[Ultima Online's original and current producers Rich Vogel and Chris Crowner talk to our own Kris Graft on the MMO's 13-year existence, and ask World of Warcraft players, "What's your purpose?" for playing Blizzard's "ding"-heavy game.]

Developed by Origin Systems and originally released in September 1997, Ultima Online continues to operate today, 13 years after its inception. It's a long run for an online game; Electronic Arts' UO producer Calvin Crowner calls the seminal MMORPG the "M*A*S*H of MMOs."

But that's not really giving the MMO's staying power adequate credit -- the M*A*S*H television series only had an 11-year run.

Last month, the Gamasutra-affiliated GDC Online Awards Hall of Fame recognized UO for its contributions to the gaming industry as part of the full ceremony. (A tribute video was shown alongside the honor.)

Sure, it's not as if UO is pulling in anywhere remotely close to the amount of subscribers and revenue that Blizzard's market-leading World of Warcraft pulls in. The continued support of UO isn't about competing with that juggernaut or any more modern whippersnapper MMOs.

But Ultima Online seems to soldier on because it still offers something unique in the space, and after all these years, people are still discovering that.

EA's Crowner and UO's original senior producer Rich Vogel -- currently VP at Electronic Arts and co-GM at BioWare Austin -- reflect on the game's unique attributes. They also examine UO in the context of an MMO landscape dominated by World of Warcraft. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have plenty of praise as well as criticism for Blizzard's MMO:

Ultima Online -- it's been around for a while.

Calvin Crowner: I call it the M*A*S*H of MMOs.

It's that classic kind of fantasy-themed game. How can you stand out and attract more people or a newer audience?

Rich Vogel: Well, it's interesting because UO, when that first came out, a lot of younger players were playing it at that time. In fact, UO was such a groundbreaking game, nothing was out there like it ever.

I mean, it allowed you to do things that you wanted to do. You saw people riding horses, you saw people in combat, you saw creatures running around, you saw the dragons. And yes, it was a 2.5D type game...

CC: And still is. [laughs]

RV: When we had community events, there were families, there were people in their teens. It was a very young audience playing the game. And when I say that, I'm talking about teenagers and 20-year-olds. The average age at that time was about 28 when UO came out. And also, a lot of people were in there 30s or 40s playing the game, too, surprisingly.

CC: Actually, our demographic is still pretty broad. We had a town hall event at the end of August, and I had guys who all showed up in 80's prom outfits. I mean, they were wearing suits, not prom dresses. Prom suits, just to be clear. But they were still fanboys, and I think they were not over 25 years old.

We still have the spectrum of players actually coming to the game, and the appeal is that I'm not on rails, that I can do what I want, that if I want to go play in a felucca and essentially PK all day long, or if I just want to be a rogue or a highway man or whatever, if I just want to go in dungeons all day, I can do that.

The first time you go into an online game, when UO first came out, and realize you can do these new things in a game that you never did before, and with real people -- how can you possibly recapture that initial sense of wonderment with gamers? How can you do that again?

RV: It's hard. ... UO was very magical at the time. The internet was just starting to become a viable means of making money at that time, and then people were just learning about the internet and what it meant.

So, UO made people say, "Wow. This is really cool. This is what the internet is all about." And connectivity, a worldwide connectivity, right? So, people were playing this game, you'd see them running around from Germany or France or Japan. They were running around in the game with you. That was just unheard of.

Calvin, you mentioned UO not being on rails. What would you have to say to that then -- on rails versus no rails?

CC: I'm a staunch open-worlder. [laughs] I mean, I'll just go ahead and say it right now, one of the reasons I quit [World of Warcraft] is that I didn't care. I went through whatever levels, 60 or whatever, and then I was done in about a week and a half. Well, let's say two or three weeks. It's like, I don't care.

In UO, you don't have the classes and levels, you have the templates, right? So essentially, you have a framework of skills and attributes that you essentially assign to yourself. So, essentially, you are creating your future, your destiny, where it's like, I don't have to say, "I'm a fighter. This is what I need and this is what I need to enhance."

In UO, you just show up and go. ... I remember the time I actually stepped into the game, I just walked. I started walking, and I saw an eagle, and I right-clicked, and it said, "Tame." I was like, "What does this mean?" And so, I tried to tame an eagle, and it didn't let me. And then so I was like, "Okay, this is the last thing that I'm going to do today. I will get my taming skill to this." And then I found out, well, tamers are kind of lame.

So, I was like, "Fine. I'll be mage PVP." And so that's the thing. It's like I can switch on a dime to anything that I want to, so as far as the rails versus open, yeah, I'm all for open world. But we were talking about that before, it's very difficult to have what I would call the contemporary attention span of today's gamer that one, wants to build it but also wants to be around to learn how to actually be a part of the world.

But do you really think that it's a situation where gamers' attention spans are too short, or are game designers just assuming that, and creating games that babysit gamers and lead them by the hand through the experience? I guess my question is, do players want to be told what to do, or are game makers just not giving them the opportunity to do what they want to do in games?

RV: I gave a couple lectures about five years ago on this aspect. One of the things I learned is players don't know how to entertain other players. It's very small, like less than 2 percent really know how to entertain players well.

And players are lazy, right? They like to go do things and experience things, but have it kind of brought to them. The class-system and level-based system that exists in the broader-based games that are on-rails are easier to understand, easier to get, and easier to get the "ding" and satisfaction faster than in the skill-based games. So, it's all about the ding. It's about the reward cycle. It's a lot faster in a level-based game that's guided than it is on an open-world.

CC: Yeah. I think, though, that once you figure out how to get past that first entrance, the rewards a lot bigger,

RV: Oh yeah, so stickiness is a lot higher in open world games, much higher than in level-based games because you have level caps, where in skill-based games, you can kind of move around and do what you want to do. There's no such thing as a level. There are skill points and things like that, which are sort of like levels. The reality is you're tied to what you build.

