Playing Video Games Improves Performance...
... If you are a surgeon. This is an old article, but cool:

Surgeons May Err Less By Playing Video Games

So, the next time you need surgery, be sure and ask your surgeon if he's a game fan. You'll have a 37% less chance of him zigging instead of zagging... at least, if it's labarascopic surgery.

Just out of curiosity, I was looking up a few of the other ways playing video games have proven (or are at least suspected of being) beneficial:

* Apparently, it's also good for pilots. Though flight-sim fans (many real-world pilots) believed that for years.

* And they've adapted game controllers for treatment of children with ADD, based on a NASA study in the 1990's.

* It's already well-known that active games like DDR (which in one case was a significant factor in a girl losing 95 pounds), or possibly the new Wii games, can be a very fun way to get exercise that we as a society are sorely lacking.

* Games are being used in health care to help treat certain physical conditions, and as a powerful distraction for children undergoing painful medical treatments.

* Researchers are demonstrating that games are, of course, a powerful training tool. Even plain ol' popular commercial games are

* And researchers at the University of Rochester have determined that action-gamers may be better drivers, due to better attunement to their surroundings. All that time spent trying to frag and avoid being fragged may be paying off, especially as you age. So kids, please get your grandpa hooked on some first-person shooters! For all our sakes!

* The Medical Virtual Reality Center is using the Unreal Tournament game engine to study (and hopefully treat) acrophobia and balance disorders.

* Dr. Scott Rigby and Dr. Richard Ryan believe that games fulfill certain deep psychological needs in players - specifically, the need for a feeling of competence, the need for autonomy and freedom, and the need for connectedness with other human beings (possible through online gaming). Besides just making the games "fun," in theory this might lead to greater self-confidence and even (gasp!) improved social skills in players. Of course, getting involved in a team sport would do the same thing... but hey, it's something.

None of this is exactly breaking news, but nice to see nonetheless, especially after enduring the last year or so of villification of videogames by politicians.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:44 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
NinjaBee's Next Indie Game: Band of Bugs
NinjaBee's new XBox 360 Game has FINALLY been announced officially. We ended up renaming the game to "Band of Bugs," but this is our IGF nominee formerly known as "Bugs of War"... finally revealed to the public.

I really, really wish I could say I was involved in this one, but I've been on different teams. I haven't even played anything resembling a recent build. But I've seen it in action, though, and it looks very, very awesome. If you have an XBox 360 and LiveArcade, you'll definitely want to try it out. Turn Based Single-Player and Multiplayer Tactical Combat...

With Bugs. The fun, playable kind, not the broken-game kind.

Labels: Game Announcements, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:20 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Telengard - My First CRPG
It's no secret that I'm a little bit of a retrogamer. Having come from an era where state-of-the-art meant moving a giant pixel around a maze being chased by a golden duck-looking thing, I don't need photorealistic graphics to bolster my imagination. But going back and looking at the games of the past reminds me of the good, the bad, and the very very UGLY that have been with us ever since some MIT students decided to make their oscilliscope do something more than plot waveforms.

We complain about clones and mediocrity and lack of innovation today, but a quick visit down emulation lane will remind you of two things:

#1 - There were a TON of Galaxian and Space Invaders clones, and

#2 - There were a TON of innovative games that sucked.

My first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, had only 1K of RAM and a membrane keyboard. Since storing what was on the screen would have taken pretty much all of it's memory, it instead constantly recalculated what was supposed to appear when it was idle. This meant that as you ran a program, or even pressed a key (I use the term "key" loosely to describe pressing on the membrane in the location where a key would be), the screen would blank out. All of the computer's 3.25 megahertz processing power was too busy processing to bother drawing the screen at that point.

I wrote some extremely trivial games for that machine, but it wasn't until the release of the Commodore 64 that I had a machine capable of actually playing games. I got one hot off the assembly line (for $600!), and for a while had to content myself with writing my own games, as there was no software available for it. Then the games started appearing ... mostly ports from other machines at first. And originally they were only available on cassette. Finally, though, the disk-based games started appearing (though the C-64's disk drive was notoriously slow - only slightly faster than cassette). One night I finally got ahold of an honest-to-goodness "Roleplaying Game" for the computer. At last I could practice my mad D&D skillz!

The game was called "Telengard." I enjoyed it because it was the only RPG I had - and one of very few then available for the C64.

The game began, faithful to its D&D roots, by presenting you with randomly generated stats for your character. If you weren't already familiar with D&D (or hadn't read through the documentation), you found yourself facing some confusing abbreviations: STR, INT, WIS, CON, DEX, CHR. And the numbers were obviously generated by a 3d6 roll. The numbers were re-rolled every few seconds (or you could hit a key to re-roll them immediately), leaving you only a short time to decide whether or not to keep that "character." If you could get all double-digits with at least one 17 or 18, you were golden.

Once you chose your stats, you were able to pick a character name, and off you went to the dungeon, just below the staple of almost all Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, the tavern. Why they had a tavern sitting right above the dungeon, I'll never know. In this case, it was called, "The Worthy Meade Inn." There were something like a hundred different taverns sitting at every entrance to the dungeon, with algorithmically-generated names.

Does that sound like a lot? It was. Telengard was all about algorithmically generated everything. Yes, long before Spore. The dungeon was something like 50 levels deep with a total of about 2 million rooms. Far more than could be stored in the C-64's 48,000 bytes of usable memory. So they were all calculated. This way you had a 2-million room dungeon that never changed.

I don't remember if there was actually any kind of GOAL to the game other than to survive and get very powerful. Certainly being able to make it down to level 50 was a large enough goal that I doubt very many people achieved (without dying almost immediately because they were teleported there).

Mostly, the game was taking chances with randomness. There were random monsters, random treasures, thrones and boxes which would do random things to you if you touched them, and of course the occasional random teleport which could deposit you a dozen levels below with no idea of how to escape, which was effectively the same as killing you, but with a time delay. And when you died, it would erase your character.

Yeah, we liked a little PAIN in our games back then.

It took many, many character deaths to map out a playable section of the dungeon. I'd map things out meticulously (after my first few deaths) so that my next character might have the advantage of a safe route to the next stairway down. In case he lived long enough to use it. Eventually, I started pulling my disk halfway out of the drive after I saved the game at the Inn, so I wouldn't lose my character.

I think I got about as low as level 7 or 8. Then I got my hands on better games.

Now, if you really want to experience the joy and pain of Telengard, there's a free version out now that almost perfectly re-creates the original experience... except for character perma-death. If you remember the original, or are idly curious, or have a masochistic streak, you can try it out here:

Telengard Remake

Otherwise, there are better "roguelike" games out there (like THIS ONE!) that are superior in pretty much every way today. But it is kinda fun to go back and visit the past, and I have to admit that Telengard still has some mild entertainment value after all these years.

