Something like 3 frames per second. I took a few painful steps, and then a velociraptor teleported next to me. Though it looked like he had teleported in via the transporter on the Starship Enterprise during an episode in which they were having "transporter malfunctions." The dino appeared inside a fence, half on one side, half on the other. It shrieked and hissed (I know I would, too, so the AI felt very realistic at that point), unable to escape its merger with a wooden fence. I would have felt pity for it, if a minute later (which was how long it took me to take maybe a dozen steps) another raptor hadn't appeared out of nowhere and killed me instantly. I didn't even have time to look down at my breasts to see if my heart-shaped tatoo was fading.

I tried several times, trying to turn the detail levels down to "nothing." Nothing worked. Well, I mean that nothing that I tried worked to salvage the game... there wasn't a "nothing" detail setting that worked. Though that would have been strangely appropriate. The game was simply unplayable from that point on.

Aftermath
The next day, I returned, shame-faced, to my coworkers and admitted to them that they were both correct and very wise. I returned the game to the Software, Etc. store where I'd purchased it. They only allowed a trade, so I desperately searched for another game that I was interested in that I knew DIDN'T SUCK. Unfortunately, the only one of equivalent price was a copy of Unreal --- a game which I could buy from the company store (we'd been bought by GT Interactive, Unreal's publisher, by that point) for a third of its retail cost. It didn't matter. By this point, I was so disgusted by Trespasser that I just wanted to put some physical distance between me and the game, and I'd like to feel my money wasn't COMPLETELY wasted.

But apparently, the scars remain.

Incidentally, that same year, Blackley's former company released Thief: The Dark Project, and later Thief 2, which I thought captured the type of gameplay promised by Trespasser. And the budget "sci-fi hunting game" title Carnivores captured the whole man-against-dinosaur thrills almost present in Trespasser. So the actual concept - the idea behind Trespasser - was demonstrably sound. It's just that the design and execution were fumbled horribly.

Since then, a wonderful postmortem has explained just how such a wonderful idea crashed and burned. This is perhaps the single, salvageable good thing to emerge from the wreckage. And, in the tradition of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a group of honest-to-goodness fans have emerged to try to convert the sow's ear into a silk purse. And I do have to admit that the game did bring me some enjoyment for perhaps the first fifteen minutes or so. So perhaps it is not the objective worst game of all time, nor even the worst failure of all time. That last prize probably goes to E.T. the Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600... he game that destroyed the system... but as I never owned a 2600 nor had to personally experience the horror of that game, except for a few minutes at a friend's house before swapping out the cartridge for Missile Command, it doesn't burn in my memory like Trespasser.

But for me, when we talk of how much a game sucks, Trespasser set the high bar for craptastic-ness that has yet to be exceeded. It is my Eye of Argon for computer games.


(Vaguely) related musings on the Nature of Suckage:
* Why Battlefield 2 Sucks
* Quality Ain't Easy
* Polish: Attention to Detail
* How To Get Me To Buy Your Indie RPG
.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Design, Mainstream Games, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:26 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post   

 
Interview with Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight
Hanako Games is an indie game studio known for their anime-style, "Girl-Friendly" adventure and RPG titles. The latest game, Cute Knight, is an entertaining blend of a Sim and an RPG, borrowing heavily from the Japanese title, "Princess Maker." Cute Knight features a randomly-generated dungeon, a crafting system, a unique magic system, over fifty different endings (with variations on each!), and scores of special in-game events. It won the GameTunnel.com "indie RPG of the year" award, and just in the last few months has achieved a prominant position on several major portals, possibly ushering in the era of the "Casual RPG."

After a great deal of arm-twisting and negotiation, I managed to secure this interview with the enigmatic Georgina Bensley (well, okay, she's actually pretty accessible, and all I had to do was ask). Georgina is the ow ner of Hanako Games, and the creator (with help) of Cute Knight. She was able to give me a lot of dirt on some of the inner workings of Cute Knight (especially its unusual magic system), with plenty of hints and strategies. We also talk about the state of adventure gaming, her upcoming project (a replayable adventure game!), her game design philosophy, and more fun stuff.

Enjoy!


Getting Started

Rampant Coyote: First off, how about a little about yourself? Who are you, and what made you take the plunge as an indie game developer?

Georgina: My name is Georgina Bensley and I make computer games!

[audience applause]

Thank you, thank you.

As for how I got here - Ever since I was very young, I've been - not an entrepreneur exactly, but open to opportunity. In grade school, I used to make little arts and crafts trinkets to sell for cash and the desserts from other people's lunchboxes. Later it was websites and ebay. It seemed natural to me that if I could make something, I ought to at least see if people were willing to pay for it.

So there wasn't a plunge, exactly. I've always been making/trying to make games. When I made something that I thought was good enough that someone else might be interested, I put it on sale.


Rampant Coyote: I dug around on your "About" page, and found out about the ColecoVision. It sounds like you were a fan of the underdog games or gaming systems from the early days. Do you have any favorite games on that platform?

Georgina: What comes to mind as my personal favorite from that time period would be the ColecoVision port of Mr. Do!. I really loved that game, I can't even explain why.

The other thing that was noteworthy about the ColecoVision was that, at least for my family, it really was a family system. Everybody used it. My mother was really into Lady Bug. As the video game industry developed, it somehow moved more and more away from that. It wasn't until several years ago when I started to find games like Text Twist online that I could once again say "I bet my mother would like this."


Rampant Coyote: Besides the ColecoVision titles, are there any other games out there that are favorites or that you think were influential to you as a game developer?

Georgina: I was a big fan of the 'Quest' games from Sierra - King's Quest, Space Quest, and so on, as well as RPG classics like Fallout and Planescape Torment.


Rampant Coyote: Are there any particular indie games out there right now that you particular enjoy or admire?

Georgina: Aveyond is an obvious choice. I'm also really fond of Eets. I don't usually buy puzzle games because I'm afraid that once I've solved all the levels, there will be nothing left to do and no reason to ever play again. With that game's wacky physics, completing a level doesn't mean that you've found the ONLY solution - you might be able to go back and score trophies by solving it in a completely unexpected and bizarre way. And then there's the level editor and the community-made puzzles... and did I mention the animations are adorable?


Cute Knight

Rampant Coyote: Okay, let's talk about your latest game, Cute Knight, Besides drawing the obvious inspiration to the "Princess Maker" series (which I still haven't played), did you draw inspiration for the game from any other games or other media?

The "stepwise 3D" dungeons of course reminded me of Wizardry, the Bard's Tale, the old "Gold Box" AD&D games, Dungeon Master, and many similar games from the 80's and early 90's.

Georgina: I looked at a lot of those games when I was designing the dungeon section. The game from that genre that I most remember playing during that time period was something called Alternate Reality: The City. The game included a huge list of potions, and while you could guess what a potion was from its color and flavor (sweet, salty, so on) you couldn't be entirely sure whether you'd found fruit juice or deadly poison until you drank it.

This inspired some of Cute Knight's potion choices, especially the visually-identical Rainbow Potions. Most potions, once you've learned what they all look like, you can use safely even if your character doesn't have the brewing skill to identify them. With a Rainbow potion, if your skill isn't high enough to tell, it could do just about anything.


Rampant Coyote: The magic system in Cute Knight is quite unusual and seems fairly subtle. My usual strategy is just to load up on 3-element charms (when I get them) for fighting the monsters in the dungeons and cover as wide a spread of elements as possible. Sort of a shotgun approach to spellcasting. Probably not the most effective. Can you explain the inner workings of the magic system a little?

Georgina: I wanted to make magic a little more involved than just "cast a Generic Spell and do damage based on your magic skill". I remember playing Dragon Warrior on the Nintendo and having spells like HURT and HURTMORE. That definitely wasn't the feeling I wanted - that makes magic seem boring.

A lot of the RPG features in the game are slightly simplified and might not appeal to the sort of player who writes strategy guides about which spells can be cast a fraction of a second faster in order to do more damage in Diablo. I wanted the magic system to be able to be incredibly complicated in order for that sort of player to explore it, but also to work fairly well even for a player who didn't want to think about it. You can just pick three copies of the very first charm unlocked and you'll still be able to fight most monsters with magic. You may not do as much dam age as you would if you had the best charms equipped, but you'll get by.

There are nine elements - Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Light, Dark, Holy, Nature, and Emotion. If you want to blast down a door, the best elements to use are Earth and Fire. If you want to fight a vampire, the best elements to use are Holy and Light. Plant monsters will be weak against Nature. Only creatures with feelings are weak against Emotion, and those are the ones you get Sin for killing. A Fire elemental will be weak to Water but may take no damage at all if you attack with pure Fire. If you have a good Luck score, you can encounter a monster, figure out what it's weak against, then run away and change your charms to be appropriate for that monster before coming back to fight.

For the number-crunchers, here's the details - your base magical damage is about 1/10 of your Magic skill. Half of that is considered 'pure' magic damage, and the other half is 'elemental' damage. The elemental damage is broken up into chunks depending on how many magical elements you're using. If your elements were half Fire, then half the elemental damage will be fire damage. That amount is then compared to the monster's resistance to Fire and raised or lowered accordingly before it's added to the total damage. And so on for the other elements you 're using. If you've got certain magical items equipped you can get bonus elemental damage. If your charm cards are pure Water but you have a Fire magic item equipped, you do all your elemental damage as water damage plus some extra as fire damage. And if you don't have all three card slots filled, your elemental damage is lowered.


Rampant Coyote: How about the Wizard's challenge? It seems to be one of the most detailed of the sub-games in Cute Knight. Sparky and Mortimer are pretty easy to beat, though it seems like Sparky emphasizes fire-based spells and Mortimer emphasizes emotion and dark magics, so I've found a few charms that appear to be relatively 'safe bets' when dueling them. But they are also weak enough to overpower by brute force at later stages of the game.