CC: And actually, I would say that the open world is a bit better for folks with ADD than those on-the-rails experiences. It's like, "I don't want to do this today. I want to do something else."

But there's a lot of stuff to do in World of Warcraft too, whether you regard that as "on rails" or not. I never really got hardcore into WoW, but I have friends that are, and, you know, I have a friend and he's like, "Now I need to fish..."

CC: Exactly.

Little things like that. But he's leveling up his fishing, that's what he's saying.

CC: Well, that's sweet. I would take it from the Japanese perspective. When players are fishing, they are fishing as part of a community, right? It's like, "I'm going to do this. And then I might catch something I can use in crafting."

Whereas in WoW, I'm fishing to fish, right. That's like running to be a runner. It's kind of like when I used to run, I run because I play rugby. I run because I want to be better at cardio to go do something else. That's what UO is, where WoW is like I run because one day I might need to run to get my kids from crossing the street. What's your purpose?

I'm sensing some frustration with where WoW is leading, you know, the industry. I'm now thinking about my inflammatory, hit-grabbing headline about "UO devs hating WoW."

CC: [laughs] No, that's fine. The point is, though, everyone should cater to their strengths. They did it, and they knocked it out of the park. UO did what it did, and if you looked at what WoW did, they took a lot of things that worked really well, and also they built on all their past experiences and did it just amazingly.

UO was the first, so it didn't have any predecessors, right, and it also knocked it out of the park. So, what is the greater achievement? To build on the success of what other folks did or to take something that's from sand, alright, and build castles? So, that's the difference.

RV: Basically, Blizzard looked around and took the best of UO, the best of [EverQuest], and the best of other games out there, mixed it all together, and made their own design on top of that and those systems, and built something that was incredible, that appealed to a large base audience that's never been seen in an MMO. I felt it was really about the quality of the experience they developed. And the design philosophies that they had were so different at that time they launched from what was out there.

The thing that they did was believe in their philosophies and stick to them, so it was a clean game in a sense that Blizzard didn't have to change drastically the mechanic of the game after it launched, which wasn't the case of other MMOs that launched before. And the other thing they launched was they refined the ding -- the ability to get the reward very quickly was fast in WoW. That helped immediately because everyone likes to achieve.

A lot of the things you are talking about just relate to different ways to present progress to the player.

RV: Yes. It is. [UO] is a different way. One, UO is a skill-based system open world, where you have things in the world that help you advance, but you also can take it and built it yourself and do your own things. And in WoW and in other games, it's a very directed experience where you go through an experience, and you do what you need to do to advance. That's directed by the design of the game.

CC: Right. I would say that the difference between the two also is WoW is like, I always wanted [to have] what I saw on somebody else.

RV: Yes, yes.

CC: Where in UO, it's like I want to get better so I can survive. [laughs]

Yeah. But is there anything wrong with seeing a guy on an awesome horse, and working towards earning that?

CC: No, not at all. But, what are you trying to achieve? So, for example, if you're playing, let's say SimCity. What are you trying to achieve? Do you just want to make a lot of money for your city? Or do you want to build parks and have an education?

What is your role or your focus for your place? What does your heart tell you, and what does your mind tell you that you want to do while you're sitting seven to 12 hours a day away from the screen?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this edition include a fun 2D platformer about collecting boxes, a cute one-button RPG, a 3D racing game with cel-shaded graphics, and a new release from Gamma Bros. creators Pixeljam Games.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Dear Agent' (cactus, freeware)
"Dear Agent is a fiddly but ultimately rewarding platformer created by Jonatan during the Blekinge Tekniska Högskola Game Jam. Over several levels, your mission is to kill all the terrorists and destroy all their equipment, before escaping through the exit."

Game Pick: 'GLORG' (Martin Jonasson, browser)
"Developed for the GAMMA IV one-button game event held at this year's Game Developers Conference, GLORG chooses the counter-intuitive premise of boiling down the gameplay of a dungeon crawler action RPG to single-button clicking. Players can navigate between scenarios familiar to classic roguelikes with the simple interface of a stationary mouse."

Game Pick: 'Super Crate Box' (Vlambeer, freeware)
"Vlambeer's first release is mucho good funo, because you get to fire lots of different guns and it's all very crazy. Points aren't based on how many kills you make - it's based how many crates you collect. However, each crate changes the weapon you're currently wielding, and there are a huge variety of slicers and dicers to play with."

Game Pick: 'Corporate Climber' (Pixeljam Games, browser)
"In Corporate Climber you play as a working man who is trying to get to the top of the corporate ladder, having started his first job without even a piece of clothing to his name. To climb to the top of the building you would have to reach the elevator that takes you to the next level, and every new floor presents a different challenge or another puzzle for the player to solve."

Game Pick: 'Cloud 9' (Rockin' Moses, freeware)
"Cloud 9 is a gorgeous F-Zero like racer with futuristic vehicles and ballistic speeds. It's still early in development and has one track right now, but it's still worth taking for a spin just for the visuals. There's a cel-shaded theme going on with both the racers and the environment, and it all looks very pretty indeed."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been too long since we last shared photos of kits for video game aircraft and mechs, so here's a collection of photos from the 27th Kanazawa Model Exhibition. Above you'll see see Twinbee's cutely designed ships, featured in Yujin's Shooting Game Historica Vol. 4 figure set, which NCSX is taking import preorders for.

The other four ships from the $29.99 Shooting Game Historica Vol. 4 series are the X-002 (XMultiply), Legend Silver Hawk Burst (Darius Burst), the CF-345 Black Fly (Metal Black), and the Flint Lock (Xexex). I've included photos for the latter two after the break.