(Vaguely) related results of a printer explosion:
* The Evolution of Computer RPGs
* But Is It An RPG?
* An RPG In A Week
* A Couple of Classic RPGs
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Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:51 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Indie Games for the Wii? Oui!
I guess it's official:

"Nintendo has developed a programming system that will allow small independent developers to make games for Wii download service.

"We cannot confirm at this time in what format the new content will be delivered, but in the future there will be original games available for download through the Wii Shop."

Details are, of course, sketchy at this time. But it seems Microsoft's LiveArcade has changed the face of console gaming for the forseeable future.

Check out the small (but full) article here:
Nintendo to Offer Original Game Downloads For the Wii.
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Labels: Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:24 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
The Slamdance Aftermath
The New York Times has an outstanding article about the controversy surrounding this year's Slamdance and independent games. Entitled, "Video Game Tests the Limits. The Limits Win," it is full of some fascinating quotes by those involved.

Me? I'm optimistic. First off, this controversy has resulted in some of the most intense publicity independent games - specifically more serious or artistic games - has ever received. And probably some of the more significant publicity Slamdance has gained in recent years.

I mean... The New York Freaking Times! And many other mainstream, traditional press channels have also picked up the story.

Is this a good thing? I think so. It's making people stop, think, and consider.

Utah's HB 50, the resurrected bill to stick videogame violence in the anti-pornography "Materials Harmful to Minors" law, failed to pass committee on Friday. It was blocked by a vote of 7-2. This compares starkly with it's previous incarnation from last year, when it passed through committee and enjoyed nearly unanimous support in the Utah House of Representatives. While I've no doubt that the failure of similar laws in a couple more states since then were a more significant factor, the bill was reviews just as the press and even the sponsoring representative brought up the topic of Slamdance's indie game festival controversy.

The issue of games as a protected form of artistic expression is starting to be taken seriously. As are indie games. It's not something that's going to happen overnight, or without more pain and a lot more discussion. But it smells a little bit like progress to me.

I think it's safe to predict that 2007 is going to be a very interesting year for indie games.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:52 PM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Star Trek V Rocks!
I never thought I'd say this, but I just saw Star Trek V, and loved it. But there was a trick to it. Which didn't involve alcohol of any kind (at least, not that I know of).

I first saw it nearly twenty years ago, shortly after it's release (I avoided seeing it in the theater, thankfully), thinking, "How badly can they screw it up? It's Star Trek." Just like that American Godzilla movie, I was both amazed and appalled by the fact that yes, they COULD screw it up that bad.

When I discovered "Mystery Science Theater 3000," I always wanted them to "do" Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, but I knew they could never afford the license to Paramount's baby. But years after the demise of both Star Trek (for now) and MST-3K (forever, probably), Mike Nelson created a new company called "RiffTrax," which basically continues the MST-3K joke of "riffing" on a movie. The riffs are sold as separate audio commentaries that you have to sync up to the movies. And play it on a separate MP3 - playing device.

Yeah, it's kind of a pain to set up. But once set up, it worked like a charm.

We invited a bunch of friends, called it a party, brought food, and figured that even if it sucked, we'd have a good time together, and play some multiplayer Guitar Hero afterwards. So it was a win / win. I downloaded the commentary onto the laptop, hooked it up to some speakers, and went through the synching-up process, and then let it rip to a living room of about fifteen adults.
It did not dissapoint.

I don't know if all the RiffTrax commentaries are this funny, but this one had some of us were falling out of our chairs by the end of the evening. While it didn't have the intermissions with the dumb skits or the "mads" or anything, it still felt a lot like good ol' MST-3K. The commentaries got a little bit edgier, but seemed more in the PG or PG-13 range. If you don't mind some jokes about Spock & Kirk's possible... relationship... you won't be offended.

The experiment was enough of a success that we unanimously decided to try it again, soon. I'd be hesitant to try a commentary with just Mike Nelson... so much of the humor worked because Mike & Kevin played off of each other so well.

Anyway, if you were ever an MST-3K fan, I recommend giving them a try, and let me know how it goes. I recommend a larger group of like-minded nuts, if you can swing it. If you hated MST-3K --- Well, this really is more of the same, so don't bother.

But now Star Trek V has been transformed in my memory as something associated with happy thoughts instead of pain. That, to me, is pretty dang impressive.

Labels: Movies

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:03 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Design: Picking Apart Flash Element TD
I haven't played the original Warcraft III mod on which Flash Element TD is based, but I have put way too much time into playing the flash game. Well, not so much now that I nearly broke 100K. But while the praise may belong more to the fans and developers who created and evolved the gameplay that the flash game was modeled after, I think David Scott's game is a model of simplicity and elegance in game design. And I'm really excited about his new project, "Flash Circle TD" (which he's shown a WIP video below).



So what has made Flash Element TD so popular? Besides the fact that it's free...

I don't think it's not the ripped-off Warcraft III graphics. I believe it's *gasp* pure gameplay. There are a few simple factors that interact together to form an elegance of decision-making. I don't consider myself a very good game designer by any means, but since I have been paid to do work in that capacity before, I'll pretend that I know what I'm talking about.

First of all, the game has a direct contention between long-term and short-term goals. Short term safety is only gained at the expense of long-term gains --- both in points, and in the capacity to provide further safety. The interest gained at the end of each turn - especially with the interest rate upgrades - is not only a huge factor in the final score, but is absolutely critical in surviving the later rounds. Spending all you have to fight off the critters will soon lead you to a point where you can no longer keep up.

To make the delicate balance even more interesting, being overly cautious in favor of the long-term view will not only bring you closer to losing the game, but will also impact your gold, depleting the very resource you were trying to save. Also, if you find that you erred on the side of being too conservative, rushing to remedy the situation later rather than sooner may end up costing more than if you'd done it correctly in the first place.

Each tower and its upgraded versions have three major, differing characteristics: Fire Rate, Damage, and range. They always seem to fire at the furthest-along creep that is within their fire range. With this standard behavior, on a linear track with no overlapping fire zones you could calculate exactly how much damage a tower could do to a line of creeps of given length. You could divide this damage by gold piece cost and probably figure an optimal cost / damage strategy based on that.

But there are some really fun wrinkles that give the game the "Emergent Complexity" Noah Falstein talks about. The biggest is placement. Because the path the AI takes twists and bends around, not all positions are created equal. So the equations to calculate the optimum cost-effectiveness of a tower is much more complex. For the arrow towers, which have increasing ranges as they are upgraded, it's even more complicated, as optimal positioning for a level 1 arrow tower isn't the same as a level 3.