The higher-level wizards seem to have a much wider selection of charms, and defeating them f eels more random.

Georgina: The Wizard's challenge takes the magic system's complication and goes even further, giving each of the nine elements a rating against the other eight. It's like rock-scissors-paper but with nine symbols and the ability to play up to three of them at a time. This was fun to make, but it came out being TOO complicated. It's not really a fair game, and it may be revamped in a later version...


Rampant Coyote: Since I'm asking you about hints - Cute Knight is full of little special in-game events. Some of these seem very rare, and will rarely be encountered by players. This definitely encourages exploration of the game. Do you care to give any hints about seldom-discovered secrets or easter-eggs in the game?

Georgina: Some things not everyone knows about -

When prompted to name your character, if you just click OK without typing anything, your character ends up being named Michiko. This is the name I use for the character when talking to artists or testers. Saves having to say "the pink-haired PC" all the time!

You get a small Charm bonus on May Day in honor of romance.

If you diligently work as a maid for the first six months or so of the game, you receive the Magic Mop, which can turn a maid into a great hero. People have gone on to defeat the dragon using that mop. :)


Rampant Coyote: I think I found a magic mop for sale during one of the festivals. I wasn't quite sure how it worked. But my cleaning skill wasn't so high. Anyway - the big question: Should we expect a Cute Knight 2 2 ?

Georgina: Yes, but not for a long time. I am currently involved in another project, which is taking quite a while to complete. So look for a sequel in a couple of years...


The Game Biz

Rampant Coyote: The game business is pretty male-dominated, but you come in as a female game developer who is also producing "girl-friendly" games. Has this been advantageous or more challenging to you? Or both? And has the community been supportive?

Georgina: Once we get past the initial "Really? I've never met a female game developer before!" I don't think it really matters that much to anyone in the business. I'm just a person like anyone else. And since the casual/downloadable market has a high percentage of female customers, there isn't the same sort of push to make everything appeal to the mythical 18-year-old male football fan that some advertisers are supposedly so fond of.

It's in freeware game development communities that I'm more likely to have problems, not the indie community. A lot of freeware kids are just that - kids, teenage boys who don't understand why anyone would want to make games that aren't Zombie Splatterfest XX.


Rampant Coyote: A lot of the attitude in the business (particularly mainstream publishers) is that "girl-friendly" games means dress-up, shopping, and ... pink. What do you think it means to make "girl-friendly" games? And should I be embarrassed about liking Cute Knight (who does have pink hair, I note...) myself?

Georgina: One reason that I prefer "girl-friendly" over just "girl games" is that I don't think I know precisely what girls like either. I know what I like. I know some things that supposedly are more popular with female players than other things. But people like different things. Some girls play Quake. Not me, thanks. And I wouldn't be any more interested in Quake if you dyed it pink and made it about roaming the mall attacking passersby with make-up kits. (What a dreadful idea!)

Girl-friendly, to me, means that a female player shouldn't feel excluded by the game. There are lots of subtle ways that mainstream game developers can show that they don't really expect girls to play. Default high-score lists filled with male names. Selection between male-only character options. Claiming to have equal options for male and female characters, but actually having twice as much content available for male PCs as female ones. Always showing female characters within the story as weak and helpless. Things like that. I don't think anyone, male or female, should feel ashamed to play a game that's girl *friendly*. :)

You could say that Cute Knight includes dress-up (choosing what equipment to wear), shopping (buying/selling items) and pink (the hair!). But except for the pink hair, you'd find those things in any RPG.


Rampant Coyote: What tools do you use to make your games? Do you use a particular game engine, toolkit, or SDK (Software Development Kit) for the game itself? How about for the art?

Georgina: I primarily build games with Game Maker. While it bills itself as being able to make simple games without a single line of code, it also has its own scripting language, and that's what I'm using. Once you know the tool, there's a huge amount that can be done with it. Any sort of 2D game is possible.

I'm interested in checking out some other systems like the Torque Game Builder in order to be able to port beyond Windows, but so busy, so much to do...

For art, I have a very old version of Paint Shop Pro and a scanner.


Rampant Coyote: When designing a game, what do you come up with first - the story, or the game mechanics? Do you start with a detailed design document? How do you approach game design?

Georgina: It's hard to say exactly because I usually have a lot of half-baked ideas mulling around in my head. Eventually the pieces fit together and I see an overall gameplay concept that includes both the basic mechanics and at least the seed of a story. After that they tend to develop together. The game's needs can influence the story.

For Cute Knight I did write down a lot of design details early on. I knew it would be difficult to shoehorn a new skill in later, so I wanted to be sure I'd thought out the possibilities as far as skills and jobs before I started putting code together.


Rampant Coyote: I played your free adventure, "Sweet Dreams" (but I never could figure out how to wake the girl up), and you also bill "Summer Schoolgirls" as a sim / adventure. Are you a fan of adventure games / "interactive fiction?" If so, what do you think it might take for this kind of game to make a comeback?

Georgina: I'm a fan of both graphical and text adventures, and the graphical adventure genre really isn't as dead as some reviewers make it out to be. :) It's funny, because I'm constantly reading reviews for adventure games in which the reviewer takes a few paragraphs to expound upon how nobody plays or makes these games anymore. It doesn't seem to occur to them that they're writing those paragraphs pretty often for a genre that's supposedly dead.

It's a niche, that's all.

I wouldn't really want them to "come back" and replace first-person shooters as the big mainstream game genre. Then they'd end up being more expensive and requiring the latest-greatest graphics cards to play!

Both graphical and text adventures also have large fan communities making games, some of which are very good, and some of which go commercial.


Rampant Coyote: If budget wasn't a concern (yeah, right!), what game would you be creating right now?

Georgina: If you gave me a pile of money for development right now, I'd keep working on the same game I'm working on. I'd just hire actors to get the whole thing fully voiced. :) Dreadful voice acting is a common complaint in small-studio games and I would rather have none at all than acting that makes everyone wince. If I could afford a top-rate cast, that'd be different.

But once that's finished, if I had so much budget that I could found a studio to work with me AND not have to worry about sales figures, I have this great idea for a game in the style of Fallout. :)


Various and Sundry

Rampant Coyote: Okay - cage match. Rhen (from Aveyond) versus the Cute Knight. How would it end?

Georgina: Well, the person challenged gets the choice of weapons, right?

Michiko chooses a bake-off.


Rampant Coyote: Any hints as to what might be next from Hanako Games?

Georgina: My current project is an adventure game (see, they're not dead!) called Fatal Hearts. It has a teenage female protagonist and a terrible mystery with hints of murder, occultism, and things that should not be.... Which, for an adventure game, is not that unusual. What is different is that there's not just one ending, or even one best ending. Different characters and factions will be trying to win the player over to their side, and you can get an entirely different story with different puzzles depending on who
you choose to trust.

Most adventure games, once you finally get through them, that's it. You're done, there's no reason to play again. Or if there are multiple endings, you have to start over and play almost exactly the same game again in order to unlock the alternate end. This is different. If you reach one ending, you still have many hours of STORY that you haven't read, and puzzles you've never seen.

Also - gorgeous vampires.

http://hanakogames.com/fatal.shtml

If I'm lucky it'll be done sometime next year...


Rampant Coyote: An adventure game with honest-to-goodness replayability? This I'll have to see! I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Georgina, thank you for taking the time out of your development schedule for this interview! This was delightful!


If you are interested in some of the other games Georgina has worked on, be sure and visit http://www.hanakogames.com



(Vaguely) related Stories:
· Interview with Amanda Fitch, Indie RPG and Casual Game Designer
· Interview with Scorpia
· Interview with Mike Rubin (Vespers 3D, 3D Interactive Fiction)
· Aveyond!
· Tales from the Road: Cute Knight

Labels: Adventure Games, casual games, Interviews, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:00 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post   

 
A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different
> Kill Dragon

WITH WHAT, YOUR BARE HANDS?

I never had to answer that question myself. But that dragon was my first significant exposure to the world of computer games.

I didn't play the game myself. Instead, I was given a walkthrough by my buddy in fifth grade, Craig Bucher, who had played it over the weekend on some "minicomputer." I don't even know if the computer even had a monitor - the game was played on the printer, recording his explorations to be shared later. With the huge printout in hand, he took relish in showing me the most interesting parts. Through his printout, I was able to share in his adventure (which I didn't realize had the name, "Adventure," at the time). I witnessed him being attacked by nasty axe-throwing dwarves and giant snakes, saw him trying to deal with the "troll bridge," navigate the twisty little mazes of passages, and witnessed him face down a fierce green dragon sprawled out on a Persian rug.

I don't know why it was - but the fact that the dragon was on a Persian rug really stuck with me. For the rest of my life, my mental image of a dragon wasn't lounging Smaug-like on a bed of gold and silver, but rather sprawled out on a large, expensive Persian rug. My parents bought a Persian rug for our home, and I always thought it seemed a bit bare without a fierce green dragon on it.

I don't know if you could call my career and hobby of making videogames a "life's calling." But if you choose to, then you could say that I realized it on that winter morning. I was an avid reader, and here I was reading what looked like a book (or at least a short story) that had been written by the computer in reaction to my friend's voyages through an imaginary world. I was struck by the possibilities of it all.

I went home that night and wrote up something without the benefit of a computer on several pages of lined notebook paper. It was an adventure, and its format was vaguely reminiscent of a "choose your own adventure" book (I hadn't yet discovered Dungeons & Dragons). I worked on it for days, and filled several pages with text and options. Much was original, but it also had nasty little dwarves with axes, and the obligatory dragon sitting on a Persian rug.

When I felt all was ready, I ran my brothers through my adventure. I played the part of the computer, reading text according to their choices.

The entire adventure ran maybe five minutes, and that was including the time necessary to give them instructions. I'd apparently underestimated the content requirements by a hair. This is a problem I still struggle with today.