Japanese kit maker PLUM is creating its own 1/60-scale Legend Silver Hawk Burst that features an accompanying "Burst Parts" set. PLUM is also producing a wicked looking AS-5E3 Leynos (Assault Suits Leynos, a.k.a. Target Earth) figure, which looks very impressive even in its unpainted form -- check it out after the break!

GA Graphic has more photos of the models shown at the 27th Kanazawa Model Exhibition.

[Via Mecha Damashii]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Taking the internet by storm this week -- or at least that small portion of the internet devoted to video games -- is Octodad, a 3D, third-person adventure game in which you control a loving father and caring husband who is also a secret octopus. It's an endearing title about "destruction, deception, and fatherhood."

With that kind of premise, I know you don't need any more convincing to download and play the Windows game, but here's more information about it anyway: Octodad must "master mundane tasks with his unwieldy boneless tentacles while simultaneously keeping his cephalopodian nature a secret from his human family."

Controlling the game is quite difficult, as you'll need to left-click/drag to move Octodad's left tentacle, right-click/drag to control the right one. Then you hit space to move into Arms mode, in which left-click grabs and right click moves your arms up and down. Now you know how if feels to be an octopus.

Octodad was developed by a team of 19 students and four faculty members from DePaul University, who have been concepting, prototyping, and developing this title since June. They have entered the title into the 2011 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase.

[Via IndieGames.com]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our own Simon Parkin sat down with Crytek UK's managing director Karl Hilton at this year’s GameCity event to discuss the Crytek buy-out, developing Crysis 2 multiplayer and what chance we might have of a new Timesplitters.]

In February 2009, after going into financial administration, it was announced that Free Radical Design, developer of Timesplitters, Second Sight and Haze, had been acquired by German video game developer Crytek.

Following a name change to Crytek UK and an office move from the outskirts of Nottingham, UK into the city center, the studio began work on the multiplayer component of Crysis 2, a project which is only now nearing completion.

At last week's GameCity event in Nottingham, Simon Parkin caught up with Karl Hilton, to discuss the past 18 months, and what happens next.

The last 18 months have been a rollercoaster for you. What has life been like after the acquisition?

Karl Hilton: It's been very good. Hopefully the game that we are showing this week speaks for itself. We’ve been working really hard on the multiplayer part of Crysis 2 and we are pretty much there now – there’s a bit of polishing to be done but then that’s it. I’m really pleased.

The team’s done a great job and the game looks fantastic and plays well. In terms of the company, we've really grown back up again. We are a studio of around about 90 people now. It’s really positive.

Are most of your current staff ex-Free Radical Design staff?

It’s a fair mix. We've had a few ex-Free Radical people come back and join us again, once we settled down and got things running which is really nice -- a vote of confidence on the studio.

All of those guys went off and got jobs in other places and are very talented people so it's exciting that they were interested in coming back when the opportunity arose. We’ve taken on some new people as well: we’ve got some graduates and students with us and some experienced people from other companies as well who didn’t know Free Radical. It's generated a slightly new character in the studio.

How many of those 90 staff are working on Crysis 2 multiplayer?

Nearly all of them. We have quite a few guys who are involved in R&D work which is supporting the Cryengine technology, addressing some of the issues in terms of moving to consoles as well as making it better for the next generation. And then we have a large amount of desk staff who are working on Crysis 2 multiplayer and then we have a few guys who are always prototyping up new ideas.

Were you always aware that you were going to handle this part of Crysis before the buy-out, or was there any discussion of what you were going to do?

Crytek was looking for a UK studio. It was perfect timing from that point of view as Crysis 2 was just starting up. Multiplayer components to games are more that just a little add-on these days: it's an entire team's worth of work, so it was one of the first things they asked us if we’d be interested in doing. Obviously, with our history of console multiplayer gaming we agreed and from that point of view it worked very well because we brought our experience of multiplayer gaming to a company which was very experienced in single player FPS games on PCs. It was a good mesh of experience and knowledge.

Did Crytek come to you with quite a defined design for the multiplayer of what they wanted or did you work on it together?

No, it was very open actually. We knew we needed a good multiplayer, and we knew we wanted to make a big stride forward with it. There was a good chuck of the single player game in place so we knew what kind of mechanics we had to play with, but other than that it was entirely open to us to come back to them with suggestions.

We spent the first few weeks just really brainstorming and making an awful lot of quick and simple white box designs that we could sort of play quick and check out – I think we did 90-odd of those. We cut it down to a core group of level that we were happy with and a core group of mechanics that were happy with and we went back to Frankfurt and presented the kinds of things that we think work. We’ve always had a good dialogue and thy have been very receptive to the things that we came with.

How have things in the studio internally changed from the Free Radical days? Did you make any big changes?

We moved offices. That's a big thing – we were in a business park in the outskirts of the city and we have now moved right into the center. That was a cultural thing for us. We decided we wanted a new start and a new building. We'd been in our new building for quite a long time so it was actually quite a lot of new infrastructure, better network connections which were good for us. We've got a very state of the art office now which is good for morale.

In terms of our day to day work, some of what we were doing is very similar to the Free Radical days. Our studio culture was a big part of why Crytek brought Free Radical. They were looking for something that had a similar culture within this team. When they came over they didn't just look at the books. Rather, they spent most of their time talking to the people about how we work and what it was like to work for us.

They decided quite early on the we were a close cultural match and that was a really key thing for them – we fit in with their way of doing stuff. That was a vote of confidence for the team as a whole. In terms of day to day practices we have similar ways of structuring out team meetings and our work groups and that kind of stuff. They developed some of their own systems which were quite interesting so we have taken those on board, melded them with our own so it's a nice hybrid of good opportunities to share knowledge.

That was a lot of positives. Have there been any negatives? Do you feel the loss of a bit of control perhaps?

