Friday, July 28, 2006
Utah Indie Game Dev Night - Summer 2006
Greg Squire beat me to the punch this time around on the report on the indie night. It was the biggest turnout yet - though fortunately not by as large of a margin as last time:
Greg Squire's Utah Indie Game Dev Night Report
In all honesty, I kinda gave up trying to see everything this time around - even though I didn't show a demo this time in order to see more. Frankly, it's starting to get to be too much to keep track of. That's not a bad thing - I think it's awesome that Utah is building up such a thriving indie community.
First of all - yes, there were some companies hiring / recruiting there. ITT Tech, of course, as well as Wahoo / NinjaBee and Head Gate. ITT Tech has a game design program here in Utah (!) as of 9 months ago, and it's a Bachelor's degree that kinda piggybacks off their multimedia arts Associates Degree program. Ray Rackiewicz was looking to reach out to the indie community here (WOW! We are a community now! Awesome!), possibly recruit students, possibly recruit instructors, keeping abreast of "real world" needs in the games industry, and I'm sure finding out what kind of employment opportunities might be available was on his to-do list as well. It was great having him and several of his students there.
A few things that really impressed me last night:
Vespers 3D
This has been blogged about over at GarageGames in the past, and I was impressed then. Seeing it in action was even more fascinating. The idea here is to take an old, classic "interactive fiction" game, and wrap that TYPE of gameplay in a 3D world. This isn't just doing a graphical adventure, and it's not just about adding pictures to a text adventure. Mike (it WAS Mike, right?) was explaining how they were trying to find a find balance between the hardcore Interactive Fiction crowd (many of whom are none to happy about corrupting the purity of the text adventure with pictures), and those who will be playing the game specifically because of it's beautiful graphics (and may not want to bother to read).The interesting thing here for me, personally, is that the game here is just as tightly limited in scope as the original adventure, which occured largely in one (large) location - a monestary on a mountain above a village. There are six NPCs (other monks, I understand) to interact with. The pacing and action of the classic text adventure game is slow and methodical. It's about problem solving and logic. Think about this for a moment from the perspective of an indie:
We're talking a FRACTION of the content requirements of a mainstream first-person perspective game. Think about the beautiful architecture of those Unreal 3 videos and screenshots - and how players will largely just blow past it without sparing it a second glance in the middle of a team deathmatch. But in this sort of game, a handful of locations are your game. You could focus on quality instead of quantity. Granted, the slower pace might not appeal to all audiences. But it struck me as a brilliant idea.
Besides, wouldn't it be COOL to do Zork again in a 3D world? Well, maybe. I don't know if the graphics could ever match my own mental image of the Great Underground Empire. But I can dream...
I Got Balls 3
Victor apparently has a goal of having a new game every Indie Night. His Flat Red Ball technology is REALLY friggin' cool *AND* it's absolutely free, as are his games. He calls it his "anti-profit plan." While some may question his sanity, none can question his talent. If you are a new indie looking for technology to begind game development on an extremely limited budget, I'd recommend taking a look at what Flat Red Ball can do. I didn't see it in action, but I heard numerous reports about how awesome his tools were, especially his GUI creation tools.I Got Balls 3 is a Snood-style game which is playable multiplayer. We used XBox controllers plugged into the USB ports on Victor's laptop and... well, we had a ball. It's a fun little game - and was completed in only about 3 months. That alone is extremely impressive.
Caster
Mike Smith's "Caster" has been a regular demo at about every Indie Night since we started. It's coming along very nicely now - it looks VERY different from the original version we saw a year ago. The graphics and special effects are really starting to look polished, and the gameplay has evolved quite a bit.
Mike and I had a little bit of a discussion about where he wants to go from here, though, and he's got ideas for a new game that will take MUCH better advantage of the technology he's created for Caster. It'll be a related project --- and frankly sounds like a winner. Now if we can just get him to FINISH Caster... 'cuz I wanna play the finished version!
Anyway, those are some of my observations this time around. Once again, I left the meeting feeling like an under-achiever. There is some great enthusiasm and great titles coming from the Utah indie community, and I'm just thrilled to be a small part of it.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:06 PM (Permalink)
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I'm jealous! We have the Boston Post Mortem in MA, which draws a big crowd, but is really not indie-centric. (Though this coming month, Jason Della Roca is speaking, so for August, we'll have indie influences.)
Folks occasionally show videos of their latest work at the Post Mortems, but allowing people to sit down and play seems like an especially good idea. I love my laptop, but with its Intel "Extreme" 2 graphics, it just can't handle 3D well.