Then there's the issue of two towers with overlapping firezones, and "spillover" when a unit is killed (the extra damage that would have been done just "goes away"), and gaps in the line as critters in the middle of the line get taken out. But wait, there's more!

A huge factor is the special abilities of certain weapons and levels where the critters are immune or resistant to those special abilities. "Splash damage" radius for several weapons acts as a multiplier to their damage when creatures are not spaced far apart. The water tower slows creatures down, allowing other weapons within range to do more damage to a line (especially with splash-damage weapons, as slowed creatures tend to bunch up), but certain levels have creatures immune to their effects. Cannons and air towers have restrictions on what creatures they can hit. And then there's the boss levels, where optimum placement for defeating lines of creatures might be less effective against a single, high-hit-point boss.

The ability to sell off towers - even in mid-level - is another very interesting mechanic that throws a wrench into the works of the best-laid strategies. Because levels contain uniform groups of creatures (something I once thought was a design flaw, but I've changed my mind on it for this very reason), sometimes towers might only be desired for a single level. Once the last critter has passed that tower's range (or possibly even before), it's possible to sell it off for a 75% refund. Interest is only calculated at the end of a level, so if you have your towers places so that you can sell unneeded towers before the last critter dies, you can still use that gold to earn more money.

As to deficiencies, the biggest is a lack of any sort of "save game" option. In order to go back and tinker with your strategy, you have to start over from the beginning. That's a big reason I haven't gone back and tried to break 100,000 points.

You can overlap tower positions, but it's a pain in the interface. Either that ability should have been removed entirely from the game, or made simple to do. Apparently, for the upcoming circle TD, that will no longer be possible.

The interest rate research item is such an overwhelmingly potent factor in final score that there is really no choice in the matter for your first researches. This is too bad, as the other tower types can be interesting choices earlier in the game. The uniform monster types are another factor that discourage selection of certain research items until late in the game (if ever). For example, the levels consisting entirely of "immune" creatures makes the selection of the water tower ineffective until after the last "immune" level. Since you are going to have to be able to take on several levels without them anyway (except for their damage - which is small but rapid and splashing), there's no point in incorporating them into your overall placement strategy.

While it's hardly a deficiency, I can't help wondering what interesting twists a different map layout would have. Though with the limited screen real-estate available for the map, I don't know how much layout variety would be available beyond what's already there.

Ultimately, the thing that fascinates me about Flash Element TD (and all Tower Defense style games, from the limited number I've played) is how the interaction of simple elements can combine to create such compelling gameplay. It gives me something to think about.


(Vaguely) related howlings at a digital moon:
* Designing a Computer RPG Rule System
* How Do You Create "Fun?"
* Free Game: Flash Element Tower Defense
* Mistakes in Game Design

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Labels: Free Games, Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:50 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Blame It On The Arcades
I 'discovered' videogames in the summer of 1981 - on a road trip with my dad (my "adopted" father though at that time he was still a fairly new stepfather). We were in Phoenix, Arizona for a three-day conference he was attending. While we were there, I learned (overhearing a phone conversation) of some severe marital problems my parents were going through. It didn't look like they were going to stay together much past this little trip.

Distracted and upset over the possible drastic changes in my family's lives, I found myself wandering around the hotel while my dad was away. It didn't take long to discover the game room.

The videogame "revolution" (fad, as many called it) was just beginning to hit the big time at that point. Arcades were sprouting up everwhere. And nearly every restaurant or other business with a throughput of walk-in customers had one or more of these arcade games set up in the corner, hoping to draw a few extra quarters from passers-by. It's probably a little hard to believe for anyone that missed that area, but arcade machines were uniquitous. Or at least, getting that way.

The game room of the hotel had three arcade machines, including "Asteroids", a game that I had played briefly before. But this time I played it (and the two others, Laser Blast and Star Hawk, I think) in earnest. Asteroids, in particular, was an escape and a twelve-year-old's geek fantasy. The thrumming heartbeat sound-effect helped raise the tension as rocks and saucers closed in. Even though the implied pilot of the rockets of Asteroids was ultimately doomed in every game, with no way to "win," the threats surrounding him were material and could be staved off indefinitely with skill and rapid taps of the fire button, and the player could feel the euphoria of beating back impossible odds - at least for the time being.

In Asteroids, even though your salvation was hard-coded to be forever beyond your reach and skill, your fate was nevertheless under your control. When you played the game, you were the most important person in that mini-universe, and you had POWER. Due to my circumstances, I think that was exactly what I craved those three days. In fact, that explains a lot of the draw videogames have over anyone.

Regardless of cause, I was hooked. I spent way too much money on that machine. And as I ran low on money, I watched other players. I wondered what other secrets lay in that virtual universe behind the glowing vector-graphics screen. Eventually, I learned that the answer was, "nothing," but I didn't know that at the time. Instead, I fantasized about what kinds of amazing possibilities there were for the game. I began to imagine the amazing possibilities of all of these games - the ones I'd played before, and ones I could only imagine now. I had no concept of their limitations, only their potential.

We continued our trip to Colorado, to drop off a car for my stepbrother. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to explore the Academy's game room, but I did get a peek at a game I didn't see again until last year. A cadet was battling fighters ripped off from Star Wars in a game called "Tunnel Hunt." I didn't have a chance to play it, but I felt its pull, and realized that I was hooked.

The next day, I flew to Illinois and spent the next eight weeks in a tiny town called Addieville, Illinois. A speck that only appears on some maps. I was spending the rest of the summer with my "real" father (I hesitate to use that adjective, but he's my father by blood and birth). He'd recently remarried, and my brothers and I would be spending time with our new relations in a small, 90-year-old house. I think the only real business in Addieville was a single tavern called "Bobby's Hi-Lo." Besides alcohol they also served sandwiches. And they had a juke box. And they had Pac-Man and Asteroids.

The most popular song in Addieville in the summer of 1981 was Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts," which actually set up a nice rhythm with the hearbeat thrumming of Asteroid's background. I found that the rhythm would actually help me keep pace with the game, and my scores actually improved when the song was playing in the background. Not that I'd ever spare a quarter for the jukebox if it DIDN'T happen to be playing. But to this day, the song and the sound effects for the game are indelibly intertwined in my brain. I can't play Asteroids without hearing that song. Which is funny, because other than that song, I really never liked Juice Newton.

My disease was also addictive. My new stepmother, Barbara, then got hooked. The two of us would compete for high scores. She preferred Pac-Man, but she loved getting on the high score table of Asteroids because her initials were "BAM." We loved seeing the high score list punctuated by what others might mistake for a mere onomatopoeia.