No, not at all. Crytek has studios in Budapest, Sofia and Kiev and they like their studios to be very independent and add value to the group by having strong regional differences and cultured and what they do. So we have been able to run the studio very much how we have wanted to with their support. As I said, we were given very free reign to design the multiplayer game how we wanted to. Obviously we feed back to Frankfurt to get their opinions on everything. It's always good to have a second opinion. Often they pointed out some very good things. It’s always been a good and open relationship and they have shown a lot of trust to the UK studio.

After Crysis 2 launches, what happens next for your studio?

That’s what everyone wants to know. Nothing has been announced yet so I can’t talk about specifics but yes we have a couple of very interesting multiplayer and single player first person shooter projects that we are looking at. In some form both of those will be going ahead.

New IP?

Potentially.

In terms of the IP ownership for free radical has all of that passed to Crytek?

Yes.

Is there anything in particular that you'd like to revisit? Timesplitters, for example?

Everyone asks about Timesplitters. Yeah it was a popular game and has a large fan base out there. Publishers all know about it and ask us about it and obviously there’s enthusiasm within the team to do something with it. But really it's about us discussing with the publishers what’s viable and what’s gonna be good and how to take it on. There’s not been a Timesplitters game in quite a while so how do we need to move it on if we were to do another one to make it relevant? Does the name matter? Fundamentally the studio is about making quality first person shooters with strong multiplayer elements. That’s what we are interested in doing.

Are you waiting to announce your next project because you are waiting for deals to be signed or is it a matter of timing with the other project that you have coming out?

It's a matter of timing, yes. We are focusing on Crysis 2 at the moment. Everyone is 100 percent working like crazy at the moment to get it done on time. We don't want to distract ourselves with other stuff. But we will always have a small team of guys prototyping stuff.

In terms of the Crysis 2 multiplayer, how are you looking to distinguish the game from its competition?

It is a crowded market and only the best survive these days so yes, it's tricky working out how to stand out. We think we’ve got something really unique with the Nano suit. We have this sort of super soldier which allows you to have almost parkour/ free-running game play. It works very well with the New York setting where the rooftops provide the opportunity to play around with architecture.

On top of that, the suit allows you to do things that you couldn't do if you were just a human. It allows you to have limited amounts of stealth and extra strength for climbing etc, so you can feel almost superhero-like for a little while. Because of its technology, these abilities are also limited so you've got the rock, paper, scissors sort of gameplay where one thing plays off another. It's got a good tactical sort of element to it.

Do you think today's multiplayer first person modes demand that sort of super human element? Has the well of creativity run dry on standard soldiers?

There will always be a place for every different area when it is done at the highest level of quality, so realistic stealth-based shooting games, more conventional warfare action and near-future and far-future games with fantastic weaponry are all still relevant. As long as there are strong mechanics in the game and it's solid and consistent in its reality then there’s a place for all of those. You just want to be the number one person in what every sector it is you’re competing in.

Who do you see as your rival for this particular project?

The Call of Duty games have a phenomenal record. They are more realistic in their setting than our sci-fi approach, but they are the benchmark in many ways for the quality. In multiplayer you see the numbers that they achieve and continue to achieve in terms of sales and ongoing players. We'd like to exceed what they achieve.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Indie developer Radiangames, which seems to be releasing a new XBLIG title each month lately, has released a new game called Fireball, an arena "shooter" the studio compares to Geometry Wars 2's Pacifism mode, except "expanded and evolved" into a whole game. It's priced at only 80 Points and has a free demo.

In Fireball, players dodge icy enemies in an arena, triggering explosion chains to destroy them while trying to pull of combos. Players can compete for high scores against themselves, their friends, and others with the Fireball's online scoreboards, which have been included for the first time in a Radiangames releases.

The studio, which is run by THQ/Volition veteran Luke Schneider, will release two more XBLIG titles, Crossfire 2 and Inferno 2, next month. For those interested in seeing how its games have performed on XBLIG, Radiangames posted an analysis of its titles' sales, sharing monthly downloads/revenues and how the recent dashboard changes affected those numbers.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a plentiful week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at DICE, Havok, Rockstar and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

DICE: Animator:
"We create interactive entertainment that will sweep you from reality to the furthest of your imagination! DICE (EA Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment), the award-winning developer based in Stockholm, Sweden, is best known for producing the phenomenally successful Battlefield franchise. Recent releases are Medal of Honor (multiplayer) and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The studio is currently working hard on Battlefield 3 – its next big blockbuster!"

Terminal Reality: Senior Designers:
"Terminal Reality has joined forces with Microsoft and Lucas Arts to create an all-new Star Wars title for the revolutionary Kinect for Xbox 360. We’re searching for senior multiplayer designers who are superstars to join our alliance. If you’ve got the jedi skills we’re looking for, you should check out our website and open positions in art, design & programming.

Havok: Software Engineer:
"Havok prides ourselves on delivering the most highly regarded middleware software solutions to the best known companies in gaming and special effects. We are looking for a highly motivated, independent, engineer with a passion for gaming tools and technology. This is a unique opportunity to work with the best in the video game industry helping to shape the development of the next generation of games. Positions are in Dublin, IE and Munich, DE, as well as Developer Support Engineer in SF, CA"

Tencent Boston: Art Director:
"Tencent Boston is a premier game development studio led by industry veterans that are driving the creation of world class online games for a global audience. We are a division of Tencent Inc., one of the largest internet companies in China. If you’re an inspired, driven individual who is ready to take game development to the next level then Tencent Boston is your new home."

Rockstar North: Flash Developer:
"Rockstar North, a member of the Rockstar family since 1999, is one of the world's leading video game developers, is a community of creatives from a variety of backgrounds. We are based out of modern, spacious, purpose-built studios in the heart of Edinburgh. We develop original game titles and are proud to be the developer of the phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto series."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

Posted by Tom Curtis at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the legal mess surrounding the title hopefully resolved, indie iOS developer Mobigame can concentrate on putting out updates for Edge (among other projects), like this latest 1.5 release that adds support for the iPad and iPhone 4's Retina display. This edition is optimized for iPad play with higher-resolution textures and a larger viewing area.