I taught myself to program on my first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, which lacked the capacity to actually run any of these games (one kilobyte of memory is apparently only enough for about a paragraph of text). Later, when we got the Commodore 64, I finally had enough memory (and storage space) to start making my dreams come true. First off, I was finally able to PLAY these adventure games myself, and finally follow in the footsteps of my friend. I finally encountered the fierce green dragon on the Persian rug, the axe-throwing dwarves, and the notorious TWISTY LITTLE MAZE OF PASSAGES for myself. And I was able to explore the Great Underground Empire, gathering the treasures I'd heard so much about. The experiences were satisfying and thrilling, but still a little short of what I'd felt a couple of years earlier.

But the best thing was that I was able to create these experiences. I started perhaps a dozen adventure games, most left incomplete in one form or another. I even collaborated with a schoolmate on one. I wouldn't go anywhere without my notebook full of maps and notes for my next awesome project. The two adventure games I actually finished, "The Dungeons of Doom" and "The Secret of Red Hill Pass" are long-gone now. And even at the time, I realized their weaknesses (though I thought they were a bit more sophisticated than the original Colossal Cave Adventure or Scott Adams' adventures). And of course, as I already knew the games intimately well, they weren't so much fun for me to play.

But it was during the development of these games that I felt the magic of the dragon on the Persian rug the strongest. I still get a taste of it in other games, some of which I record in my "Game Moments" articles. Part of my anticipation for Mike Rubin's Vespers 3D project is a hope to catch another taste of the magic, as I haven't really been able to get into pure text adventures again (though I've tried, and I don't fully understand why I haven't gotten very far). But those are enough to continue to drive me to play... and to create.

After all this time, that dragon is STILL there on that Persian rug. Oh, he's available in a free download, if anyone feels like challenging him - though I doubt the magic is still there. I don't think it ever was captured in the bits of data that made up the game. Where he really lived, for me, was in my mind. My imagination. The simplicity and abstraction of the text was what invited me to create him, to give him life, and to even give him some amount of power over me.

That was where the immersiveness came from. That's something that fantastic shaders and voice-overs cannot reproduce, and may even hinder (though I'm not quite willing to give them up and go back to text-only). It's all about capturing the imagination. Once that happens, the game - the medium - takes on a life of its own. The player is not just a consumer, an audience, but a participant, and the game becomes much more than the sum of its code and data.

And that's the power of the dragon.

In spite of all his power, the dragon was actually pathetically easy to slay. That was the whole trick. The key was to think outside of the box. It was to realize that in this new medium, the rules of the "real world" didn't necessarily apply. Adventurers were confounded, sometimes for weeks, sometimes forever, because they brought with them assumptions and baggage from the outside world with them into this new but familiar one. Because obviously, slaying a dragon is going to have to take something SPECTACULAR. Maybe something you haven't found yet. All the tricks that worked against the other monsters in the world failed utterly before the power of the dragon.

But the solution was both simple and outrageous. It was spectacular by being non-spectacular. It involved nothing that the adventurer didn't already have with him at the start of the game. For all his intimidating might, the dragon could be defeated by the simplest (but not the most obvious) means possible.

I lied when I said at the beginning of this article that I never had to answer that question myself. Sure, I knew the answer for the Colossal Cave Adventure. But as it set me on my path to making games, to trying to share that little bit of magic with others, particularly as an indie game developer with little resources. I haven't felt extremely successful at it. The dragon on his Persian rug keeps defeating me, as I find myself having to answer that question over and over again. But I keep trying.

I wonder if the answer is really any different?

> Kill Dragon

WITH WHAT, YOUR BARE HANDS?

> Yes.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE JUST VANQUISHED A DRAGON WITH YOUR BARE HANDS (UNBELIEVABLE, ISN'T IT?)


(Vaguely) related rambles:
* How Do I Get Past the Harpies?
* Interview with Mike Rubin (developer of Vespers 3D)
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
* Interview with Scorpia
* How Do You Create "Fun?"

Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post   

 
Game Moment #15 - Neuromancer
Neuromancer, the novel by William Gibson, blew my mind when I read it in the late 1980's. I think it blew the minds of a lot of people. It created the (short-lived) Cyberpunk genre. It was heady stuff when it was published, theorizing virtual reality mingled with a world-wide computer network before the "Internet" was in anyone's vocabulary. It combined a uniquely 1980's era dystopia with a vision of computers and communications melding seamlessly with everyday life - and even within the human body itself. The line between computer programs and the human mind was blurred, and the result was both tantalizing and nightmarish.

Very cool stuff. And more plausible every day. Well, except for the idea of the Soviet Union still being a major player.

Around 1988, the computer game based on the book was created. Published by Interplay, it was a graphic adventure / RPG hybrid by Troy Miles. It even included part of a song (horribly rendered in MIDI glory on the PC) by Devo (How's that for 1980's?). The graphics on the PC version were standard 320 x 200 16-color EGA, and not nearly as attractive as other EGA adventure games of the era.

I didn't get around to playing it until 1991, shortly before I became hooked on Wing Commander. I hadn't even heard of the game before, but I found it discounted for $20 at a little computer shop in northern California early that summer. I wasn't yet plugged back into the gaming scene, so like most uninformed gamers I was as likely swayed by the license as anything else. Although I was saving money for my upcoming wedding and the next two semesters of college (yeah, it was quite the summer), I figured $20 wasn't a very big risk. I bought the game and tried it out that night.

Instead of playing the hero of the novel, you instead played another hacker of a user-supplied name on a somewhat parallel journey. For an adventure game, Neuromancer had a surprisingly small number of physical locations. Most of the game took place along three streets in Chiba City, with a trip near the end-game into orbital space stations. The game borrowed descriptions and characters from the novel, but also included some of its own own humor to the setting. Like the "Church of Pong."

The segment of the game taking place in "meat-space" was almost pure graphic adventure game, with the exception of the flow of cash. There was no combat - saying the wrong thing, going somewhere unprepared, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time could get you killed, or arrested and fined. Like most games of its kind, you learned to save early and often to avoid re-tracing your steps after a disasterous experiment.

The other side of the game was "Cyberspace," where you upgraded your "cyberdeck" and your software to hack into computers. The combat was in real-time, but it didn't exactly require fast arcade reflexes. It involved analyzing the opposing computer's strengths and weaknesses, and using the right combination of intrusion software to force your way in.

Success netted you access to bank accounts to raid, clues to your next move in cyberspace or in meat-space, upgraded intrusion software, passwords to be used in systems that were too hard to hack through brute force, access to security systems or other controls which affected the meat-space world, background information on the world itself, and some amusing little side-stories. It was perhaps more interesting "treasure" than any +2 sword of ogre decapitation.

In spite of its second-rate graphics (even for the time), the game had something to make it powerfully compelling. It drew me into the world and left me thinking about it when I wasn't playing --- planning my next move, musing over puzzles I hadn't yet solved. As this was still prior to the era of the World Wide Web, the solutions were not to be found in a quick Google search.

No, I had to figure this one out on my own. As any old-school adventure gamer is aware, this led to trying out sometimes irrational behavior in-game to either stumble across a solution, or maybe gain some other clue as to what really should be done, or reveal some previously overlooked option that could break apart several roadblocks at once. As always, I saved the game, experimented, and often found myself having to re-load after experiencing a minor setback or disaster.

My brain was so engaged in this tiny, fictional, 16-color universe that this game "moment" occured in the real-real-world. After playing the game for a couple of hours earlier in the evening, I found myself in a conversation with my in-laws-to-be. I don't remember what it was about, but they asked me a question, and I found myself trying to "save game" prior to answering them. Just in case my answer wasn't a good one.

When I realized what I'd been thinking, I figured I'd probably had enough Neuromancer for the day. I figured my brain had been at it too long, anyway. And that was another thing about old-school adventure games: the solutions often revealed themselves only after you took a break from the game and let your subconscious wrestle with it for a bit.

Incidentally, whatever answer I gave to my wife's folks was evidently the correct dialog tree option. I didn't find myself needing to re-load the game afterwards.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Moments, retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:46 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Interview With Amanda Fitch,Indie RPG and Casual Game Designer
This month, I interviewed Amanda Fitch, the author of the hit indie RPG, Aveyond, and founder / owner of Amaranth Games.

Aveyond (now re-christened "Aveyond I: Rhen's Quest") appeared at the beginning of the year with little fanfare (at least from what I could tell), but found itself popular with both fans of “old-school” console role-playing games of the Super Nintendo era, but also with a brand new audience. In particular, female gamers of all ages have become involved in the story of Rhen, a young farm girl with a mysterious past and a fateful destiny. Because of its success amongst "casual" gamers, this fantasy RPG has managed to occupy top-ten positions for several weeks on major casual portals, something normally reserved for match-three style puzzle games like Bejewelled.

I asked Amanda to share some of her thoughts on indie game design and development, how she got involved in the business, and the two new games that are currently under development. In particular, I got some tidbits about the soon-to-be-released Grimm’s Hatchery, a casual game that may appeal to fans of Aveyond, and the upcoming sequel to Aveyond, entitled Aveyond II: Ean’s Quest.


---== The Past ==---

Rampant Coyote: So how did you end up becoming an indie game developer? And why Role-Playing Games (RPGs)?

Amanda: I wanted to play a game like Kings Quest VI, but I found out that game companies weren't making these sorts of games anymore. I rolled up my sleeves and decided to make the game that I wanted to play. After I finished my first game, Gaea Fallen, I wanted to play an RPG like Final Fantasy VI, but alas, I had the same problem. No one seemed to be making them anymore. So I made Ahriman's Prophecy. Both games were freeware and Ahriman's Prophecy was popular enough for me to consider making games for a living.


Rampant Coyote: Game development is a fairly male-dominated industry. Has that been an issue with you at all as an active member of the indie game development community? Or have you found it advantageous to bring a different perspective or stand out as one of the few female indie game developers? Or does it even matter?