The coolest thing about this though, was what outsiders to the arcade scene never quite understood, was the social aspect. The quarters went all too quickly. But the shared fascination with these games gave us something more to talk about. While it wasn't universal, people who played these games also TALKED about them. We discussed strategies, compared scores, talked about what we liked about them, told each other about new ones that we'd discovered, and swapped stories of our victories.

My stepsister joined in the fun to a lesser extent. One day she mentioned to me that her uncle (I think) actually WROTE games like that for computers. That concept floored me. While I'd realized that SOMEONE had to have written these games, the idea that it might be a person that someone might actually know. A real person. I pressed her for answers to questions she didn't know --- such as exactly HOW he made those games. I couldn't get my brain around it. Communicating a game design to a computer --- how was it done?

How did you tell the computer how to draw the ship in Asteroids? How did you tell it how big to make it? How exactly did you make the computer produce the images and behavior that were in your head? (Sometimes I STILL wonder that...) We visited the library, and I checked out books on computer programming in an effort to find out. The books available at the time were dense tomes on opcodes and operands for assembly language for "minicomputers" like the PDP series. Nothing on how to make Asteroids. (Nowadays, the problem is too MANY books on he subject...)

Weeks later, I returned home, to find my parents were still together (for another seven years, at least), though Barbara shortly thereafter got a divorce. I spoke to her briefly over the phone in the fall, but never heard from her or her family again. I wonder if she still plays games.

For me, the obsession had only begun.



(Vaguely) related wastes of perfectly good pixels:
* Pac Man Fever!
* So How Do I Make a Game? Part I
* A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different
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Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:34 PM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
Vespers 3D Progress
Mike Rubin has written a great article on the current progress of Vespers 3D, the 3D Indie Interactive fiction game I interviewed him about last year. Even if you aren't a developer, you can get some insight into the challenges he's facing on the project with the parser, voice recording, and so forth.

Check out the article HERE.



(Vaguely) related blabbering:
* Mike Rubin interview part I
* Mike Rubin interview part II
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
* How Do I Get Past The Harpies?

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Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:14 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
A Belated Meme Thing
Apparently, I was tagged by Tachevert over at World IV to participate in the "Tell Five Things You Don't Know About Me" blogging meme a couple of weeks back, but I missed it. I'd just come back from vacation and had to dive head first into a new project with a looming milestone and.... *tries to think of more lame excuses*.

Better late than never, I guess. Besides, it's "massively multiplayer gaming" at it's best, without expensive servers or subscription costs! Incidentally, a partial lineage is: Susan Wu (who sent this into the gaming blogosphere)-> Raph Koster -> Broken Toys -> Mythical Blog -> MMODig -> Gaming Bitch -> World IV -> Li'l Ol Me.

So here goes: Five Things You Don't Know About Me. Unless you already do:

#1 - I'm a hillbilly. I was born in West Virginia, and lived in a place called Tick Ridge. I kid you not. My grandparents were just up from a place called Mud Suck. It used to be about two hours from Charleston, but a freeway made it closer to a half-hour. Talking to my aunt about a year ago, I learned that now Charleston has grown to the point where it's pretty much IN Charleston now. Oh, and developers have come in and, in an effort to make the area more sellable, have re-christened it "Cedar Hills" or something like that for the maps. But the locals still call it Tick Ridge.

We moved out when I was only five or so, during my mom's divorce. Flitted about to Florida, Maryland, Alabama, and then back to Maryland again (where I spent my teenaged years, and I guess that's where I lost my accent).

#2 - I'm adopted. Partially. When my mom remarried, my stepfather (who we soon just called "dad") offered to adopt her three boys, and we took him up on it. I think I was just starting junior high at the time. So I officially changed my name from "Murphy" to "Barnson". Irish to Icelandic. Go figger.

#3 - My first job was at a toy store. I missed the worst of the Teddy Ruxpin craze, but I was fully exposed to (the deliberate, I think) undersupply of Lazer Tag. I learned firsthand the horrors of the Christmas Rush. And I faced accusations by desperate customers of hording massive supplies of Cabbage Patch Kids in the back room. I got to participate in little "sting" operations to catch 14-year-old shoplifters. And I had to endure dressing up in a pink promotional costume. At least it was better than working at a fast-food place.

#4 - I'm an active Mormon. As I live in Utah, this shouldn't be too surprising, as that's about half the state (well, Mormon, if not active). And then I think I mentioned that I went to Brigham Young University, which is kind of a dead giveaway. I don't drink, don't smoke, was married in the temple, go to church on Sunday, served a mission, pay 10% of my income in tithing, and all that. But I do play D&D, have written some somewhat violent videogames, and have done my own minor bit of campaigning in support of freedom of speech over "protecting the children." All that and I teach Sunday School, too. I'm like a renaissance geek or something, huh? Okay, maybe not.

#5 - I've considered careers in acting and writing. I was a pretty decent actor in a high school somewhat famous (or notorious) for its theater program. But, that's high school, and I really wasn't sure I wanted to try that for a career. I also thought more than once about writing fiction professionally. But I enjoy programming too much for now, and as those who regularly read this blog can attest, my skills may be a little ... lacking. :)


Okay, it's traditional that I now, in true chain-letter fashion, pass this along to five other innocents whom I don't believe have done this yet. And assuming they are more on-the-ball than I am, they may or may not respond by listing five things we'll wish we'd never learned about them. Hey, it's a topic for a slow news day, at least.

So here we go --- tag, you are it! Let's go with Jacob Proffitt of The Rabid Paladin, Shamus Young of Twenty Sided Tale, Jana (~J) of Eeps, Meeps, and Ipes, Scorpia of Scorpia's Gaming Lair, and David Michael of JoeIndie.com. That should give us a cross-section of game journalists, game developers, and gamers.

(I would pick Weird Al, but I don't think he'd respond. And while it's not a requirement, I don't think he's a gamer. Though apparently he's a wiz at Minesweeper and can play for days, and once we see his sweet moves, we'll stay amazed at his fingers moving so fast it'll set the place ablaze....)
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:37 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Nevermind Slamdance.... How About Sundance?
I haven't heard any details about Slamdance's panel Sunday to talk about their decision to remove a game from their "Guerilla Gamemakers" competition AFTER it had become a finalist. What was said, if it even made a difference, I have no idea.

While it certainly matters, there is the possibility of an even bigger opportunity for indie game developers, and a festival showcasing work based more upon true artistic merits than controversy (not that I'm denying the power of controversy to force attention to important topics). Apparently, a panel was held Saturday to consider the possibility of an Indie Games Festival in the future at Sundance. I have no idea if this panel was in any way officially affiliated with the world-famous independent film festival, but some of the attendees were in town for that reason.

This could be extremely exciting if it actually happens. If so, and if Slamdance gets its act together and commits to gaming as medium, Januaries in Utah will become much more exciting...