Mobigame says the update also offers "improved gameplay performance", as well as a level progression system that unlocks five new stages at a time instead of one. Edge now has 48 levels, plus its unlockable Turbo mode after player complete the action-puzzler.

The update is free if you already have a copy of Edge -- if you don't, you can grab it for only $2.99. Mobigame intends to soon release an update for one of its other titles, Cross Fingers, with over 150 new levels for iPhone and iPad. The developer will announce its next game soon, too.

[Via FingerGaming]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Continuing his 'GDC 25' archival mining ahead of the 25th Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next February, official GDC historian Jason Scott presents newly unearthed audio of a 1998 Game Developers Conference lecture led by Steve Meretzky.]

Besides the comprehensive pile of material from Game Developers Conference organizers itself, attendees have been sending in photos, stories, and home movies of their times at various conferences throughout the years. Sadly, nobody is has yet mailed in any console prototypes or cardboard standups, but I'm patient. I'll wait.

Meanwhile, there's this massive pile of tapes, both audio and video, that need some digitizing. I've started with the audio tapes, recordings of sessions and symposiums at GDCs past. Pretty much all I have are recorded professionally, by companies hired to capture the event, and therefore recorded off the mixing board. Eventually, GDC moves away from audio tapes (actual tapes) and shifts over to CD-ROMs with recordings on them, and of course video.

I've always had a soft spot for adventure games, so I thought our first digitized exhibit on this 'GDC 25' journey would be Tape #109 from the 1998 Game Developers Conference, held in Long Beach, California from May 4th-8th. The title of this tape is 'Are Adventure Games Dead?', hosted by Steve Meretzky, and it's now available to listen to on GDC Vault.

Meretzky, now at social game giant Playdom, probably needs no introduction for most of you, but if so, by 1998 he was already recognized as a giant in the field of game design, having made fifteen games for companies such as Infocom, Legend Entertainment, and Boffo.

Many of these were adventure games, of both the text and graphics variety, and in this hour-long seminar (which he calls "a roundtable but with a lot more people"), he presents his thoughts on the state of adventure gaming in the late '90s, and then invites audience members to comment and questions.

While I think the whole tape is worth listening to, I'll just mention some highlights. After a short introduction about how the seminar will go, Meretzky shows the audience (unfortunately, not in a way we can know what was shown) the sales of 18 recent adventure games (1996-1998). The list is dominated at the top by Myst and Riven, with other games' sales leaving Meretzky "shocked" at how low they are.

He considers the state of game publishing in 1998 to be hit-oriented, which makes a tough sale for adventure games, which are so intensive in their creation. He wonders if the issue is just cyclical, where games of a genre are unwanted until a hit shows up, and then that's all they want. He talks about the advantages of the adventure game genre, and it's interesting to hear him laud what he likes about it.

He speculates that the DVD-ROM format and voice recognition may help re-energize games of this sort, since some people want to play adventure games "without typing and reading". At around 30 minutes in, he opens the floor to the audience, and this is where things get very interesting indeed.

When you have an open floor for questions and comments on a recording like this, all sorts of folks are caught up in this historical net. The room is filled with fans of Steve Meretzky, of adventure games in general, and creators/would-be creators of adventure games.

Mark Moran, co-creator of The Last Express, tells the story of how the game cost $6 million and didn't make anything close to that. He mentions a movie possibly coming out in the future (as of this writing, there hasn't been any.) A developer who worked on an unreleased game called Dog Eat Dog for Trilobyte tells the story of the game (about office politics) and how it was unsuccessful at being finished.

Marty O'Donnell, at the time a sound designer for Riven at Cyan, asks if the adventure gaming community feels outcast and not a part of the game industry. (He also mentions a comment by an employee at Bungie, a company he would later join.)

Teaching with adventure games, whether characters are important to the saleability of a game in the face of 3D graphics, and the place that adventure games will play in the future. In all, it's a wise and fun delving into the potential for these games, with some great moments.

Towards the end, a particularly fun comment comes in about how the future for adventure games should include online voice chat, so you feel like you're sharing it together. One last notable commentary throughout the session is that everyone just punches Myst and Riven in the gut. The simplicity of the experience, the puzzles, and the story all come under criticism.

The tape flutters in some locations, a reflection of the tape aging and losing some of its recording. You can always make things out, but it's not always a smooth ride. This was the copy in the GDC archives, and if someone has a better copy, then I ask if it's possible to borrow it to replace the version that is now online. Something is better than nothing - but there's always room for improvement. Feel free to help things improve.

I'd love to hear comments about the content of the tape - were you there? Do you know more than the speakers about the subject? Please share - that's all history too.

[NOTE: We'll be adding all of the important historical audio and video that we talk about during the 'GDC 25 Chronicles' to the free section of the GDC Vault. Full access to Vault, including near-complete video from all of the recent GDCs, is available to GDC All-Access Pass holders after attending a current GDC show, plus Individual Vault subscribers and studio/school-wide subscribers.]

Posted by Jason Scott at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you saw Patrick Jean's Pixels video (above), which went viral earlier this year with its excellent animations of '80s video games invading New York City, and wished for more, Adam Sandler's production company Happy Madison might be able to grand that wish.

Happy Madison recently approached Jean with the idea of creating "a Ghostbusters-style action comedy in which characters come out of a video game to wreak havoc in the real world", according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The production company's Tim Herlihy, who has collaborated with Sandler many times in the past and has penned the scripts for films like The Wedding Singer, will adapt Pixels for the big screen.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us a fresh new roundup of links from Ian Miles Cheong, featuring some of the most interesting articles about video games and their portrayal of the real world, the historical evolution of the medium, and how empowerment changes our perspective on the world.]

