Greenlight is a Go.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 31, 2012

I had this in an update yesterday, but I wanted to give it one more go: Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon  is on Steam Greenlight. Please vote for it, if you have a Steam account. Obviously, Greenlight is now up and running. And… I dunno. I’m apparently not the only one seeing it as […]

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games - Comments: 17 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights 2: Virtual Graph Paper and Tool-Driven Development

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 30, 2012

(UPDATE: The original game, Frayed Knights the Skull of S’makh-Daon, is now on Steam Greenlight. If you are on Steam, I’d be most appreciative if you’d kindly vote it up at this link: Frayed Knights for Steam! ) So if you were to ask me what the number one challenge I faced making Frayed Knights: […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

How to Beat Procrastination

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 29, 2012

Heh – the really funny/ironic thing is that I’d had this article on my list of things to read for several days, but I put off reading it. How to Beat Procrastination I like that the article explains the three different psychological influences that encourage procrastination,  as well as providing tips for overcoming these influences. […]

Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

A Message to a Young, Newbie Game Developer – Thirty Years Ago Today

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 28, 2012

I’m not sure of the official “ship date” for the Commodore 64, but it was pretty close to thirty years ago today. We had ours on pre-order for months, and it finally arrived on our doorstep in early September – after school had started, much to my chagrin. I’d anticipated spending a summer learning to […]

Filed Under: Geek Life, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Procedural Content: When it sucks, when it doesn’t

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 27, 2012

I’ve been a fan of procedural content since I first played Telengard back in 1982 or so. The Telengard dungeon boasted a size that was pretty much unattainable by conventional methods. There were a total of two million rooms in the game. Even if you managed to compress the entire room information down into a […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

UnderRail Released

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 24, 2012

Yesterday was something of a banner day for RPG fans – we got the re-release of Ultima 9 and Lands of Lore 3 (sadly, neither were considered the apex of their respective series) on gog.com, Knights of the Old Republic 2 on Steam, and the pre-release “alpha demo” for UnderRail (formerly entitled Timelapse Vertigo). May […]

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Hot Dang. All the Ultimas.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 23, 2012

The whole series. On sale. With new goodies. That is, if you exclude Akalabeth: World of Doom (which I don’t know was ever officially ported to the PC), and Escape from Mount Drash (which was an unofficial horrible VIC-20 game produced by Sierra in a time when they didn’t realize what ‘intellectual property rights’ really […]

Filed Under: Deals, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

The Meaning of Indie. Again.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

If you focus on the history, the gist of what ‘indie’ means is pretty simple.  Once upon a time, the big, bad publishers had a pretty solid (but never total) lock on being a gatekeeper for customers. If you wanted to make games that had an audience, you almost had to go through them. Almost. […]

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Going Big When You Are Small

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 22, 2012

I’ve had a few discussions with friends over the last couple of weeks about RPG design, revisiting past ideas, etc.  Those inspired yesterday’s post. And today’s post. But what really drove something home was this RPG Codex interview with gaming legend Jon Van Caneghem, creator of the Might & Magic series and founder of New […]

Filed Under: Design, Indie Evangelism, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Competing Against the Past

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 21, 2012

One of the awesome things about indies is that they are capable of revisiting genres or game styles that have long been abandoned by the industry at large. Turn-based RPGs, adventure games, 2D platformers, shoot-em-ups, space combat sims, even flight sims… these game categories are nicely represented by indies nowadays after long dormant periods. This […]

Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Your Friends, the Video Game Companies…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 20, 2012

Just remember: Video game companies are your friends. And these cartoons will help you remember just what kinds of friends they are. I guess I could add one about indies: “The indies are a collection of casual acquaintances you see in the local clubs, and perhaps you remember a few of their names. They seem […]

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Indie Game Development: Words of Discouragement?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 17, 2012

This is a sad story indeed. There are a few lessons that could be drawn from this story. One might be that nice guys finish last. These guys tried to take a different path from how they saw “predatory” in-app purchases work. And as a result, they are now broke. So one could say that […]

Filed Under: Biz, Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Pixel Prospector’s Big Page of Indie Resources

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 16, 2012

Not sure if I have linked to this before… but if so, it’s grown quite a bit: Indie Resources at PixelProspector There are tons and tons of articles linked there – a couple of them from Tales of the Rampant Coyote! If you are serious about making indie games, there’s plenty to find here to […]

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Why Are CRPGs So Combat-Heavy?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 15, 2012

Why don’t we have more RPGs that emphasize non-combat activities? Why wasn’t Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines able to keep up its efforts for non-combat solutions to problems, particularly in the latter part of the game? Do players tend to min-max their characters for fighting because the CRPGs emphasize it, or is it the other way […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Boss Battles and the Positive Feedback Problem

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 14, 2012

In my article last week about Frayed Knights‘ problem with boss battles, I neglected to mention one other factor that worked against my poor bosses which is peculiar to the RPG genre: One of my guiding principles of the overall game design is that the game should be fully playable and of reasonable difficulty for […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Thirty Years and Counting…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 13, 2012

I hit a major (internal) milestone with Frayed Knights 2 on Friday. So for the weekend, I decided to celebrate by taking a break. By… working on another little “side” game project. Mostly it was an educational experience to get more familiar with NGUI for Unity – and it did enlighten me to a few […]

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



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