Still, you've inspired me to see if I can cobble together a hands-on demo for September.
Folks occasionally show videos of their latest work at the Post Mortems, but allowing people to sit down and play seems like an especially good idea. I love my laptop, but with its Intel "Extreme" 2 graphics, it just can't handle 3D well.
Still, you've inspired me to see if I can cobble together a hands-on demo for September.
If you'll pardon my double-posting, Vespers 3D is particularly interesting to me, as our first project was an attempt at modernizing the text adventure. The Argon Forest was not nearly as lush as Vespers 3D, but the goal was similar: to provide the depth of a text-based game (specifically a MUD) while appealing to a more modern eye.
The prototype evolved from text to a crude graphical prototype and finally working alpha where players could interact with the environment with the same complexity found in a text adventure.
Unfortunately, I lost sight of the design, and ended up making a mess of it. We spent 2 years developing the game, and during that time, our smaller puzzle games earned us money, while Argon earned us nothing. It was really a heart-and-soul effort, so emotionally, it was tough to kill that baby off. But it was the right thing to do.
I still hope to revive that project in some form. Someday. :)
The prototype evolved from text to a crude graphical prototype and finally working alpha where players could interact with the environment with the same complexity found in a text adventure.
Unfortunately, I lost sight of the design, and ended up making a mess of it. We spent 2 years developing the game, and during that time, our smaller puzzle games earned us money, while Argon earned us nothing. It was really a heart-and-soul effort, so emotionally, it was tough to kill that baby off. But it was the right thing to do.
I still hope to revive that project in some form. Someday. :)
Thanks for the kind words, Jay -- and yes, it's Mike. It's always nice to hear about interest in our project. This whole thing was originally intended to be just an experiment, to see if we could capture some of the immersiveness and interactivity of the old text games and add to it by providing visuals and space. But it seems like there is a growing interest in something along these lines, even if it ends up just being a niche product. I'm pretty happy how it has come along so far, but there are still some pretty large hurdles ahead of us.
I think you're right in that the limited scope of the game means we do only need a fraction of the content, and you're also right that we can focus on quality instead of quantity. But that represents a different challenge: because you have limited amount of content, you have to make sure the content you have is really high-quality stuff. When your players are blowing through rooms looking for something to frag, you can afford to cut a few corners, but when the setting is such a huge focus, you have to make sure it's immersive and believable.
The same goes for the NPCs. They are the real focus of the game, and that means you really need good quality models and good quality animations to pull it off, and I think that's tough stuff for indies to deal with. Well, at least this indie...;)
We decided to take the approach of starting with a great story game, and building from there. In a sense, it draws many parallels with the relationship between a book and the movie based on it. The challenges are similar, and I'm sure the criticism will be as well. But it will definitely be interesting to find out how it's received. Thanks again for another great night!
I think you're right in that the limited scope of the game means we do only need a fraction of the content, and you're also right that we can focus on quality instead of quantity. But that represents a different challenge: because you have limited amount of content, you have to make sure the content you have is really high-quality stuff. When your players are blowing through rooms looking for something to frag, you can afford to cut a few corners, but when the setting is such a huge focus, you have to make sure it's immersive and believable.
The same goes for the NPCs. They are the real focus of the game, and that means you really need good quality models and good quality animations to pull it off, and I think that's tough stuff for indies to deal with. Well, at least this indie...;)
We decided to take the approach of starting with a great story game, and building from there. In a sense, it draws many parallels with the relationship between a book and the movie based on it. The challenges are similar, and I'm sure the criticism will be as well. But it will definitely be interesting to find out how it's received. Thanks again for another great night!
# posted by 
: July 29, 2006 4:30 PM
: July 29, 2006 4:30 PM
Unfortunately, I lost sight of the design, and ended up making a mess of it. We spent 2 years developing the game.
So --- may I ask in good ol' fashioned post-mortem style, what was the mistake? How did you go off-course? What was the vision of the design that you should have held to?
So --- may I ask in good ol' fashioned post-mortem style, what was the mistake? How did you go off-course? What was the vision of the design that you should have held to?
So --- may I ask in good ol' fashioned post-mortem style, what was the mistake?
It was a matter of trying to lean more towards generating content as a way of providing gameplay rather than creating a complex set of rules to maximize the small amount of content we could produce. As indies, I think we have to rely on the latter more than the former, and that's something I still have problems with.
Durnit.
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It was a matter of trying to lean more towards generating content as a way of providing gameplay rather than creating a complex set of rules to maximize the small amount of content we could produce. As indies, I think we have to rely on the latter more than the former, and that's something I still have problems with.
Durnit.
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