Amanda: The guys have been really cool and very supportive. I do think that I tend to look at games at a different angle than most of them. I look at the story, art, and music first, and then worry about the underbelly of whatever I'm making. I don't care if the ground shakes when my characters jumps up or down; I'm much more interested in their social interactions with each other.


Rampant Coyote: What games have you played that you would consider your biggest influences, if any?

Amanda: Kings Quest and Final Fantasy are my hands-down favorites.


Rampant Coyote: Ahriman's Prophecy was your first role-playing game, to my knowledge. At least the first one you finished and released to the public. In many ways, it sounds like it was practice or a "dry run" for Aveyond. What sort of lessons did Ahriman's Prophecy teach you?
Amanda: I used Ahriman's Prophecy to learn how to present a game to the public and market. I practiced uploading it to sites, and learned a lot about software submission. I also created two versions. The second one was much better than the first.


Rampant Coyote: What did you change in the second version of Ahriman's Prophecy to make it better?

Amanada: I recreated the battle system, all of the menus, and made much better maps.


Rampant Coyote: How much time did it take to complete Ahriman's Prophecy? How about Aveyond?

Amanda: Ahriman's Prophecy took 1 year and Aveyond took 1 1/2 years.

Rampant Coyote: Aveyond was your first commercial game. I'm not privy to your sales numbers, but by most indicators you really hit one out of the park on your first try. Aveyond has not only made it onto several major portals, but has also spent some significant time on their top-ten lists - a place usually held by match-three style games. You have a large number of affiliates, and a healthy community at your site. To what do you attribute your success, and what is it going to take to maintain it?

Amanda: Lots of marketing, a good, long story, and a niche with no competition. I offered something different and it made a splash. Now, I need to figure out how to turn a splash into a tidal wave. :D

Rampant Coyote: Aveyond has been described as a "casual RPG." Was that your intention when you started working on it, or did it just evolve that way?

Amanda: When I started working on it, I didn't know that the indie game market had fragmented into casual and non-casual. Most of the casual games looked cute and light-hearted, so I figured Aveyond would fit right in.


Rampant Coyote: Now that Aveyond has been out for a year or so, what sort of lessons are you taking from it to apply to future games? Is there anything you wish you'd done differently?

Amanda: I wish I had marketed earlier and not made so many changes later on. I was constantly updating the game from January to July and some updates were drastic. In the future, I'm only going to make bug fixes to games that I've already released. If new features are added, they will be part of a goodie pack that players can download from my site. I also didn't have a professional logo for the game until April. I should have done that before the game ever went live.


Rampant Coyote: You've used some pretty high-end toolkits for creating your games - specifically RPG Maker for your two RPGs. Some people get a little funny about that. On the one hand, some people treat it as if it's somehow cheating - that it is both overly constricting and somehow "too easy." Yet there are very few finished games out there using these engines, let alone polished, commercial-quality games of the quality and scope of Aveyond. So what does it really take to create a polished, commercial-quality game using a higher-level engine? If it's much harder than it sounds, is a higher-level engine even useful?

Amanda: I knew that when I released Aveyond that I was stepping into the briar patch. I was very worried about how the development community would feel about my approach. I repeated to myself over and over again that my goal was not to please developers, but to please players.

I also wanted to break the ice and bring attention to Game Creation Systems. I don't think they are The wave of the future, but I think they are A wave in the future. If game creation systems continue to gain popularity, this could be a bit threatening to some developers who like to program everything from the ground up. It would be a bummer to find out that the artist next door made the same match-3 that you did in a fraction of the time with better art, eh?

Actually, there are loads of games that have been completed with Game Creation Systems! The problem is that most of these game makers only show off the games on freeware sites (Game Hippo) or in the communities devoted to the Game Creation Systems. For example, if you go to the Adventure Game Studio site, you will see that there is a huge list of finished games.

Many Game Creation Systems stink, and you will probably never see anything completed with them. The easiest way to find out if a Game Creation System is good is to check out its community. RPG Maker XP, Game Maker, Adventure Game Studio have huge active communities. It's a shame that most of the people who have created amazing games with these systems are afraid to sell what they make or step forward. This is changing, however. In fact, a commercial game was just finished with Adventure Game Studio, and the second indie shareware game is on the way. I also know that indie developers have made shareware games with Game Maker. Too cool!

My guestimate is that 97% of projects never make it to completion with the good Game Creation Systems. This may sound alarming, but it isn't since 97% of all indie game projects fail anyways.

Hey, here's a fun Q&A:

Q. What hugely popular commercial RPG series was build with a 3D game
creation system?
A. Elder Scrolls!

Q. What is the name of this game creation system?
A. Gambryo!

Q. How much is Gambryo?
A. More than most of use make in two years!


Rampant Coyote: Are there any little secrets in Aveyond that most people never discover that you'd like to share?

Amanda: The cash cow, secret portal stones, and lots of other hidden goodies that players probably won't find unless they go to Amaranth Games and find them in the section called “Goodies.”


---== The Present ==---

Rampant Coyote: So, tell us about your next game! Don't spare the gory details!

Amanda: The next game is called Grimm's Hatchery, and it involves caring, breeding, and selling of magical pets. This isn't an RPG, but the game takes place in Candar, a village in the Aveyond universe. I'm also working on Aveyond II: Ean's Quest, which I seriously think is going to blow Aveyond I: Rhen's Quest away.


Rampant Coyote: With the success of Aveyond, and players hungry for more, why did you decide to make a casual game before moving on to the next RPG of the series?

Amanda: I needed a break from RPGs, I wanted to work on a short 5-month project, and I wanted to draw more casual gamers into my world of Aveyond. The conversion rate for Aveyond is very high, and I think a lot of players haven't played this sort of game because it is completely new to them. I hope that Grimm's Hatchery will help me convert more of these players. I want them to fall in love with the characters in Grimm's Hatchery (a traditional casual game), and feel brave enough to try out Aveyond II so that they can experience their favorite characters again.


Rampant Coyote: Do you think the new game will appeal to fans of Aveyond?

Amanda: Oh yes! It's just a bit lighter than Aveyond. There are lots of quests around the village, so there's quite a bit to do besides raising pets and chasing off monsters. I think Adventure lovers are especially going to love this game. Like King's Quest and Monkey Island, each area has a beautifully rendered 2D background, and you can use your mouse to explore each area in the village, just like you would in your typical adventure game.


Rampant Coyote: When should we expect to be able to play the new game?

Amanda: Grimm's Hatchery will be released to the players on my site around December 15th and to the rest of the world on January 11th. Aveyond II: Ean's Quest will be released next September.


Rampant Coyote: It sounds like the original Aveyond is getting a name change. Sort of like how Raiders of the Lost Ark is now "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark." Do you have plans to re-release it with the name change?

Amanda: Yep, I've already re-released it on my site. I figured that I needed a way for people to distinguish between the two games. This is it for big game changes in the future. :)


Rampant Coyote: I understand Grimm's Hatchery is being made with the Torque Game Builder (TGB). How do you like working with TGB? How does it compare to working with RPG Maker XP?

Amanda: I like it! Both game creation systems have rich scripting systems, and both are great for the type of games they are intended to make.

RPG Maker XP has the best editor for making RPGs period. I've been seriously spoiled by it, and I've not yet found anything that compares. Torque Game Builder is great for the casual game that I'm making (Hatchery). I'm glad that I didn't try to use RPG Maker XP to make Grimm's Hatchery, and I'm crazy glad that I didn't try and use Torque to make Aveyond.


Rampant Coyote: So once Grimm’s Hatchery is released, you will be back to work on Aveyond II: Ean’s Quest. Can you talk about it at all at this point?

Amanda: Sure! Here's a quick overview:

Ean (m) and Iya (f) are two young elves who live in a far away place called the Vale. One day, Ean wakes up to find that Iya, his best friend is mysteriously missing and that no one remembers who she is. Not only that, but a very strange thing has occurred... snow has fallen in the Vale. Ean sets out on a quest to find his missing friend; a quest that will take him away from his beloved home to the mainland below. And on his quest, Ean will find that dear Iya has been swept away by the Snow Queen, and that her heart is slowly turning to ice. Ean must save his friend and Iya must learn to control her wild powers that the Snow Queen desires for herself. The fate of Ean and Iya are the key to defeating the Snow Queen's terrible plot to cover the world in ice.


Rampant Coyote: So how do you approach game design? What goes into a design document for an Amaranth game? Do you involve others in the design process?

Amanda: At this point, I'm the only one in the design process, but when I get suggestions from those I work with, I tend to implement them. To begin, I write the story, then I decide how many quests that the game needs to have, what areas need to be in the game, and then I fill the rest in as if I was writing a novel... layer by layer by layer.


Rampant Coyote: A lot of the older mainstream games, particularly RPGs and adventure games - were the work of very small teams, and were often designed by a single designer. In fact, the name of their designers were in some ways a brand for those games, and a lot of people felt that the tiny design and development team allowed the creators to inject a lot of their own personality into their games. Do you feel that is the case with your own games? Is there anything you could point to - or that has been pointed out to you by friends - that seems to be "signature Amanda Fitch?"

Amanda: Absolutely! I love being devious to my characters in a light-hearted way. For example, in Aveyond, militant squirrels are out to rule the world, and you can join them and follow the Way of the Nut. Of course, no matter what you do for the militant squirrel commander, he will always find a reason to whip you.


Rampant Coyote: What makes a great RPG?

Amanda: For me, a good story, lots of quests, lots of villages, and loot!


Rampant Coyote: What games are you playing right now (if any)?

Amanda: Drats! I've been caught... Er, none at the moment. I've cut myself off from everything until I finish Grimm's Hatchery.


Rampant Coyote: Are there any other indie games out there in the market right now that you are particularly interested in or admire?

Amanda: Cute Knight!