First up, Annie Wright of GamerMelodico writes about how she felt marginalized by Kim Pine’s ending in the Scott Pilgrim game, where the writers clearly did not know what to do with her character as they turned Kim into a lesbian.

The article discusses the stereotypes engendered in characters throughout popular fiction and how the treatment of anyone who doesn’t behave like a lead character in reality is relegated to the role of “other”:

“Honestly, whether or not Kim Pine, Velma or Peppermint Patty are lesbians in reality is not even relevant, because they are not real people. However, they are characters written by real people. The more we come to associate certain personality traits with specific gender identities portrayed on television, in games and other media, the more likely we are to make those assumptions about people in real life, which is simply not how real life is.”

Michael Clarkson of the Discount Thoughts blog writes about the importance of the player as a creative force in cinematic action games, which often place little to no emphasis on what the player is doing in order to tell a pre-written story. It is a well written rebuttal to Roger Ebert’s assertion that games can be art only to the extent that they disregard the player’s input.

Joe Tortuga looks into video game interfaces and Fable 3’s lack of menus on his blog at Cult of the Turtle. It’s an interesting look at how an interface can either impair or empower one’s sense of immersion, and how Lionhead’s push for a lack of menus may have driven the simplicity of its latest title.

Elsewhere, Rob Zacny writes about the powerlessness he felt throughout the first half of BioShock 2 and how his experience in Siren Alley changed his perceptions through empowerment, allowing him to see the narrative through a different lens.

On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander talks about fusing the effort of doing work in real life with playing videogames and how games get us to do normally unfavorable tasks through instant feedback and charted progress.

Cruise Elroy steps into the wayback machine and takes a closer look (sans rose-tinted glasses) at the decade old Super Mario 64, examining its influences on modern games. And Groping the Elephant’s Justin Keverne returns with another excellent entry of Groping the Map, featuring the second part of his in-depth investigation of the “Life of the Party” mission in Thief II.

Over at Boing Boing, Tom Chatfield takes a serious look at the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm, and how it is poised to change the face of MMO gaming. He talks about the changes it brings not just to the game, but to the genre as a whole:

“Cataclysm also makes me think that pretty much everyone else creating similar games to World of Warcraft ought to be terrified. Because if it’s possible to keep on reinventing a game this well, how can anybody else hope to tempt you away from a place so layered with experiences and memories, and so relentless in re-calibrating itself on the basis of its users’ behavior?”

On Current Intelligence, Greg J. Smith writes about what controversies over games like Six Days in Fallujah, Modern Warfare 2 and Medal of Honor tell us about the nature of ethics and realism in the gaming industry and how the events that play out in games shouldn’t be confused with actual conflict.

Spectacle Rock’s Joel Haddock examines what it’s like to be locked out of a turn-based game and how the worst thing that can happen to you is to be denied your turn. I for one remember the annoyance I experienced whenever my soldiers had their minds controlled by Ethereals in X-COM.

On his blog FlickeringColours, Adam Ruch attempts to extract meaning from Far Cry 2, from its mechanics and and the narrative and aesthetic information it provides. The premise of his argument is that its designer was more concerned with creating an experiential game rather than creating a dramatic arc through its narrative.

Jorge Albor writes about players who are attempting to recreate the world of Middle Earth on their Minecraft server, carving out a fictional history with pixellated bricks.

Bitmob features a trio of new posts this week. First up, Greg Kasavin examines the narrative design of Limbo. Although he ultimately enjoyed it, he failed to find meaning in the game’s story. Kasavin asserts, “Limbo is a game about what it feels like to take a wrong turn.”

Also on Bitmob, Layton Shumway investigates the consequences of friendly fire in games, or the lack thereof. Citing his most recent experience with Medal of Honor, he writes: “Maybe it’s just an issue of AI. Maybe better-programmed allies wouldn’t jump in front of my gun, and this wouldn’t be a problem. But it’s still hard for any campaign to carry any weight when you feel like your actions have no real repercussions.”

And finally, Jon Porter writes about how the trend of genre splitting in games like Mass Effect threatens the value of overspecialization, asking if the industry’s desire to create hybrid titles is holding back the various genres from achieving their true potential.

To round up this week’s entry is a review of Minecraft by Objective Ministries which presents Minecraft as a Christian game aimed at secular gamers. It’s a very amusing, if not “enlightening” read.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

German indie developer Spaces of Play has released Spirits for iPad, which was one of a select few games featured Sense Of Wonder Night's showcase of innovative projects this year. With its hand-drawn graphics and orchestral soundtrack, it also took home IndieCade's "Best Aesthetics" award last month.

Somewhat similar to Lemmings, Spirits is an action-puzzle game in which players direct a stream of mushroom-shaped characters towards a spinning spiral. The little figures can blow or block wind, dig tunnels, and grow bridges out of leaves to reach the spiral.

The iPad game is available on the App Store now for $4.99. An iPhone and iPod touch edition for Spirits is also forthcoming.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If your life is in such dire straits that the idea of a fighting game pitting puppies that spew sweets against kittens that balance gifts on their heads is incapable of cheering you up, then... Well, you've got some serious issues that you should talk about with your friends and family.

This is a two-year-old image created by pixelartist Paul Robertson (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game), so it's been bringing joy to people's hearts for some time now, but it's seen a resurgence in popularity due to two sites, presentcat.com and cakedogg.com, that pair the scene with music from George & Jonathan.

I've mentioned George & Jonathan here before in passing when talking about their performance at Heavenly Symphony last week, but in case you haven't checked them out, you need to give their latest album, The Best Music, a listen.

[Update: Jason Scott points out that Torleif West created the sites.]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Our own Christian Nutt attended game engine company Unity's Unite 10 conference in Montreal, where Schell Games founder Jesse Schell delivered a keynote called The Future of Virtual Characters, in which he predicted the potential future of interactive characters and the technology requirements to achieve truly compelling and enduring characters.]