Tip o' the fedora to Jana (~J), of Eeps, Meeps, and Ipes, for finding this little tidbit of awesomeness.

(Vaguely) related yammerings:
* Super Columbine Massacre RPG too hot for Slamdance?
* IGF Finalists Announced - We're In!
* 2006 Indie RPGs of the Year Announced
* Do Games Matter?

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Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:31 PM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Cutting Out The Suck
You might remember an article I wrote some time ago on "Red Line Analysis" of games. This was based on a trick I heard a professional writers' group use - they drew a red line at the point in the manuscript where they expected a reader or editor to quit reading. They'd return the manuscript, and the original author would endeavor to move the red line back, a little further with each revision.

As noted last year, I think the same thing can be done with games. I can't count the number of times when I've asked someone how they liked a game, and they tell me at which point they gave up playing. Usually it's due to filler making the game too tedius, some really critically annoying bug, or "the straw that broke the camel's back" of minor points of suckage accumulating until the player no longer likes the game. Sometimes it is a point (like a boss monster) where the difficulty jumps to a frustrating level very suddenly.

My favorite was an explanation of why a friend never got very far in Final Fantasy 7. "I quit when the houses started attacking me." I agreed that it was lamest monster in the game, and a very tedious random-encounter sequence. Maybe that was cool in Japan, but it was really lame in

The Suck List For Apocalypse Cow
Apocalypse Cow went alpha last week, which is kind of a fuzzy definition. Traditionally (especially in the hardware world), alpha testing meant that unit and module testing could begin, but that all of it didn't yet work together as a unit. For games, I consider Alpha to be kind of like the "rough draft" of the entire game - the first point at which you can say, "Okay, test this game."

For Apocalypse Cow, I'm trying to figure out how to implement the "red line" analysis on the game. My answer was, instead of a bug list, to create a "suck list." It's not about fixing bugs (though that's part of it) - it's about getting rid of everything that sucks.

To cut out the suck, I'm going through the game, and noting everything that sucks. As I'll be asking anyone testing it for me to do. Then, as with bug lists, there are priorities to be assigned. I'm used to bugs being prioritized "A," "B," "C," and / or "D," which typically mean something at beginning of testing, but in late testing everything gets almost arbitrarily assigned an "A' or "B" priority because everyone knows the C's and D's won't get fixed, or possibly even looked at. A bugs are typically disasterous crashing / game-destroying bugs, and B bugs are "critical."

Well, for the alpha-stage suck-list, this weekend I came up with a different priority scheme for Suckage. It seemed amusing and useful when I came up with it, so I'm sticking with it for now.

So here they are:

Blinding Suckage
Ther top priority is "Blindingly Sucking" problems. Anything issue that would be hard for a tester to see past to look for other areas of suckage is Blindingly Sucking and must be remedied before anyone else even looks at it. Crash bugs, major game-balance problems, and things that ruin saved games are obvious candidates for this category. But since I'm working with volunteer testers - including a lot of friends whom I wouldn't want to jeopardize relationships with by forcing them to sit through hours of annoyance, I also have to include anything that sucks too bad to be ignored by a sane human being. I don't want anybody to have to deal with Blinding Suckage but me.

Examples of Blinding Suckage: The Upgrade UI and the in-game HUD are absolutely horrible and provide little feedback to the player unless he knows what to look for. The player's helicopter jitters (badly on some machines). Missions aren't always ending when the timer runs out. The lighting is broken on some interior levels, rendering them almost unplayably dark (except you can fire your gun and use its dynamic lighting as a flashlight).

Embarassing Suckage
The next priority is "Embarassingly Suckage". These are things that suck so bad I'd be kind of embarassed for anyone else to see it until I get them fixed. They are things that kind-hearted testers might ignore as they push deeper into the game, but would probably leave a bad taste in their mouth to make them less likely to try out a future version. But I might let close friends hammer on a version with Embarassing Suckage without feeling like I am abusing their friendship too much.

Examples of Embarassing Suckage: The Zeppelins aren't dissapearing when they die. The tanks are shooting fireballs backwards and out of their treads. There is far too much stand-in content. There aren't instructions or feedback for some of the more complicated missions. The mid-game story screens need to be in with at least "placeholder art." So does the end-game story screens. Need to turn off dynamic lighting on most AI attacks - they are HAMMERING lower-end machines on the late-game interior levels.

Pre-Beta Suckage
Moving on down the priority list, there's the list of things that "Suck Too Much For Beta." Pretty much anything that noticeably sucks at this point that doesn't make the other two lists goes here. With the possible exception of some stand-in content and some known fine-tuning issues, anything with a known suck-factor must be removed before the game goes beta. Then in beta we'll find a bunch of Subtle Suckage. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Some examples of Pre-Beta Suckage: Dialogs are too wordy - need fewer words and a larger font. Need to fix sound effect priority. Guns far above / below the player in interior levels are still shooting. Player's guns should change visuals as they are upgraded. More powerful AI should differ in appearance from their earlier-game cousins (the ol' "different paint job means different danger!" trick). All sound effects need to be in and getting triggered (even if some sound effects are temp).

Indeterminant Suckage
I don't actually have this category yet (there's way too much obvious, high-priority suckage to deal with), but I thought this last category might be one for things which Might Not Suck. Maybe it's something that people have mixed opinion on, or maybe it's something that sucks a little, but enables something very cool, and you can't find a work-around to get rid of the suck but keep the cool. This would be a category for the sorts of things that need to be investigated further.


The Long Road To Beta
As the examples show, I've got a lot of suckiness to cut out before going beta.

The cool part about it is that during the first half of alpha, I get to clear out a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit. If the game is any good, it is during this stage that it goes from being a lamentable mess that kinda resembles a game to a pretty honest-to-goodness GAME.

Labels: Apocalypse Cow, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:52 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
More Utah Indie Night Stuff
I shoulda posted this last week - but Greg Squire, organizer of the Utah Indie Game Dev meet, has posted on last week's meeting.

Check out his take here:
Utah Indie Games Night - January 2007
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:10 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
It's Official: Harmonix No Longer Making Guitar Hero
I was hoping it was just a rumor, but it seems that RedOctane has now stated quite plainly that the original creators of Guitar Hero, Harmonix, will no longer be involved in the Guitar Hero franchise, and that development is being transferred to Neversoft.

While this was something of a surprise, the fact that both companies (RedOctane and Neversoft) are now Activision subsidiaries makes the decision pretty obvious.

In the above link, Dusty Welch, head of publishing, explains the rationale and the future of the franchise. He goes into a lot of PR doublespeak to say very little, but basically it boils down to three arguments:

#1) Not having to pay out royalties to a third party is like free money!

