Warren Spector: “We Are In Absolutely a Golden Age Right Now.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 12, 2010

Warren Spector was the producer of many games well-loved by members of this community (like Thief, Deus Ex, Ultima Underworld, etc…)  He’s been interviewed by Portfolios.com, and has some great quotes about the past and present of the games industry, and of his own career (now with Disney). I particularly loved this quote about project […]

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Blizzard Jumps the Shark?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 11, 2010

Is this for real? Suspending or banning people and revoking their CD-Key for cheating in single-player against the AI? If it’s for real, that’s beyond the pale. Maybe I’m just an old fossil who remembers some games that were so buggy and poorly balanced or just plain vicious that they couldn’t really be won without […]

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Game Design: Character-Building Exercise

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Modern CRPG design philosophy, at least so far as I can grasp from interviews and games, seems to hold that it is a sin to make a player wade through the character generation process prior to letting them get to “the fun part.” Character generation should be as streamlined as possible, minimized, and preferably delayed […]

Filed Under: General - Comments: 18 Comments to Read

Bejeweled 2 FREE Today Only

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 10, 2010

Okay, the site is like TOTALLY slammed right now with people right now, but until 10:10 PM Tonight Pacific time, Bejeweled 2 is FREE at popcap.com to celebrate the 10th birthday of Bejeweled! (And, as we know, thus began the casual game phenomenon….)

Filed Under: Casual Games, Free Games - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Old-School RPGs Revisited – Blog Recommendation

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 8, 2010

As much of a fan as I am of old-school western RPGs, I can’t hold a candle to this guy. I discovered him recently and have been going through his candid play-throughs and semi-reviews of old computer RPGs, and have enjoyed them thoroughly. Even when he completely disses on Ultima II (I never played the […]

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Making Games Is Easy! And Kinda Like Playing a JRPG…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 7, 2010

This is a few months old, but still a fun and motivational blog post from Sophie Houlden: Making Games Is Easy, and I Won Apparently… She makes a few analogies to playing through a JRPG (and not just the amount of necessary grinding). Her point really is that if you have the desire to make […]

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

Turn-Based Combat – Tactics Versus Execution

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 6, 2010

As she was cleaning up our storage closet this week (making room for Christmas presents, I guess), my wife pulled out an old wargame of mine that has been preserved over the decades – the TSR release of the hard-core air combat game Air War. I’ve never been much of a wargamer, but Air War […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

How Much Money Can an Indie Game Make? The 2010 Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 5, 2010

Minecraft continues to defy all expectations. It’s now selling as much as 10,000 copies per day (It actually spiked to over 25,000 one day, after a few days of the server being down).  It’s sold over 300,000 copies total as of several days ago. But just think about it. Thousands of sales. Per. Day. At […]

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Sintel

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

If you haven’t yet seen the short film Sintel on YouTube,  here it is: The coolest part? It was made by independent funding from donations, and was created using Blender – the free open-source 3D modeling package. In fact, the goal of the project was “to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation […]

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

State of CRPGs This Summer: Lucky Thing I’ve Been Too Busy To Notice…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 4, 2010

RPGWatch contributor VoxClamant states that for CRPG fans, it has been a long and disappointing summer: “…it was largely a summer of disappointments and failures.  And it was matched by some discouraging trends in the game industry that are slowly trying to sap the life out of gaming.  Were it not for mods to old […]

Filed Under: Mainstream Games - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: Part-Time Indie Blues

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 1, 2010

I took a day off of the day job last week just to focus on Frayed Knights development. I was able to pretend to be a “full-time indie” for a day.  It’s amazing how much more productive eight hours of semi-uninterrupted time in a single day is for development than the same amount of time scattered across […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Spiderweb Fifteen-Year Anniversary Sale

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

You know what I don’t do enough of? Reposting press releases. Probably because I receive so few of them. But here’s one that’s got ME excited, and by excited I mean, “Searching for loose change under the couch.” Spiderweb Software, the original “indie RPG” studio, is making this a very special October sale. ‘Cuz they […]

Filed Under: Deals - Comments: Comments are off for this article



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