Schell's company is currently developing multiple games, including The Mummy Online, a free-to-play MMO which uses Unity. "I think there's a lot of reason to believe that a lot of the innovation in the next five to 10 to 20 years will be happening on the Unity platform," Schell said, which is what attracted him to speak at the conference.

While he admitted he's speaking about the future, "making concrete predictions about the future is the best way to make predictions," he said -- in other words, the more he does it, the better he gets at it.

Rolling back to the past, even before games, he said "there's something deep within us that likes the idea of virtual characters." And though we "we often think of virtual characters as something for children," they don't have to be.

Schell used to work for Disney, and has had plenty of chances to observe kids interacting with the characters in the suits at the theme parks. Many kids love them, but for the ones who do not, they often react deeply negatively.

"There's always this moment where kids are uncomfortable around these characters... and the kids become explosively angry at the characters. Some kids become very upset, and what they become upset about, as far as I've been able to figure, is that they figure out that this character isn't real, and the fantasy has been taken away from them."

So how do we preserve this fantasy?

Facial expression tracking is one of the core tools -- "the reason this stuff matters is because everything's getting a camera on it." Once devices can track the user's expression, you can map that onto a character and improve interactivity. "You can imagine that in MMOs five to 10 years from now, that every character will map the facial expression, the eye movement of the player who's playing."

Schell also sees this as potentially useful for avatar-based teleconferencing, which could well replace video services like Skype, in his view, because it will be more freeing and also improve interactivity. "Once the technology is there to make decent facial expression... It will be an interesting experience to see who uses which avatar when," he said, referring to professional versus social and game situations.

At this point, Schell found it important to point out that while there are plenty of skeptics about these ideas becoming prevalent, disruptive technologies often leapfrog those that have slowly and steadily developed over time and gained huge audiences.

Using a chart from the book The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen -- "everyone should be familiar with it," he said -- he illustrated this concept. "The reason they blow it because they make the terrible mistake of listening to their customers." The customers end up switching to disruptive technologies, "and I think facial avatars will be one of those."

Now, you have an interactive avatar -- what would improve that? How about a memory? Persistent databases can allow for this.

It's-A You

Referring from 1981's Donkey Kong to today, Schell made this point amusingly: "You think of game characters kind of like your friends, but I'm sorry Mario, you're a terrible friend. Mario, dude, we've been together 30 years. I remember you! You don't remember me!"

"We have persistent characters on per-game basis, but why not do it on a per-character basis? When you sign into a game he could remember you, show you videos of what you've done before. We could switch from 'It's-a me, Mario!' to 'It's-a you, Jesse!'"

Of course, he pointed out, "If we're going to have a long term relationship over time," there's an important stipulation. "We change. Will the characters need to change too?"

Speech recognition is going to be crucial to the evolution of characters, too."It's another one of those below-the-line [of necessary-for-adoption quality] technologies we've given up on," said Schell, but "it's crucially important for us. It may be the most important technology for us of all as game designers."

USC professor Chris Swain, said Schell, draws a parallel between games and movies here. "People did not take movies seriously when they were silent; they were not serious art or serious entertainment. Then they learned to talk and everything changed. And film and video became the literature of the 20th century.

"He suggested we'll see the same parallel with video games. Of course, they can talk, but they can't listen. Once they listen to us and we can have a conversation, games will become the most important medium of our time," said Schell.

And for that, natural language understanding will be key. However, he found it important to point out that discussions of this topic are often framed in terms of the Turing Test -- but this "trips us up a lot because there are a lot of things that wouldn't pass that test that still would be interesting to talk to."

Text adventures were once popular, but Schell thinks it's not just the rise of graphics that killed them. "The text gives you too many options. It opens it up and says 'type anything', but there are only a small number of actions it can respond to. It's acting like it's free, but it's not, and that's what frustrating."

Scribblenauts is another example of this technology -- still incipient, but promising, said Schell.

Facial sensing was already covered. Emotions are easily recognized by humans, but computers must be part of that, said Schell. "Once we can do that we can sense your emotions," said Schell, developers can create "a game where you actually have to act, or feel emotions. A game where someone tells you where there dog just died and if you can't manage to cry then no, you're not getting to the next level!"

Joking aside, that would leave room for "characters who can sense your emotion [and] may want to act differently."

Of course, the best-known example of this so far is Lionhead's Milo demo. "A lot of people were frustrated with this because parts of it were cool technology, and other parts of it seemed to be created out of vapor and lies," Schell admitted. However, "Setting that aside, this is the dream of face-to-face communication with a character... I'm sure that soon it will be very possible."

Here's a question: Who will we talk to? Schell's answer wasn't what you might expect.

"I think this will fundamentally change the way video games work," he said. While the natural assumption is that it will be NPCs and other players -- similar to contemporary game interactions -- "I think we're going to be talking to our avatars. Normally we think that's crazy -- I control the avatar. I would never talk to the avatar."

We already disengage from our avatar in cutscenes, however, he pointed out. Mario talks, and then the player resumes control. This is a process -- "a natural projecting yourself in, projecting yourself out. As such we will develop a relationship with these guys to the point where we may think of them as virtual companions. We may have a relationship with them... and if they have some intelligence they may do some stuff when I'm not logged in."

And as games map to more and more platforms, the character (with its persistent database) will hop from one to the next and continue your interaction. "The number of technologies that run 3D graphics is going to continue to diverge. It's not going to converge because technologies never do that," said Schell. These characters could connect to everything from Facebook to GPS, access your health data, your social graph, examine your emails and online purchase info, of course interface with game data,

He even envisioned a conversation with a character while driving -- the character continues to play in the persistent game and gives you updates while you're unable to interact beyond speech.

Anti-Social Weirdos

Schell also sees these characters as potential "cognitive tutors". Research suggests that "if you create a situation where a student's job where it is to teach the virtual character," they perform better. An application called Betty's Brain invited kids to teach a simple character. "They found that when children are trying to help another character they learn better and focus more."

