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

Deathfire – New Screenshots and Reasons for Optimism

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 7, 2013

Wow, way to go, Guido. Way to pressure me into stepping it up a notch… 🙂 Seriously, guys. Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore sounds like it’s pretty close to head-to-head competition with my game – we are going after exactly the same audience, IMO.  And you know what? I hope he sells a million copies. I […]

Filed Under: General - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Guest Post – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Testing Snark

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 4, 2013

Today, if all goes well, I’ll be on my way back to the United States, after a somewhat eventful trip to Bangladesh on business of the day-job variety. It’s been weird being in a completely opposite time zone – 5 AM in Bangladesh has been 5 PM in Salt Lake City. Weird. Anyway, to finish […]

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

Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 6

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 3, 2013

With this installment, we now come to the end of my “general guidelines” for designing adventure areas for Frayed Knights. After this, we move onto specifics, like “dungeons should have at least X of Y” and stuff like that. For those who may not recall, this series is expanded excerpts from the design document for […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

D&D and Computer RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 2, 2013

Tom’s Hardware has a nice little retrospective about the influence of Dungeons & Dragons on computer RPGs throughout the short little history of video gaming, including some comments from two guys who were involved in brief renaissance of D&D-inspired RPGs, Chris Avellone and Feargus Urquhart. I’ll letcha read it now, and, as usual, apply my […]

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

What happens when everybody loses the race to the bottom…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 1, 2013

So the gold rush that was once mobile game development is hitting its inevitable bust cycle. Not that it’s “tapped out” or anything – there’s still plenty of money to be made there – but the competition is fierce, and the results are usually disappointing. Kinda like the PC has always been. It’s been the […]

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



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