Rampant Coyote: Me too! I’m really hoping her fans will talk her into making a sequel! So, is there anything else you'd like to add?

Amanda: Thank you so much for this interview! If anyone wants to keep up-to-date on the progress of Grimm's Hatchery, my new super-secret Amaranthia Kingdom web project (sssshhh!), or Aveyond II: Ean's Quest, please check out my designer journal, which I update every week: http://www.amaranthia.com/journal


Rampant Coyote: Awesome. Thank you, Amanda, for taking the time out to do this interview. I hope this hasn’t impacted the release date of Grimm’s Hatchery! :)


(Vaguely) related Tales:
· Interview with Scorpia
· Interview with Mike Rubin (Vespers 3D, 3D Interactive Fiction)
· Aveyond!
· Aveyond 2.0 Released!
· Tales from the Road: Cute Knight
· Pre-Teen Game Designer Poised To Take Over the World
· The Evolution of Computer RPGs
· Torque News

Labels: Adventure Games, Aveyond, casual games, Interviews, Roleplaying Games, Torque

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post   

 
Scorpia's New Tale: An Interview With One of Gaming's Most Popular Columnists
Scorpia was one of the most influential women in computer gaming long before people starting paying attention to that sort of thing. For sixteen years, she wrote adventure and role-playing game reviews for Computer Gaming World. Her column, "Scorpia’s Tale," was one of, if not THE, longest-running regular column in the short history of electronic gaming journalism. It was also by far one of the most popular columns in the industry.

Scorpia had a reputation not only for hard-hitting RPG and adventure reviews and witty commentary, but also for being a treasure-trove of game hints and clues for desperate players. In an era before walkthroughs for any game were available almost before a game’s release on the Internet, Scorpia was the number-one savior of stumped adventurers and dungeon-delvers. If you couldn’t figure out where the secret door was on level six, or how to vanquish the dragon on the Persian rug, Scorpia would come to your rescue.

I was thrilled to find out that Scorpia is back at it again, with a new venue: Scorpia’s Gaming Lair. Since she remains a treasure trove of knowledge and insight (and a sting!) of all things adventure and RPG, I jumped at the chance to pick her brain a little bit about Role-Playing Game and Adventure Game design, as well as lay to rest some mysteries surrounding her long-running column. And while I was at it, I was anxious to learn more about what she’s up to now.

Curious? Want to know the sordid history, the rumors and innuendo, the scandals of the game industry in the 1990s, and all the dark secrets of videogame journalism? So would I! She wouldn’t tell me that. But, as always, she was happy to provide hints, tips, and witty commentary which I think you’ll enjoy!


Background: In Ye Olde Beginning

Rampant Coyote: We both started gaming in an era where text adventures were about as “in” as any other kind of computer gaming, and an entire game with “high resolution graphics” could fit in less memory than a screenshot does today. How did you get sucked into computer gaming as a hobby?

Scorpia: Well, among other things, I went to a combined Apple II/TRS-80 computer show, and came out lusting for my own machine. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the future. I planned on learning to program the Apple (my computer of choice). So of course the first thing I did was to go out and buy about $100 worth of games. The road to perdition was a short one ;)


Rampant Coyote: Your column was certainly one of the most popular features of Computer Gaming World back in the day (at least among the geeky crowd I hung out with). How did you end up becoming the guru of the adventure / RPG genre at CGW?

Scorpia: I wouldn't call myself "the guru", or even "a guru". As to how I started at CGW, it was simple. One late winter night in early '83, Russ Sipe (then owner of CGW) called me into a private chat on CompuServe. He asked if I'd like to write for his magazine. I said yes, then I asked what mag it was. He said "Computer Gaming World" and I hadn't heard of it before. But I tracked down a store later that carried it. So it was just like in the movies, I was sitting there minding my own business, and someone says, "Hey kid, how'd you like to be in pictures?" ;)


Rampant Coyote: Your columns in CGW were billed as being distinctive and “often controversial.” I always wondered: what sort of controversies did you stir up?

Scorpia: I'd love to know that, too. Of course, not everyone agreed with my opinions, so maybe we could call that controversy. Or perhaps the controversy came from the game companies if the review wasn't favorable. Basically, I gave forthright opinions and let the bodies fall where they may ;)


Rampant Coyote: Your final column was (I think) April 1999. I guess all good things have to come to an end, but what brought the Scorpion’s Tale to its conclusion? Did it have anything to do with Johnny Wilson’s departure and George Jones taking over as editor-in-chief? Or the commonly held opinion in the late 90’s that roleplaying games, like adventure games, were “dead?”

Scorpia: Some people may have thought that adventures and RPGs were "dead", but I never thought so. Both genres did go into something of a decline, although the amazing success of Myst did revive the adventure segment for awhile. As to why I left, the mag didn't want my stuff any more. CGW had a new owner and new management, and presumably were going in a new direction.


Rampant Coyote: Well, I know for many of us, that was the first of many signs of the demise of the magazine. I personally felt like they were aggressively pursuing the lucrative market of 14-year-olds with Attention Deficit Disorder after that. So after that, then what? Have you been doing any game journalism between the end of your CGW column and the creation of your new website?

Scorpia: Yes and no. No, I haven't been writing for any other mags since leaving CGW. Yes, because I was writing for my site. See my answer below. [“What brought about Scorpia’s Gaming Lair?”]


Rampant Coyote: And to round out the background info… where did the moniker “Scorpia” come from?

Scorpia: Moniker? What a plebian term ;) From role-playing, naturally. After many years, I finally found a good use for my astrological sign. All I did was change the last letter to indicate female, although that did escape some people over the years. Heh.


On Adventures and Role-Playing Games

Rampant Coyote: There’s a commonly-held belief that adventure games as we knew them are now “dead,” at least as mainstream products. At one point it seemed that it was only text-adventures that had died, but now even the successor, the “point-and-click” adventures made famous by games like Monkey Island and Myst, seem to exist now only as part of gaming’s history and as lower-budget indie ventures. What led to the adventure game’s demise, and do you think any kind of comeback is possible (perhaps in a new form)?

Scorpia: Interest in adventures revived with Myst. Unfortunately, everyone wanted to do "another Myst", another biggie that would hook into the mainstream. That never happened.

Then the game markets turned more towards that infamous "young male demographic", featuring sports, strategy, shooters and driving games, which continues to this day. And, of course, there is the growth in various MP games online. Most game houses now belong to one or another corporate giant.

It's only the small, independent companies that can do what they want. If another adventure game should hit it big, we might see more adventure games, but likely in the Myst copy-cat mold.


Rampant Coyote: You’ve often said (with elaborate detail) that your favorite game was Ultima IV. Is this still true? Do you have any close runners-up?

Scorpia: Yep, Ultima IV is still numero uno. The runner-up position is held by the original Fallout, which surprised me by being so good as it was. However, I can't think of anything offhand for third place, which is sad.


Rampant Coyote: What makes a great adventure game?

Scorpia: First, a good story. One that draws you in and makes you want to know more about what's happening. But it has to be logically constructed, even if a horror type, such as Barrow Hill or Scratches.

Puzzles that make sense and aren't there just to pad out the game. They should fit in with the story, and each solution should advance you a little along the plotline. The player should be able to solve every puzzle without the need for trial and error; hints and clues ought to be available in-game for all of them. NO "hunt-the-pixel" stuff, where you have to scan your mouse all over the screen to find some critical object, and no “action / adventure" stuff, either.

And the game should come to a satisfactory conclusion, and not leave you wondering about anything.


Rampant Coyote: That makes perfect sense. So moving even nearer and dearer to my heart - what makes a great roleplaying game?

Scorpia: As it is for adventures, a good story. Preferably one that does not involve "killing off Ancient Evil Foozle to save the world" (you already know, Jay, how I feel about "Ancient Evil" ;).

NPCs that have some realism to them. In particular, aspects that make you care about at least some of them (not necessarily in a romantic way). Decent dialogue that doesn't look or sound like it was written by a 14-year-old with an attitude.

Balanced combat (this is much better now than it used to be in the old games). A good mix of combat and non-combat situations.

Multiple ways to resolve some of the quests. Different endings for good and evil, if the game allows evil PCs. Opportunities for true role-playing, outside the straightjacket of D&D alignment (I've never liked the alignment system).

A rewarding ending that provides a sense of accomplishment (see "The End" for more on that).

And bring back the player-created party system! See "It's My Party" for details.


Rampant Coyote: While it wasn’t extremely common even then, many of the old-school game developers were known by name to the press and to informed gamers. Names like Richard Garriott, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schaffer, David W. Bradley, Marc Blank, Jon Van Canaghem, and Bob Bates were known to many adventure / RP gamers, in spite of the fact that they also worked with larger teams to bring their visions to market. This doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. Was knowing the names and faces behind the creations a good thing? Why is this on the decline? Are players losing interest, does the press no longer care, the publishers trying to focus attention on brands rather than creators, or is it something else entirely?

Scorpia: Excellent question. I covered some of that in my "Nostalgia" piece. Anytime you create something you care about, you put something of yourself in it. In those earlier days, JVC and Lord British and the others were more in control. Others may have had a part in the product, but something from the main person came through. That doesn't happen much these days, simply because the design teams are so large; just look in any manual at the credits. In a true team effort, the contributions become diffused. So, for that reason, individual designers no longer come to the fore. The only one I can think of that still has public attention is Sid Meier.

And yes, I think it was good that designers had "name recognition", because those were all good names and people were eager for their products. Now, it does indeed go by brand.


Room With A Grue: Scorpia’s Gaming Lair

Rampant Coyote: What brought about the creation of Scorpia’s Gaming Lair (www.scorpia.com)?

Scorpia: Well, this is the third incarnation.

After I left GEnie, I started up Scorpia's Domain on the 'net. Alas, it didn't do too well, so after awhile I revamped it as Scorpzine. That wasn't very successful, either, but then both of those were subscription sites. So then I went into hibernation for awhile (a long while, actually), but I've been at this too long. So I'm back once more, this time with the Lair.