#2) Doing a skateboarding game with music in it is almost like making like making music-and-rhythm game, so Neversoft will do just as well as Harmonix.

#3) Please don't bring up the subject of Gun.

Actually, I made up the third point. So it's really only about first two. And if the second point sounds really weak (he only repeats it in various ways about six times to make it sound stronger), see point #1. Again.

He does mention their intention to continue working with WaveGroup sound, who handled the song covers in the first two games. This is definitely good news, as they've done a stellar job. And to be completely honest, I'm actually not that concerned about Neversoft screwing it up. The blueprint is firmly in place, and I expect that the Neversoft dev team will be a competent and respectful of the series.

I'm sure Harmonix will also put a positive spin on the situation, and will publicly make nice with RedOctane and Activision and talk about the exciting new opportunities they are now exploring. But it sounds to me that when all is said and done --- they got shafted. Legally and legitimately. As much as RedOctane contributed to the development of the games (more than just the controller!), it was Harmonix that that made it into the ultra-valuable hit franchise. And now they are being told, "Thank you for making us rich, don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out!"

The moral of the story, kids, is this: He who owns the I.P. rights gets to take home ALL the marbles.

Remember that when signing on the bottom line.



(Vaguely) related bits of fluff:
* The House the Mouse Built
* Original or Licensed IP?
* Guitar Hero Tidbits
* Guitar Hero Mini-Review

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Labels: Biz, Guitar Hero

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
No Indies In The Indie Competition?
I guess The Behemoth has now withdrawn Castle Crashers from the Slamdance "Guerilla Game Developers" competition (which begins today) - right on the heels of DigiPen forcing its students to re-enter the competition.

The DigiPen thing is interesting to me. Based on my understanding, the school owns full rights to everything that its students create. As DigiPen is not a major publisher, I guess the game is still technically an independent game, just as Saga is technically independent (but from my standpoint, it was still contract work for my studio). But it really stretches and makes me reconsider my definition of "indie."

Undoubtably DigiPen provided valuable training and resources to its students. But why should the school, and not the game creators, own the result of the students' labors? We can see that the developers themselves are not in control of their end product. Is it still "indie?" It seems very strange to me, as unlike a traditional publisher / developer arrangement, it is the students themselves who are ultimately funding the product, through their tuition, "lab fees," and everything else. Maybe that's common in film schools and music academies, too, but it seems really screwed up to me.

I think it is interesting that two of their remaining seven competitors are "DigiPen Owned" games. Obviously, they are shooting for getting some awards for their school, and feel its more important than the desires of their students. With only half the original number of finalists, they have excellent odds this year.

As to the competition itself, the official statement from Slamdance concerning the pulling of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! has changed in the last couple of days. Rather than citing moral grounds as they did previously, they are now stating their concerns about possible lawsuits that they couldn't afford to defend themselves against.

This is a legitimate excuse - the game has a bunch of copyright violations (unlicensed content grabbed from Doom, Marilyn Manson, and Nirvana) that could have possibly gotten the competition in legal trouble for supporting. It's a safer explanation than the alternatives. It doesn't paint the sponsors or Slamdance as the villains. But it sounds to me like rationalization after the fact.

Which is kind of how Danny Ledonne's explaination for the purpose behind SCMRPG's creation sounds to me, too. But once again, others differ strongly from my position. In fact, Wired Online just published a very good article about the game, critiquing it as a work of art. Once again, I don't deny that it's art... I just don't think it happens to be particularly good or worthy art. Regardless of its original purpose or stated purpose, one thing the game has managed to do is generate discussion about games as a medium of art and expression. And that is a good thing.

This whole controversy is certainly causing me to ask a lot of questions. Here are a few:

Will Slamdance organizers decide that games are more trouble than they are worth, and cancel the Guerrilla Gamemaker competition in the future?

Will they try to stay the course and act as if nothing happened, and rely upon people's short memories (and the willingness of schools like DigiPen to force submission of student projects to garner prestige for the school)?

Or will Slamdance renew their commitment to games as an art form and take advantage of the "controversy surrounding the controversy" (and the press it has generated) to make indie games a more significant aspect of the festival?

Will DigiPen actually lose more potential students than it gains by not only making it clear that they own all rights to their students' creations, but are willing to use said ownership against the wishes of the artists?

And should we start referring to game developers as "artists" (as I just did) in acknowledgement of the the validity of games as a medium of art and expression? We do that in other media (particularly music), why not games?

Should the term "indie" only apply to those games which remain in the control of their original creators (ahem, "artists")? That would disqualify a bunch of indie developers who are willing to sell their IP rights to publishers after self-funding a title.

What do you think?

Labels: Indie Evangelism, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:56 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Why The PC Game Industry Figures Are Baloney
According to the NPD Group, PC games enjoyed a very modest but measurable growth last year, posting a 1% growth over 2005, to the tune of $960 million dollars. While it's small compared to the $12.5 billion enjoyed by console gaming, it still contributes a noticeable share to the gaming industry.

So the PC games industry isn't dying after all! It's small but growing, right?

I agree with the conclusion that the rumors of PC gaming's death have been greatly exaggerated. But I will be one of many who will be calling "Bull!" on those numbers.

Not that I think that the numbers themselves are wrong, but that using them to gauge the growth of the PC games market is... well, ludicrous. It's obvious to me that the NPD group is only counting boxes. Their press release details that this research is limited to "Retail, U.S. Sales." That still works for consoles - for a while.

But counting boxed retail sales for PC games? THAT is what is dying. Not PC games.

But surely the figure isn't too far off, is it? Counting boxes is still a pretty good indicator of the overall revenue by the PC games business, isn't it?

Subscription-Based Games
First off, let's look at World of Warcraft. As of March last year, it has had a total of SIX MILLION subscribers, and that number was reportedly up to eight million recently. Chinese subscribers (that make up a little less than half the subscriber base) are only paying $5 per month for the game, but the rest are paying between $13 and $15 per month.

Averaging it out, we'll assume $9.50 a month per subscriber. With 6 million subscribers shortly after the beginning of the year, and 8 million at the end, that averages to about 7 million subscribers for the year. We can be conservative and say 6.5. million times $9.50 a month

That comes out to $61,750,000 per month... or nearly $750 million for the entire year. IN SUBSCRIPTION REVENUE ALONE! That's not including boxed sales, which evidently accounted for another 2 million sales times the average retail price worldwide. What, 25 bucks, maybe? Another cool $50 million - which is probably all NPD counted when they say World of Warcraft was the #1 seller.

So World of Warcraft made almost as much as the NPD is reporting all by its own little lonesome. And that is a conservative guesstimate in my opinion. So maybe nobody bought anything else OTHER than World of Warcraft last year, except for me?

