Another Take (of Three) on JRPGs vs. WRPGs…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 29, 2012

Courtesy of Extra Credits – now hosted over at Penny Arcade: Western & Japanese RPGs (Part 1) I’m interested in hearing what else they have to say, but I’m not sure I’m going to be on board with their conclusion that WRPGs and JRPGs are two distinct genres.  Especially as I made a big case […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Technical Dungeons

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 28, 2012

I’ve got a new term which I’ve been using all week to describe a feature of a particular flavor of dungeon-crawler RPGs: “Technical Dungeons.” I don’t know how to define it yet. You get it in many roguelikes and old-school western RPGs. You don’t get it in most JRPGs or modern non-indie RPGs. Darklight Dungeon […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part VI: Indie Before Indie Was Even Uncool

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 27, 2012

My dad had an overdeveloped sense of my skills as a game programmer when I was whipping out adventure games and simple arcade-style clones. He owned a tiny holding company – which are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “shell companies.” Mainly it was there to be a “parent” company to for the entrepreneurial idea of […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Geek Life, Retro - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Major Price Reduction on Eschalon Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 24, 2012

If you were looking for an excuse to get the Eschalon games, this is it. Both games have been reduced in price by $10 … now at $9.95 and $14.95 for Eschalon: Book 1 and Eschalon: Book 2 respectively. Get Eschalon: Book 1 Get Eschalon: Book 2 I haven’t changed the prices on the web […]

Filed Under: Deals - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Variable Encounter Difficulty

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 23, 2012

A friend asked the other night about combat encounter difficulty in RPGs – is it better to have the challenge be consistent, or variable? I answered pretty firmly in favor of the latter. I think most people who suffered through the automatic level-scaling in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion would probably agree. But here’s why. […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part V: Language Skills

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 22, 2012

As I attempted to imitate my favorite arcade games on the Commodore 64, I found myself running up against a pretty major limitation: Speed. Specifically, the lack thereof when running my homemade games.  I learned a lot of tricks (most of which I’ve forgotten, now) to making my BASIC programs faster. But while those optimizations […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

WRPGs vs. JRPGs – Not as Different as You Might Think?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 21, 2012

For a while, I was tempted to split up the RPGs on RampantGames.com into “Western-Style” (WRPG) and “Japanese-Style” (JRPG) role-playing games. I’ve not done that for a number of reasons, the main one being that it is too difficult to draw the line on indie games. A game written with RPGMaker will automatically inherit the […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Blades & Booms – How Games Can Spark Real-World Interests

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 20, 2012

Most of my knowledge of historical weaponry originally came from games. Not that game stats are the primary source of my knowledge anymore, but the games are what set me on the road. I don’t know why I get intrigued by the subject, but I do. Maybe it started with an article in Dragon Magazine […]

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part IV: Sixty-Four

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 17, 2012

When released, the Commodore 64 was quite simply mass-produced awesomeness. We didn’t really know it at the time… it was just another “home computer” released in a sea of competitors. It came from a company that had specialized in business systems (the name was “Commodore Business Machines,”), with one weak home computer entry (the VIC-20, […]

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

Robert Boyd on How To Become an Indie Game Developer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 16, 2012

Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games (“Cthulhu Saves the World“) has some advice for aspiring indies… So You Want to Be an Indie Game Developer? There is probably nothing new here for folks who have been following this blog for a while, but it’s still good advice: Practice, Analyze, Iterate. There’s more, of course, as well […]

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part III: Grand Designs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 15, 2012

In our previous installment, our hero (er, me) was learning how to program on a tiny, super-cheap computer with 1K of memory. Er, the computer, that is. Our hero has slightly more memory, we’d hope. While I was playing on a toy computer, the arcade / video game boom was hitting full swing — the […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Sinister Valentine’s Day

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 14, 2012

Craig Stern’s Telepath RPG: Servants of God is a top-down, 2D, story-heavy, turn-based tactical RPG that has been in development over three years (at least it’s been over three years since I first heard about it and played the original demo). It’s been available for pre-order for something like eighteen months now. But, as previously […]

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part II – The Kilobyte

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 13, 2012

Because of the binary nature of computers, they tend to handle things in twos – especially powers of two. The fundamental states used repeatedly by digital machines to represent everything is “on” (or one), or “off” (zero). Now, by itself, that doesn’t seem to be a lot of information. But then you can combine bits […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

A New Legend Forms Around Legendary Adventure Game Designer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 10, 2012

So file this one away under “Adventure Games Are Dead and Other B.S. the Games Industry Tries to Sell Us.” There’s really only one topic I could comment on today, and that is the amazing crowdfunding success experienced by Double Fine Productions. In case you missed it (it’s sort of the top story everywhere in […]

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

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

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 9, 2012

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

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

Darklight Dungeon Eternity Released!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 8, 2012

The email I received says the game officially releases on the 9th, but from the looks of the website, it’s available now if you cannot wait. I would rather not wait. If I wasn’t in crunch mode, I’d take tomorrow off to play this game: Darklight Dungeon Eternity. I’ve played a bit of an early […]

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



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