Rampant Coyote: I only heard about it myself a few weeks ago, from a comment here on Tales of the Rampant Coyote. But I’m happy to spread the word! You seem to be building up quite an enthusiastic community on the website. What are the differences between the community there now and the community in the CompuServe days?

Scorpia: Not very much. I found that my areas on CIS and GEnie attracted what you might call "hard core gamers", who were intelligent, literate, and cared about the quality of the games they played. As you probably noticed from the comments, many of the Lair members go back to the early days of gaming. At the same time, they also play some of the new ones. Overall, I'd say that the ones coming to the site now (whether they post or not) are the type of people I've always written for, and I just wish I had more of them.


Rampant Coyote: So what are your goals goals with the new website? How do you see it in, say, two years?

Scorpia: To write honest reviews and articles of interest, make money (I should have put that first ;), and keep busy. As for two years from now, thanks, but I'm taking it one day at time right now.


Parting Shots (With Crossbows)

Rampant Coyote: So if you had the chance to give some Adventure / Roleplaying game developers out there any advice for appealing to the “Scorpia Market,” what would it be?

Scorpia: Make games that have fun, wit, and charm. Forget the eye candy. A game doesn't need cutting-edge, must-have-a-desk-top-Cray graphics to be good. Pretty pictures are nice, but gameplay should not take a back seat to the visuals. Play some of the great older games, and analyze what makes them great. For the rest, see my answers above. [Ed: “What makes a great adventure game” and “What makes a great roleplaying game.”]


Rampant Coyote: What does the future of computer roleplaying games hold? Are we going to be stuck with Diablo clones from the mainstream market from here on out?

Scorpia: I certainly hope not! There will, of course, be some of those clones, which is not altogether a bad thing, if the games are done well. But such are not true RPGs. At the moment, it seems the D&D franchise, and Bethesda, are the only ones doing traditional RPGs (and Bethesda certainly messed up with the combat in Oblivion), though I hear Bioware has something in the works. However, it's not likely there will be as many in the future as there were in times past. Development takes much longer now, and there is an emphasis on allowing for online play.


Rampant Coyote: Anything you wished I would have asked? Or any other comments you’d like to make?

Scorpia: Nope, I've said (or typed) enough.


Thank you, Scorpia, not only for subjecting yourself to my nosy questions, but for not sending Fred the half-grue bouncer to break my kneecaps or anything else... unseemly. And I'm sharing this with everyone publicly now, so that if I mysteriously dissapear the next time I enter a dark area, well... people will know!

But seriously... thank you! And good luck with Scorpia's Gaming Lair! It's already become one of my favorite gaming sites, and I'd like to encourage folks to go check it out!


(Vaguely) related stories:
* R.I.P. Computer Gaming World
* Grown-Ups Like Videogames, Too
* Aveyond!
* Interview with Mike Rubin about Vespers 3D: An Experimentin 3D Interactive Fiction
* How to Get Me to Buy Your Indie RPG
* The Most Important CRPGs of All Time
* Great Game Moments

Labels: Adventure Games, Interviews, Mainstream Games, retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:37 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post   

 
Indie Interview: Mike Rubin pt 2
This is Part 2 of the interview posted yesterday with Mike Rubin. Mike was gracious enough to answer some questions about his "3D Interactive Fiction" project, Vespers 3D.

You can read part 1 by clicking HERE.

Rampant Coyote: When you move from a more abstract representation of a world to a more concrete one, those kinds of things are bound to come up. I've heard similar things from experienced "Pen and Paper" RPG designers moving to computer games. And even from doing conversions of board games to computer games.

I would imagine that you aren't the first one to think of pairing up Interactive Fiction with a 3D environment. Do you know of anyone else who has succeeded? If not, why do you think they failed? If so, what are you doing that's different (other than telling a different story)?

Mike Rubin: Well, I can't say I'm completely familiar with all of the different attempts that have been made in the recent past with respect to graphical adventure games. But I'm pretty sure that nobody else has taken the approach of incorporating this much text into the game. The text in traditional IF performs many functions; it is descriptive, narrative, informative, aesthetic; and of course it is used for interaction. Is there no role for that in a graphical adventure game? I think there certainly is. Perhaps not in the descriptive sense (that would probably be redundant), but certainly in its other roles. And I don't know of any real-time 3D games where a text parser is used for command entry. So in that sense I don't know of other games which have really tried to incorporate interactive fiction per se.

I think people will always point to the Myst series as the best-known implementation, and they did use real-time 3D in their later efforts. Some people really liked those, but I have not played them all. Our story is different, yes, but I also think we will differ in how we tell the story and how the player experiences it.


Rampant Coyote: How do you think the Interactive Fiction community will respond to a real-time 3D I.F. game? Do you worry they'll cry out for your blood for polluting their beloved text with something that looks like a First-Person Shooter? Or is this something that the community has already been asking for?

Mike Rubin: It's a fascinating discussion to me, and on one hand I'm eager to see the reaction and on the other I'm dreading it. I'm sure there are people in both camps, although I couldn't really tell you which outnumbers the other. I've spent some time lurking in groups like rec.arts.interactive.fiction and there have been dicsussions in the past about making 3D adaptations of IF, but most were met with strong skepticism. I think there are definitely some IF people who would like to see this, but there are probably a lot who will reject it. There are, after all, hard feelings still lingering towards people like Roberta Williams (of Sierra On-Line) for initiating the demise of the text adventure game when the first graphical adventures came along.

One thing that I think will lead to some indifference is that 3DIF is much less accessible to the individual developer than text IF. Most text games can be developed by a single person over a relatively short period of time, and with some of the new tools like Inform 7, very little programming skills or knowledge is needed. I think that's one of the things that binds the IF community together; it's not a commercial enterprise, it's a group of like-minded individuals working on their own projects and helping each other out and playing each other's games -- and they're all free. A 3DIF game takes a group of people with different sets of skills, some cash, and a lot of time. When the community gets their hands on this I'm sure one of the first reactions will be, "can I do this with my game, too?" The answer will probably turn many of them off because it's very different from traditional IF.

I think some parts of the community are really looking for something new to spice up the IF world, and I hope this fills that role. But it's hard to say if it will.


Rampant Coyote: Do you think that Vespers 3D will help expand Interactive Fiction to a new audience? What kind of market do you expect to find for a game like this?

Mike Rubin: The IF community always seems to be looking for ways to expand their audience, and if this project can do that, I would be happy about it. I don't suspect that will necessarily be the case, but you never know. What I would like to see is people trying Vespers3D, and then trying the original text version to see how they compare. If that happens, I'm sure there will be a number of people who find they like the text version better, and perhaps they will be inspired to try other text games as well. I'm considering distributing the text version and its IF interpreter with the game, along with some information to direct players to online repositories where they can try other IF games. I think that might be an interesting tact and something of an offering to the IF community, since I'm still really an IF enthusiast at heart.

I'm not sure what kind of market we will find, but I'm certain there is a market for it. I think Myst showed that you can be very successful with games that are slower paced and focus more on creative problem solving rather than fast-twitch reaction times. But Myst succeeded for a number of reasons that don't necessarily apply to our project, so it's hard to say. I think it will definitely be a niche product, but I also think people will appreciate it for what it offers.

Rampant Coyote: Do you have any projections for when Vespers 3D will be complete? Is Vespers 3D a commercial project? How will you be distributing it?

Mike Rubin: I would like to be able to project that, but I really don't know. We're still at a very early stage, and a lot will depend on finding additional help for some areas of development.

Whether or not Vespers3D will be a commercial product was and continues to be a topic of considerable debate amongst our team. Originally, we planned on producing only part of Vespers; the text game takes place over three days, and we considered producing only the first day as our proof-of-concept prototype. But I think we all agree now that it will have a much greater impact as a complete game. That said, it will require a significantly greater investment to do the whole thing, which complicates matters. I'd still like to do the whole thing and release it for free, but only if that's feasible and if we believe it will help us with a future (commerical) game.

As for distribution, we haven't really discussed that yet, and of course it will depend heavily upon the decision above.


Rampant Coyote: So what other games have inspired you? Any indie games?

Mike Rubin: All indie games inspire me. Any individual or small group who can start and finish a game deserves a great deal of credit, and that includes IF authors. But I'm more inspired by those games that try to do something new and different, which is really what the indie game dev community is all about...doing the things that the big game companies won't take risks on. I wasn't really part of the indie community until I got involved with the Torque Game Engine, and now I've met some pretty inspiring people. Two games that were recently completed using TGE are "Minions of Mirth" and "Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa", and it was pretty cool to watch them progress through to completion. WT:VA was a finalist at SlamDance last year, and now you can find it on store shelves at places like Best Buy, which is just amazing to think about. I can't imagine how it would feel to walk into a Best Buy and see Vespers3D sitting on a shelf.


Rampant Coyote: What are you most proud of in Vespers 3D?

Mike Rubin: I'm pretty darn proud of the text parser, which is a form of punishment I wouldn't wish on anyone. Text parsers in IF games may seem pretty simplistic, but there is an incredible amount of complexity to them. The funny thing is that they have evolved to handle some pretty complex commands -- but the reality is that the vast majority of commands they handle are still simple one or two word phrases. But the expectation now is that a good parser should be able to handle those difficult phrases, so the bar has been raised and people will expect your parser to live up to that standard. I think ours for the most part will.

But really the thing I'm most proud of is that we've made it this far. Indie game projects are kind of like fish eggs; thousands are laid but only a handful survive to adulthood. We're not anywhere near the end, but we've reached something of a milestone this month. There's a tangible sense that the concept will work and the team we have is good enough and committed enough to pull it off. It feels like we have passed the point of no return, so to speak.