Like the TV sales pitchmen are fond of saying, "But that's not all!" Last count, World of Warcraft accounted for just something north of 50% of the MMO subscriber market. So let's take that $750 million, and let's multiply it by, say, 1.9, to represent all the MMO market out there. That brings us to 1.425 billion dollars.

Okay. No big deal. So the NPD Group is short by a half a billion dollars. Sure, that's an honest mistake.

Though we still haven't counted the boxed-sales of those games into the figures yet. And the ride gets rougher still.

Casual Games
In 2005, the "Casual Games" industry made $713 million in revenue, according to the DFC Intelligence joint market report. It is estimated to grow to $1.5 billion in 2008. Using the ol' rule of 72, that means a 24% growth rate per year. So if casual games continued to grow this year rather than making an unexpected downturn (and from what I could tell, nothing of the kind happened - it's been a great year!), that would mean $884 million in sales this year.

Yeah, once again - almost the entire NPD-reported PC games sales for the year, by Casual Games alone. Now, some of those (a third, maybe?) were boxed game sales sold at Wal*Mart or whatever, and thus included in the NPD report. But at this point, we're now talking $2.3 billion in sales.

So the NPD group is now short almost a billion-and-a-half dollars. Oops. And we're still not yet counting all those shiny shrink-wrapped packages of World of Warcraft, The Sims, and Oblivion that were greedily snatched by gamers everywhere off of the shelves of GameStop and Wal*Mart yet.

Incredible.

Hardware Sales
According to the GameDaily Biz article, the NPD report for console sales included "portable and console hardware, software and accessories." That's all well and good, and should be included. Except it also compares apples to oranges when you are comparing it to PC sales, where (I'm guessing) only the actual software is counted.

But in 2005, Alienware had $173 million in sales --- part of the reason it was gobbled up by Dell. Alienware specialized in - let's face it - game machines. And it was supposedly on track to sell $200 million worth of game machines in 2006. So to make things fair, we could toss that value onto count, for over $2.5 billion in PC gaming sales to include some hardware.

But Alienware is only a drop in the bucket. Logitech had $422 million in sales in 2005 (and probably a similar amount last year), much of which is going to feed the PC gaming appetite.

And let's not forget NVidia, which apparently had $2.5 billion in total sales in 2005! One company! And ATI, which made $2.2 billion. While much of that was going into consoles (and Alienware machines), there has got to be a metric buttload of that money coming from the PC-based business. And who needs NVidia or ATI hardware in their machines? Gamers!

Granted, not everyone who gets a "gaming-oriented" motherboard or 3D card is actually going to be using it to play games, which makes the actual calculation extremely fuzzy and impossible to difficult to quantify with exact numbers. So I won't fault marketing analysts for not wanting to touch this one. But I think it illustrates what a big difference it would make if you tried to make a fair comparison

The Long Tail
That doesn't bring into consideration the other sources of "long tail" revenue. Nobody asked ME how much Rampant Games made selling non-casual downloadable games last year. Not that it would have made a dent in their calculations. But there are a LOT of guys like me out there, selling their software, hardware, peripherals, and game-related services (like FileFront.com) over the Internet, mail order, or what have you.

While we may all fly under the radar of these intelligence-gathering firms, collectively we form a "long tail" of entertainment software sales that might actually be a significant number. I won't even hazard a guess at this point, other than to say, "several million." Whether several means $3 million or $30 million or even $300 million I have no clue.

But at least in having no clue, I don't seem to be alone.

You Can't Get Away With Counting Boxes Anymore
With consoles, game distribution is still based on traditional distribution channels. While it's expanding to downloadable game sales, it's still tightly regulated by the console manufacturers themselves. Sell-through numbers are still notoriously hard to come by, but these market analysts have been at it a long time, and I'm assuming they are pretty good at it.

But unless there are a lot of people grossly exaggerating numbers out there, my quick-and-dirty guesstimation seems to indicate that the NPD group (and they aren't the only ones) are grossly underestimating the PC game market. If you make the assumption that they really have been just counting boxes, and add that to my rough estimation above the PC games industry last year probably made around $3.5 billion in sales last year. And that's NOT including game-oriented PC hardware sales.

Unfortunately, that's not a direct comparison between consoles and the PC. The NPD numbers are for U.S. sales only, so you can probably double their numbers for worldwide sales. On top of that, their numbers include hardware sales, and gathering that number for PCs sounds extremely difficult. But I think it's clear that traditional retail sales is telling far less than half the story.

If you could then manage to exclude the console hardware sales so that we could make a more "apples-to-apples" comparison of game sales, I think you'd find that PC games are generating perhaps a quarter of the games revenue for the entire industry.

To me, that sounds like a very healthy gaming platform.

(Note: Tip o' the sombrero to Scorpia for the GameDaily link!)

(Vaguely) Related Tirades
* PC Gaming Is Far From Dead
* It's the Reseller's Fault!
* A Pirate Story
* How to FUBAR an MMO Launch

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Labels: Biz, casual games, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 PM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Utah Indie Developer Night, Winter 2007
So what did I learn last night at the Utah Indie Game Developer Night?

We had, for the first-time, fewer people than the previous event at our Utah Indie Game Developer Night. The principle loss came from not having the ITT Technical Institute guys this time, and an extremely tiny contingent from the company formerly known as Headgate. Now that they have become EA Salt Lake and cracked down on indie game development, I don't expect to be seeing so much of them anymore. I expect that the fact that it was well below zero when I left last night didn't help any, either.

Still, it was well-attended, with 29 people showing from all kinds of different walks of life. We had our token game reviewer (Jana, AKA "~J" of Eeps, Meeps, and Ipes), the folks working full-time making games and part-time making indie games (like me), a couple of guys who've left mainstream game development on consoles to make casual PC games, some students, a writer, a couple of wives of game developers "just along for the ride," and some other "curious parties" who just wanted to see what it was all about.

Apocalypse Cow
I got to demo Apocalypse Cow, and received a bunch of feedback. People were throwing around cow jokes like crazy - I wished I'd been recording everything folks were saying. The big thing almost everyone told me was that the key selling point - to them - was the humor. Picking on poor cows (particularly when they shoot back) is just funny, and the more over-the-top silliness the better. People were extremely positive, though I also found several points (and key bugs) that need to be addressed before I get the first alphas in the hands of testers. I'll be working on those over the weekend.

CaveBug
Brad Edwards, an old co-worker of mine from the Warhawk / Twisted Metal / Jet Moto days has formed a new company called Cavebug. He and his partner, Josh, abandoned work on high-end console games to go make console games for the Mac and PC, using the Popcap framework as their core engine. It's been a bit of a shock for them switching gears like that, but their first game, Pathstorm, is now at the "RC2" stage (the second release candidate --- if it proves to be clean enough, it will be the final version). They are currently offering it for a discount price of only $12.95, to go up to $19.95 once it goes final.

