Game Development Quote of the Week: Markus “Notch” Persson

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 29, 2013

I changed the title from last week’s “Game Design Quote of the Week” to “Game Development Quote of the Week” Because as important as design is, it’s only part of the equation. This one comes from the fedora’d one, Markus “Notch” Persson of Minecraft fame, in an interview at Bafta Guru a couple of years […]

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White Water Rafting vs. The Amusement Park

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 26, 2013

As a teenager one summer, I went whitewater rafting down the lower New River in West Virginia. Several class 4+ rapids, and tons of lower ranking rapids in about a 14 mile stretch. It remains one of the the coolest memories ever. It was exhilarating and exhausting. There were times where the water felt like […]

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The Indie Roadmap

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 25, 2013

What does it take to make an indie game? How do you begin? How do you know your idea holds water and is on schedule? Here’s a suggestion from Cedric Guillemet: The Indie Roadmap Now, obviously, there is no “one, true way” to making a game. But this is a good “average” case and warns […]

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Game Design Quote of the Week – Calvin French (“The Real Texas”)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 21, 2013

“Creating dungeons or levels is quite hard. In particular, it’s hard to know where to begin. What I do to get started is I try to hold to a certain constraint which is that map areas (including dungeons or levels) should exist geographically first. It should have an ostensible purpose outside the confines of the […]

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Ghost Town of Norrath Pt 3 – Design Thoughts

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 20, 2013

This is the conclusion of a three-part series. You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here. All-in-all, it’s pretty remarkable that EverQuest is still running today. While it’s far removed from its heyday, the fact that it’s still around – running under a different monetization plan than originally envisioned, and in an era […]

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Ghost Town of Norrath pt 2

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 19, 2013

So, as I promised in yesterday’s post, here are some thoughts on the changes that have been made to EverQuest over the years to keep it (at least minimally) viable while numerous competitors have come – and in  competition has grown, and in some cases become nothing but a memory. The trend, as things progress […]

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Finding Your Indie Rhythm

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 11, 2013

To be completely honest, I’m not sure how successful I’d be right now as a full-time indie. I still struggle with schedule. I struggle with my rhythm. I usually find an awesome (but exhausting) pace towards the end of a project, but it is a little too crazy to sustain it all the time. I […]

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Indie Games: Learning From Failure

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 1, 2013

Just a couple of links to articles today. As usual, when these articles call out the failures, I wince. I’ve done a lot of these myself. This first one comes with a great warning: The following list might be filled with things so stupid that you wouldn’t ever imagine doing them, and yet I did […]

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Production - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Multiplayer Only? Nevermind.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 30, 2013

I did it again. I bought an indie game because of a steep discount without looking too closely at its description. No single-player mode. You know what this means? It means I am never, ever going to play it. I may look at it, analyze it a little bit to see what the developers did […]

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Challenge: A 3D Modeling Tool for 2.5D RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 24, 2013

Yeah, I *wish* I could participate. I suck at making tools, and I’m behind schedule as it is. But I love this idea, and I hope somebody (maybe even somebody from this community) rises to the challenge… Daniel Cook (DanC) has issued a challenge to make a 3D modeling tool for creating content for 2.5D […]

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Procedural Everything

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 23, 2013

I have a love-hate relationship with procedurally generated content. One of the very first CRPGs I ever played was Telengard, by Daniel Lawrence. This was one of those formative experiences with procedural content. In effect, this gargantuan dungeon that would have consumed several megabytes with traditional storage was packed into a 64k computer (really 48k […]

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Jeff Atwood Revisits Masters of Doom

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 22, 2013

Somebody lost my original copy of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, so I was forced to buy another copy. Forced, because that’s a book I feel belongs in my permanent library. In fact, I think it is mandatory reading for any indie game developer (or aspiring indie). […]

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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Creation Rules, Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 18, 2013

At one point, I decided to document the things that I thought made up the “secret sauce” (not much of a secret now, is it?) that I thought gave Frayed Knights its flavor. I also wanted to make a checklist for quality and help certain other people I’ve contracted to help make content for the […]

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RPG Design: Expendable!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 17, 2013

One of the issues that I face when playing any RPG – computer, dice & paper, whatever – is my tendency to hoard expendable items. Expendable items (AKA consumables) are those things that can get “used up.” Potions, magic items with charges, scrolls, etc. Often, at the end of a game, my level 60 character […]

Filed Under: Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 30 Comments to Read

The Joys of Crappy AI, and the Importance of Obviousness

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 9, 2013

Read most articles about game AI, and you’ll see a call for improvement. “Why can’t we have better AI?” As it turns out – and this is an open secret in the game dev community – players often don’t like it. That’s why. A recent article, Artificial Intelligence?, on MMORPG.com, discusses one failed attempt to […]

Filed Under: Design, Programming - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Relatively Complete Blender Tutorial

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 8, 2013

If you are unfamiliar with Blender, I consider it one of the major “success stories” of the open-source movement. Beginning life as a commercial 3D modeling program, it was later re-purchased through a very early version of crowd-funding (we’re talking back in the 1990s, here), released to the public, and has since been steadily evolving […]

Filed Under: Art - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



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