Greenlight Follies

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 30, 2014

Hey true believers! Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is finally in the top 100 games on Steam Greenlight. I could use everyone’s help to move it up and – more importantly – keep it there. I suspect just about everyone who hits this blog and who has a Steam account has already voted for […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

E.T. Exhumed from New Mexico Desert

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 29, 2014

I suppose everyone has heard about this by now. I was knee-deep in getting this website put back together, and even I heard about it over the weekend. I’d heard it was happening a couple of weeks ago, but then promptly forgot about it. It seems Microsoft and others got permission to exhume (and document) […]

Filed Under: Geek Life, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Nuke the entire site from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 28, 2014

I feel like a guy who decided he had been pushing his luck for too many years without having a fire extinguisher in his kitchen, and goes out to buy one… only to have his kitchen burn down while he’s off at the store buying the fire extinguisher. Or something. I finally got to my […]

Filed Under: Rampant Games - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Downtime

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 26, 2014

The blog will be going down for maintenance at some point this weekend. The outage will probably only be a couple of hours. This should not affect the main Rampant Games website ( http://rampantgames.com ) Sorry I don’t have a more specific time, but – in the words of Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5, I’m […]

Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Game Design, Research, and Mortality

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2014

A weird, personal note today. Several years ago, I did a great deal of research for a game I still want to do someday. I backed off on it because I realized I didn’t have the chops yet to pull it off. So I put it on the shelf for a while. I haven’t given […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: Read the First Comment

Movie: Knights of Badassdom

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 24, 2014

Knights of Badassdom is a horror / comedy movie about LARPers (Live Action Role-Players), featuring Ryan Kwanten, Summer Glau, Peter Dinklage, and Steve Zahn. I’d been following it for a while, during it’s seemingly unending quest for distribution. Like most indie movies – especially those not trying to be controversial or artsy-fartsy – it experienced […]

Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Evermore – An Adventure Theme Park?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 23, 2014

Anybody remember the “Dream Park” series by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes? It was basically about a massive high-tech theme park for LARPing (before that was such a thing). Since then, we’ve seen variations on that idea in real life come about in small ways. But it looks like somebody’s going for it in a […]

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

Twelve Things I Learned at the Salt Lake Comic Con FanXperience

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 22, 2014

I went to the Salt Lake City Comic Con FanXperience (or “FanX”) over the weekend. With over 100,000 people there on the final day (Saturday), it was crowded but fun. The emphasis for FanX, as I understand it, is more on the broad spectrum of pop-culture fandom, whereas the Comic Con event (to be held […]

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Overwhelmed By Choice

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 21, 2014

This weekend wiped me out, and kept me going almost constantly. I have a couple of unfinished larger posts, but I didn’t want to leave you empty-handed on a Monday. So here are a couple of things continuing to make me think: “An Algorithm for Discovering Hidden Gems” by Lars Doucet talks about putting in […]

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

Comic Con FanX Thoughts: Making It Real

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 18, 2014

I’m hitting the Salt Lake City Comic Con FanXperience this weekend. I just got through the first day, and only a few hours after-work at that, but I had a pretty good time. I was pondering on the whole geek-gathering thing while sitting in the hall munching on a sandwich for dinner. I have coworkers […]

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

Lord British Wants *You* to Port His RPG…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 17, 2014

This looks like fun for programmers around here… Before there was Ultima, before there was even Akalabeth: World of Doom, there was…. DnD1. On a PDP 11 mini-computer. There’s a one-month contest going on at Richard Garriott’s Portalarium – a contest to port his first computer RPG to Unity and to the browser. This is […]

Filed Under: Programming - Comments: Read the First Comment

Eschalon Trilogy On Sale Today…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 16, 2014

GOG.COM is running a sale on the entire Eschalon series, from Basilisk Games, today only. Indie Gem Promo: Eschalon Series If you are a fan of old-school style RPGs, or indie RPGs, this series belongs in your library. I dunno what else to say. The price they have for the entire series is less than […]

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

The Best-Kept Secrets

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 15, 2014

I once heard a veteran of the arcade-game industry talk about how the arcades were a great place for business Darwinism: Rapid turn-around, and the successes quickly rose to the top while the lesser games – and it was implied these were “not great” games though not necessarily bad games – quickly disappeared. According to […]

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

Lights Turned Off in the World of Darkness

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2014

Bummer: CCP Games Halts Development of World of Darkness MMO. I was really looking forward to seeing how they “solved” this one. I guess they didn’t. I think I was always more of a fan of the theory behind the RPG system than the implementation, although I really loved Mage and played a bit of […]

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights – Sorry, the Princess is in Another Castle

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 11, 2014

In development of Frayed Knights 1: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, a lot of the time and effort in the latter stages of the project was devoted to dealing with scaling the game. A lot of the practices which worked okay for one or two dungeons didn’t scale well to making two dozen locations. There was […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Game Dev Quote of the Week – Getting it Done

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 10, 2014

Designer / Developer Chris DeLeon , speaking on the matters of … uh, how to finish your game: “It’s common now to see developers finish game jam games more ready for public release than their long-term projects. The two main factors that seem to contribute are having a smaller scope and an unmoving deadline. The […]

Filed Under: Production, Quote of the Week - Comments: Comments are off for this article



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