Rampant Coyote: Incidentally, two of the few games I actually "finished" in the Commodore 64 days as a budding wannabe game programmer were text adventures, and I remember all the effort I put into the text parser, and how proud I was of it. They still weren't quite up to Infocom standards, but I felt I could take on the Scott Adams adventures pretty handily.

So, getting even more technical for a moment here: What made you decide to use the Torque Game Engine for Vesper 3D? Is this your first project in Torque? What has been your experience with Torque so far?


Mike Rubin: I chose Torque because I wanted an engine that was inexpensive, cross-platform, simple to license, and came with full access to the code. I also wanted one with a simple scripting language. Torque fit those criteria well, although one or two others did as well. I looked for a long time at Unity, which was appealing because I'm predominantly a Mac user. I chose to go with Torque mostly because of the great community there, which seemed a bit more established than Unity's. People at GarageGames.com have been really helpful and there are just an incredible number of resources there to help make your game better. This is my first project in Torque, and it's amazing to think about how much I know now compared to when I started last fall. And it's just as amazing to think of all that I still don't know.

Working with Torque is one of those experiences that is hard to characterize. It's probably in some small way similar to raising a child; it's incredibly difficult and when you start out you have no idea what to do or how to do it, and you spend a lot of time struggling. But every now and then you stop and look at what you've accomplished, and you realize you've actually enjoyed it all and you're really proud of what you've been able to do.

But then again, I don't have kids, so I can't say. (At least that's what all my friends with kids tell me.)


Rampant Coyote: I'm still fussing with my first Torque project myself. I know I get a little embarassed by some of the earlier code I did --- it seems like after a point you quit kicking and screaming at the engine and things just start to "click."

So, is there anything else you'd like to mention here?

Mike Rubin: Just that any project like this is almost never attributable to just one person. I owe a lot to Jason, N.R., Jon Jorajuria (our sound designer) and a few others for all of their help and their skills, and for making this project both attainable and a lot of fun. And I should really be thanking my wife for not kicking me out when I spend far too much time coding on my spare time.


Once again, thank you, Mike, for this interview!

(Click Here For Part 1)

Labels: Adventure Games, Interviews, Torque

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Indie Interview: Mike Rubin pt 1
At the Utah Indie Game Developer's Meet last month, I had the chance to meet Mike Rubin (aka "Rubes"), who really impressed me with a demo of the upcoming game "Vespers 3D." Vespers 3D is actually a 3D Interactive Fiction (I.F.) project, based upon the award-winning text-only Interactive Fiction game called, coincidentally enough, "Vespers."

My discussion with Mike was split between discussion of his adaptation of Torque Technology to drive this project, and a conversation about the design issues he faced coupling the explorative, deliberate gameplay of Interactive Fiction (AKA "Adventure Games") with the visceral, immersive experience of first-person perspective, fully 3D graphics. Mike seemed very soft-spoken and unassuming, and kept praising the artists he'd worked with to create this demo.

While he was very open with the possibility that this experiment might fail, I was struck by his passion for the project, and how well he'd thought through the design issues. When the opportunity struck to interview him about his project, I was thrilled by the chance to pick his brain a little more. I hope you'll find it as fascinating as I did!

The interview is pretty huge, so I broke it two parts. You can read part 2 by clicking HERE.

Rampant Coyote: So tell us a little about yourself. Who is Mike Rubin?

Mike Rubin: Best I can tell from Wikipedia, I'm a videographer with ties to Apple and Lucasfilm, a middle east scholar, and a musician whose best known work is on "Blue's Clues." I really don't recall anything like that in my past, but then again there's a lot of my life I don't remember well. Mostly what I know is a life predominantly in medical research, now as an assistant professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine. It's an interesting hobby while I pursue my life dream of getting my own personal entry in Wikipedia as the father of three-dimensional interactive fiction.


Rampant Coyote: Steve Taylor of NinjaBee told me to ask you about Missions of the Reliant. Was that you? Want to tell us about that one? Steve tells me he played it a TON, and wanted to know if you have another version planned.

Mike Rubin: Yeah, that was the game that was supposed to "get it out of my system." It was a shareware game I made for the Mac back in the early/mid-90's while I was in graduate school, mostly because I had always wanted to make a game and I had to give it a try. I based it on that old ASCII Star Trek game, where you moved around from sector to sector wiping out Klingons, only this time I made it with isometric 2D graphics and a different storyline. It was a lot of fun, and I learned an incredible amount -- particularly how bad I was at marketing and post-production crap. But it got some recognition in MacUser's annual shareware awards and it made enough money to buy a few more beers and brats in grad school. The fact that Steve remembered it is amazing, although I'm not sure he should really be admitting to playing a "ton" of it. I've thought about trying to go back and modify the code to release the full game for free, but I've got enough on my plate right now as it is.

Interesting, now that I think about it; in that game I took what was originally a "text"-based game and put a nifty graphics front end on it. Now I find myself doing the same thing with Vespers and text IF. I wonder what that means.


Rampant Coyote: It's gotta be destiny, man! Back when I was a kid, "Interactive Fiction" was just called "Adventure Games." The early Colossal Cave adventures, and the timeless Infocom games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, motivated me to learn to program myself so I could create these absolutely incredible experiences. I came across the term, "Interactive Fiction" about ten years ago. Is there a difference between "adventure games" and "interactive fiction?"

Mike Rubin: I think there are some differences, but the fundamental concept is pretty much the same. I would say that the term Interactive Fiction evolved as a way of reflecting the greater literary approach that is now being taken in the writing of these games. Many IF authors spend a great deal of effort on the quality of the writing and its contribution to the game experience, rather than focusing entirely on the puzzles. And there are some experimental IF games that have taken this approach to new and interesting places.

I really cut my teeth on some of those old games; I remember spending far too much time playing Original Adventure on my dad's hulking Northstar computer, followed later by Scott Adams's wonderful, albeit laconic, adventure games. Those early games, although certainly literary in their own style, concentrated more on relatively simple puzzle-solving; any semblance of story was thin and basically emergent from the puzzles. Then Infocom came about, and I would say that most people would identify that as the start of real IF. The games shifted focus from being centered around puzzles to being centered around stories. The puzzles were still there, of course, but it became more about the writing, and the quality thereof. I think those were probably the first games that you would begin to identify with the term "fiction".

The term "adventure game" can still apply in many cases, though. Lots of IF games are about exploration and adventure, but many also additionally have some of the components of true fiction, such as plot, characterization, dialogue, and so forth. IF has come a long way since the 80's, and there are some really sophisticated works out there.


Rampant Coyote: What technology was Vespers originally built with?

Mike Rubin: Vespers was written using Inform (version 6). A newer version has come out
since then (Inform 7), which is a real advance in writing text IF games
because it uses more natural language.


Rampant Coyote: So what made you decide to implement Interactive Fiction in 3D? What made you think it would be good match, and what do you hope to accomplish with this title?

Mike Rubin: I'm still not sure if it's a good match, to be honest; that's what we're looking to find out with this experiment. I guess there are two main reasons I thought it was worth trying. One reason is that I've always enjoyed the freedom of movement and exploration that first-person games (FPS) provide, particularly those with really compelling worlds. But typically, FPS games don't want you to spend a lot of time exploring and experimenting with things; usually you have a straightforward goal and the idea is to complete it and get to the next level. Well, text IF is all about exploring and experimenting, so this would be a way of incorporating those things into the 3D world.

The other reason is that I think there is a growing sense of dissatisfaction with mainstream games, particularly FPS-style games. So much emphasis is placed on the graphics, and story is really just an afterthought used to loosely tie together the various levels. Half-Life got all this credit for having a great "story", but come on -- that was a fragfest, not a story. But again, text IF is all about developing story and characters and interactivity, so once again this would be a way of giving 3D games something they've been missing.

There are other reasons as well, like trying to bring a greater sense of interaction to 3D games by using a text parser and forcing the player to really think about what to do next -- not just click click click. Some of the recent graphical adventure games do this to some extent, but I like the increased options that a text parser can provide compared with mouse clicking.


Rampant Games: So why did you choose a 3D remake of "Vespers," rather than an original title?

Mike Rubin: Well, I decided if I was going to try this, I needed to start with a reasonable goal: create a small prototype game, like a proof-of-concept. I thought the best approach would be to base the prototype on an existing IF game -- and specifically a really good one, so people would hopefully enjoy it while they're trying it out. So I checked out the latest entries from the 2005 IFComp (the annual IF Competition, at www.ifcomp.org), which is open only to IF games that can be completed in two hours or less. The first one I looked at was Vespers, a game by Jason Devlin, which had just been voted the winner of the competition.

It was fantastic, and it had all the elements I was looking for: a compelling story, great characters, a perfect setting (small but well visualized) -- and it was short. It was easy to envision bringing the game to 3D life. So I e-mailed him after I finished playing it, presented him with the idea, and he was sold. He remains intimately involved in the project -- probably the way an author would be when his book is being made into a movie.


Rampant Coyote: I imagine that going from a text-only game to a full-blown 3D world came with a lot of challenges. What sort of challenges did you face, and were any of them unexpected?

Mike Rubin: It's probably safe to say that most things were unexpected, since I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Although many of the challenges are difficult and problematic, I'd probably also say that they are a source of great enjoyment. Jason, N.R. Bharathae (our modeler and artistic lead), and myself have had many great e-mail conversations about how to implement a particular feature of IF which is simple to do in text but horrendously complicated in 3D. (Well, *I* think they're great, those guys are probably sick of me e-mailing them all the time to complain about something else.)

One of the earliest issues that came up was the concept of "scope." In text IF, the game world is divided up into well-defined rooms or locations. So at any one point in time, you can easily determine which game objects are "in scope" (those objects the player can interact with). Usually that's whatever is in that room, plus whatever the player is carrying in inventory, and it's simple to calculate. But in 3D, rooms are more difficult to define. I tried defining scope as whichever objects fall within a particular radius of the player, but then you have to take into account walls (if an object is behind a wall, you can't really interact with it), field of view (if an object is behind the player, should he be able to interact with it?), and so on. You don't have to take these things into account in text.