EA Games and Indies
The three attendees from "EA Salt Lake" explained their situation now with EA Games. They are pretty much forbidden to work on making games for sale in their off time. One of the developers is - and always has been - working on a non-profit game engine (useful for hobbyists and students) called Flat Red Ball. So EA gave him their blessing. Another had EA re-classify what he's doing as "educational software" for children so he could continue work on it.

And Mike Smith - well, he's pretty much hosed with his work on Caster. It's a game, and it's for profit, so he had to cut off development on it. He showed us what he was able to get done do prior to Headgate's buyout. There are some new special effects, including a really cool motion blur when your caster races ahead along the battlefield. It looks good. Hopefully he'll find some way to continue development on it and get it released in the future.

Other Game Progress
Mike Rubin talked to me a little about Vespers 3D progress, though he didn't demo it this time. They ran auditions for voice actors, and got the principle NPC modeled, animated, and did his voice-over recording. They've still got a LOT of content to do, but dang this project sure sounds awesome. I can't wait to play it.

Mike commented that they were originally just planning on doing the first 'day' of the original text adventure (er, "Interactive Fiction") as more of a proof-of-concept thing. But they realized that people would really, really want to play through the whole adventure after the first day, so they changed their plan to include all three days. Unfortunately, the second day has twice as much stuff going on as the first, and the third is even larger. So it remains a big challenge.

Herb and Dan Flowers demoed Link Realms again. The big addition since last meeting was dungeons, though they were unfortunately buggy. One thing I note is that they really seem to enjoy playiung their own game. That's a good sign...

I also got a sneak peek at the upcoming third game in the Deadly Rooms of Death series. I think it can be summed up by: Improved Graphics, New Puzzles, Same Great Gameplay.

Portals
Wrangling a conversation about submitting a game to a portal, I was reminded of the following bits of advice:

* Many portals have different audiences. A game might sell great on one site, but horribly on another, just because they cater to a different audience.

* Some portals charge you to host your game. Some portals charge you a lot. If you have a game with one of these companies that is NOT a good match for their audience, you could end up losing most of your meager profits to hosting and bandwidth fees.

* Portals partner with each other , creating a chain of royalties that steadily decrease the trickle that goes back to the developer. While it's not a bad thing for you, the developer, to get your game out to as many sites as possible, it is best to do the legwork yourself and work directly with all the portals you can prior to allowing them to do this.

* Portals will do a minimum amount of work (initially) marketing your game. For the most part, they'll throw it up on the "new games" page and let it sink or swim. If it does well, THEN they may spend more time pushing it to maximize their profits. But it's not in that top ten percent or so, they're happy to let it fade away into obscurity while they are looking for their next hit. So it behooves you, as a developer, to really maximize your game's chances every way you can, and not rely on the portals to do your job for you.

Summing Up
Well, that's about all I can think of for now. There were lots of conversations going on, and I was able to chat with a lot of very cool folks. As usual, it was an awesome chance to network with people, see what cool stuff people were working on, and to get inspired. And in this case, I was also able to get some of the first "post-alpha" feedback on Apocalypse Cow, which I will be taking full advantage of this week :)

I hope to see some FINISHED games this spring at the next one! (Including my own!)

(Vaguely) related Ye Anciente Articles:
* Utah Indie Dev Meet, Fall 2006
* Utah Indie Dev Meet, Spring 2006
* Utah Indie Dev Meet, Winter 2006
* Utah Indie Dev Meet, Summer 2005

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Labels: Game Announcements, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:50 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Wanna Learn To Be A Fighter Pilot?
Do you remember in the movie "Top Gun," when Charlie is going over the ACMI logs in the briefing room with all the pilots? She rips on Maverick's split S maneuver, and says, "The encounter was a victory, but I think we've shown it as an example of what not to do." Then she moves on to another pilot (presumably Iceman), and remarks, "Now this is a perfect example of a textbook maneuver."

I always wondered, "What textbook? Do these fighter pilots have a textbook that they use to learn how to kill the other pilot most effectively?" I imagined college textbooks for chemistry, calculus, and dogfighting. As a long-time fan of flight sims, aviation, and of course air combat games, I really wanted to know.

As it turns out, they do have a textbook. It is called "Fighter Combat - Tactics and Maneuvering," by Robert L. Shaw. And it was pretty much used as the textbook in the U.S. Navy, and probably most other armed forces with an air combat mission in the world. I don't know if it still is or not - it was originally published in 1985, and while some of the information may be somewhat dated, the book covers all aspects of fighter combat, and is equally useful for modern jet aircraft as World War I era biplanes. Most of it hasn't gone out of date. Not until we develop anti-gravity aircraft that don't rely on lift and thrust, or weapons that can fire from any angle of the plane with equal chances to hit.

I had to special-order a copy many years ago. But now I've learned that you can get it as a FREE DOWNLOAD E-Book.

If you are into combat flight sims, grab a free copy of it HERE.

It uses the .RAR format to compress the PDF file. If you don't already have a program to decompress .rar files, I recommend the free utility 7-Zip, available HERE. It's also a bit more powerful at creating .ZIP files than the compression that comes with stock Windows. :)

Reading it won't make you an expert fighter pilot. But as a guy who got pretty competitive in online dogfights, I can say that it really helped me take my skills to the next level and kick some online tail in games like Falcon 4.0. Unfortunately for me, most of the top-ranked pilots had read the book also.

But the book contains a lot of information that becomes more valuable as the flight sim becomes more realistic. In it, you'll find the different means of defeating Doppler versus Continuous Wave radar systems, when and how best to begin your turn in a one-on-one engagement, turn performance effects on nose-to-nose turns, and the basic fighter maneuvers and how best to use them such as the high and low yo-yo, flat and rolling scissors, etc.

If you aren't a flight sim fan, then none of what I just said made any sense at all. But if you are (and we seem to be decreasing in number these days), check it out!

(Vaguely) related mumble transcripts:
* Game Moments #2: Falcon 4.0
* Game Moment #11: Falcon 4.0 (again)
* Guest Game Moment #1: Falcon 4.0
* Why Presentation Is Important
* Do Games Matter?

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Labels: Flight Sims, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:32 PM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
What I Did This Summer
Looks like the press release has gone out, and it's all official, so I can tell everyone what I did last summer. And last fall. And last spring. Pretty much up until a little over a month ago.

http://www.playsaga.com

Yes, it fits the definition of an "indie" game. No publishers were harmed during the creation of this game. I'm still kinda amazed it's all come together - the project was really pretty tremendous in scope, even though we developer