Most of the other problems are similar in that they deal with the issues raised by introducing spatial relationships into the equation. How to drop objects when the player is standing right in front of a wall; how to deal with certain commands when the player is standing at funny, unexpected angles; how to handle placing objects inside or on top of other objects. The list goes on and on, and there are still lots of outstanding issues that we haven't worked out yet.


(Click HERE For Part 2)

Labels: Adventure Games, Interviews, Torque

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:08 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
How Do I Get Past the Harpies?
Especially back in the 1980s (but still true today), if you happened to know a thing or two about computers, people assumed you were an expert on the subject. And you'd get called on to fix other people's computers. At the age of 14, I knew how to program in BASIC and a little bit of 6502 machine code; I knew what a floppy disk was (they were mainly 5 1/4" back then); and a little bit about booting up different kinds of machines. That made me a "whiz kid" and earned me some measure of respect and awe from adults. Which was of course, very cool.

One Saturday a woman from our church needed help with her computer, and had asked my parents if I could come over and take a look at it. She lived a distance away, so my dad dropped me off to take a look at it, promising to be back in a few hours.

This lady was very gracious, but had no clue what to do with this machine on her kitchen table. This was a "portable computer." Back in 1984, a "portable computer" was jokingly referred to as a "luggable." They were about 50 pounds or so, had a built-in 4" screen, and were about the size of a small suitcase.

I spent about 20 minutes fiddling around with the system, asking the lady for her boot disks and anything else that came with her system. I figured out the problem, but I wasn't able to fix it (I think it was a bad disk, and she didn't have a backup). I gave her my best advice, and I was done. And... I still had a few hours to wait before my dad would pick me up. She gave me some lemonade, and said that she thought there was a couple of games on her assortment of floppies.

The one game I found held my interest for a few minutes (it was some game about a garden maze full of monsters - all ASCII characters), but then I found a disk with a version of BASIC. I booted it up, and began programming.

By the time my Dad showed up to pick me up, I'd written a short little text-adventure game. I only had time to do a really simple text parser, and it had something like 20 areas and a dozen items scattered through them. I left the computer running, and forgot about it. The lady thanked me again for my help (what little I'd done), and I went home and forgot about it.

Shortly after dinner, we got a phone call from this lady. It was for me. I was wondering if there was something else wrong with her computer. I answered the call.

"How do I get past the harpies?!?" she begged me.

It took me a few seconds to realize what she was talking about. She'd discovered my little adventure game --- and had gotten most of the way through it. She was stuck at the harpies, which kept killing her.

"Oh, you get the wax from the candles and put them in your ears. Just 'Use wax.' That way you won't be effected by their song," I responded.

"Thank you!" she said. And she explained that she'd been playing it all evening, and had been trying to get past the harpies for the last two hours, and it had been driving her nuts. She thanked me for the solution, and hung up - presumably to finish the game. Which had taken her almost as long to play as it had taken me to write.

As for me, I felt GREAT. This was the first time someone else had played one of my games - and she'd apparently been hooked on it the entire evening. She LIKED it. And she was not a geeky computer-game addict like me... just some woman who used her computer for her business. But my little invention was of worth to her.

There have been a lot of games since then, and a lot of players. And the feeling hasn't changed much.

It still feels great.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:16 PM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post   

 
Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
It was 1982, and anything was possible.

I had started programming at the age of twelve on the Singlair ZX80. That machine had all of 1K of RAM, and no "memory-mapped video" ... which meant the screen blanked out every time the CPU had to do something other than constantly refresh the screen. There was room for maybe one page of code, total. It made game programming pretty hard.

My dad pre-ordered the Commodore 64, which I dreamed about for weeks. I was designing videogames and adventure games on paper while I waited, anxious to get going during summer vacation on a games that were going to be equal or better to anything else out there. Unfortunately, by the time the C-64 was actually released, school had started. That didn't stop me from spending my evenings and weekends on the machine, learning how to harness the machine's incredible power. I'd go until late at night, the stereo next to my machine playing softly (to avoid my parent's wrath, and I usually didn't feel like wearing headphones).

My programming skill at the time was still pretty rudimentary. The ZX80's version of BASIC was pretty minimal - and you couldn't write more than a page of code for the thing anyway. While I was learning to put pictures on the screen, I was also learning to do string manipulation to do a text parser for an adventure game. I'd tried this on the ZX80, but the awful memory limitations prevented me from doing anything really interesting. But I had an idea of HOW I would do it, as soon as I had the machine with enough capability to meet my vision. In 1982, with the Commodore 64, these limitations were removed. Time to get going!

The problem was that I was still in spaghetti-code-ville writing in BASIC, and hadn't quite gotten the grasp of how to avoid hardcoding everything, or how to properly re-use code. So my attempts at adventure games were really ugly - every room effectively had it's own section of code that had to handle everything that might be done in the room. I did have the sense to break out my rudimentary text parser into a subroutine, so the rooms didn't have to repeat the parsing logic. But still my code looked something like this:

900 PRINT "YOU ARE IN A FIELD BY A BABBLING BROOK RUNNING"
910 PRINT "NORTH AND SOUTH. YOU CAN FOLLOW THE BROOK"
920 PRINT "OR FOLLOW A PATH EAST INTO THE WOODS."
930 IF LANTERNLOC=5 THEN PRINT "YOU SEE A LANTERN LAYING ON THE GROUND."
935 IF SWORDLOC=5 THEN PRINT "SOMEONE LEFT A SWORD HERE."
949 REM GET COMMAND ROUTINE
950 GOSUB 9000
960 IF CM$ = "GO NORTH" THEN GOTO 1100
962 IF CM$ = "GO SOUTH" THEN GOTO 1200
964 IF CM$ = "GO EAST" THEN GOTO 1300
966 IF CM$ = "GET LANTERN" AND LANTERNLOC=5 THEN GOSUB 9600
966 IF CM$ = "GET SWORD" AND ITEMLOC(1)=5 THEN GOSUB 9620
968 IF CM$ = "INVENTORY" THEN GOSUB 10000
970 IF CM$ = "LOOK" THEN GOTO 900
999 GOTO 950

It worked, and in theory I could have created an entire adventure game this way on the Commodore 64. There was enough memory to handle it, and CPU limits aren't exactly a bottleneck for text adventures. But just because I could do it didn't mean I should do it. Fortunately it was pretty clear to me that this was the wrong way to do things, and that I'd have a nightmare trying to make a game larger than eight rooms using this kind of programming.

A friend of mine, Kevin McCarthy, was staying the weekend with me. We were doing some "Midnight Programming" on adventure games that night (term cribbed from a book I'd already started to read by then, "The Soul of a New Machine"). Kevin was starting to lose it already, as it was pretty late. Then I had the little breakthrough in understanding of making the rooms data-driven so that one routine could handle all possible locations. A simple idea, but a pretty big step for a 13-year-old who was still a beginning programmer.

I turned the descriptions into an array of strings with an index into them based on room number. I also built an array of exit names, exit locations, and indexed them based on room number. I quickly whipped a map of about a dozen rooms and exits. Only the first six had any detail - the remaining rooms had one-line descriptions like, "THIS IS ROOM #9.". But I linked them together with exits, and wrote some code where rooms were handled with a single subroutine.

Kevin was only barely conscious by the time I ran the code. We had a couple of false starts where we encountered syntax errors, which we rapidly corrected. The radio started playing a song by Saga, "Wind Him Up" - curiously, a song about a compulsive gambler. And then... it all worked. It ALL worked. The song became victory music as we walked around our hastily-constructed map, finding that everything was working perfectly, and that making a change or adding a room took an insignificant change instead of the monstrous task it had been before. I had figured out how to create an adventure game. Kevin and I congratulated each other;I made a couple more tweaks to our proto-game and enjoyed a few more minutes of playing around in it. Then we saved our work, and got some sleep before beginning a great Saturday of hitting the local Arcade and playing some Dungeons & Dragons (it's funny how my view of what constitutes a great Saturday hasn't changed much).

The next few days had me furiously working on what was probably my first "complete" game, the adventure game with the vastly overused title, "Dungeons of Doom." It even had some sound effects, color, and some minor animation. I think it had somewhere around 40 rooms altogether. Next was "The Secret of Red Hill Pass", which clocked in at well over twice the size of Dungeons of Doom - not to mention a much smarter parser and many more advanced capabilities.

I bring all this up because I just heard that Saga song again, and it brought back the old memories. Nice motivation when I'm banging my head against the wall trying to learn the Torque engine (I'm a beginner again) while working on a cool new game. Of course, there's probably a point or two here somewhere. Here's my take:

It's now 2005, and anything is possible.

We live in an age now where the possibilities of computers for entertainment have far surpassed most of our wildest imaginations in 1982. Sure, we'll bump up against the limitations of our platform from time-to-time, but that's not the big issue anymore. Instead, we sometimes forge ahead so quickly to exploit the capabilities of the technology that we don't step back and question whether or not we should.

Sure - we can make our game fully 3D and give the player an unparalleled level of control and realism. But is that really the best way to go? Is it the best for the game and the gamer, or would 2D gameplay actually provide a better experience? You can now deliver a game to the user with 500 different weapons and 300 unique levels --- but do you have the tools, experience, and manpower to do it? And even if you do, is it really going to be better than a game with 5 weapons and 30 unique levels?

Step back, evaluate, simplify, and organize. Just because the old limits are gone doesn't mean you are you in any way obligated to go beyond them. It just means that now YOU are the one in charge of imposing your own constraints and framework to your games. Make sure you are doing the right thing, and doing it in the right way.

And if you find yourself hardcoding very similar chunks of code, think hard about whether or not it would actually save you time to make it data-driven.

Labels: Adventure Games, programming, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:19 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post