The people who are told that they are teaching a character, it seems, "spend more time getting ready, prepping, and end up learning better, because it's something people take seriously."

There are currently programs which invite kids to read to dogs at libraries -- because when kids are reading by themselves they read differently than when they read aloud; meanwhile dogs are not judgmental, allowing the kids to learn and improve at their own pace.

An important tech that needs to be developed for this all to come together is "intelligent actors". Schell pointed forward to the conversation game Facade as the best example of this.

While its AI characters have traditional goals and behaviors as in many games, they're also aware of the story arc of the interaction -- and change their behavior and tone as it's reaching its climax. The developers call this "the value arc". Schell concedes that this is a very complicated area of development, even as he deems it necessary.

Augmented reality is another tech he thinks will be important. "One could assume all of these interactions could happen indoors, but there's a lot of reason to believe that soon we can have outdoor virtual experiences," he said. Moving off the screen, even to glasses which overlay virtual characters onto the world, is an area he expects to grow.

In the end, these characters will "be an important part of our social life because they're going to be the one you can always go to." Persistent, growing, and fully interactive, "these characters will serve as meaningful emotional crutches in our lives."

Schell asked, "is this going to be a good thing? Is this going to make us into a bunch of antisocial weirdos?" He's not sure, but seems to think the positive will outweigh the negative.

And while researchers are working on some of the pieces of this puzzle, "the game designers are going to make this first," said Schell. "Think about how Facebook became a game platform -- because 'I'm already at Facebook' ... because people got the Facebook habit, games became a Facebook thing," he said.

By the same token, once game characters begin to reach some of these technological areas needed for meaningfully interactive as Schell describes it, "if you're already interacting with [the virtual character] for games... it will become a habit."

"What starts as a game could become part of people's lives... And while it may have negative aspects, having friends who are always there for you might not be such a bad thing," he concluded.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Brad Borne's popular flash game series The Fancy Pants Adventures is coming to XBLA and PSN thanks to Electronic Arts' Partners program. The publisher's EA 2D group will work with Borne and Madrid-based studio Over the Top Games to develop the downloadable title and release it next spring!

In the side-scrolling platformer, players control a hand-drawn, mohawked stick figure named Fancy Pants Man, who is on a quest to rescue his kidnapped sister Cutie Pants. This new edition takes the adventures from the original two games and adds a new world, story, and modes exclusive for consoles.

EA Partners has also announced partnerships to publish a twin-stick shooter called Gatling Gears from Vanguard Games (Greed Corp.), and a stealth-action game titled Warp by Trapdoor -- both are releasing next year for XBLA, PSN, and PC.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Organizers of the 2011 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the jury panel that will determine the finalists and winner of its Excellence in Audio award, a category which seeks to highlight the best musical & sound innovation, quality, and impressiveness in independent gaming.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Audio award, which will be given out at Game Developers Conference 2011 next March, earned recognition for games that took an entirely new and unique to approach to sound in games or otherwise excelled at their craft.

These have included Queasy Games' abstract acoustic guitar shooter and 2007 award winner Everyday Shooter, 2008 finalist guitar-controller platformer Fret Nice, 2009's ultra-stylized finalist PixelJunk Eden from Q-Games and Osaka musician/DJ Baiyon, and the atmospheric 2010 award winning Closure (pictured).

This year, the jury will receive recommendations from the wider body of over 150 IGF Main Competition judges (itself including notable former IGF winners, finalists and indie game notables including Ron Carmel, Andy Schatz, Ramiro Corbetta, Kellee Santiago, and Olivier Lejade) as they consider the merits of each of the five finalists and eventual award winner.

The 2011 IGF Excellence in Audio award jury consists of the following:

- Danny Baranowsky (Founder of dB soundworks and musician behind games like Canabalt & 2010 Excellence in Audio finalist Super Meat Boy.)
- Vincent Diamante (Composer and sound designer behind PS3 indie hit Flower, audio & game design teacher at USC's School of Cinematic Arts.)
- Jordan Fehr (Sound designer/editor/mixer with credits on Super Meat Boy, Donkey Kong Country Returns, SteamBirds, Realm of the Mad God, & Spewer.)
- Dylan Fitterer (Creator of music-puzzle racer and 2008 IGF Excellence in Audio winner Audiosurf.)
- David Lloyd & Larry Oji (Respectively, musician and founder of game music site OverClocked ReMix; OCR head and soundtrack director on Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.)
- Matt Piersall (Founder of GL33K, the indie audio studio behind games like Splosion Man, Comic Jumper, Epic Mickey & Donkey Kong Country Returns.)
- Emily Ridgway (Music director and audio designer on games like BioShock, Brutal Legend & Costume Quest.)
- William Stallwood & Dain Saint (Respectively, creative director & technical director of Cipher Prime Studios, creator of ambient music puzzler Auditorium.)
- Rich Vreeland (Composer, sound designer, netlabel curator, and chiptune musician performing as Disasterpeace.)
- Josh Whelchel (Independent composer behind The Spirit Engine 2 & Bonesaw: The Game and works for UbiSoft, MTV and Zynga.)

"Independent games are at the forefront of recognizing the true potential of music and sound in games," said festival chairman Brandon Boyer.

"Beyond simple soundtracks and scores, the indie gaming community has been crucial in exploring the space where mechanics and audio can play together, and for veering radically from traditional musical expectations to create fantastically unique ambience. We're all excited to hear what this year's entrants have created!"

The announcement is the second in a series revealing specific juries for each IGF Award, following the debut of the Nuovo Award jury, including notables like Jason Rohrer, Clint Hocking, Rod Humble and Ian Bogost.

All entries in the 2011 Independent Games Festival -- part of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website -- are currently browsable at the IGF's official site, where more complete biographical information on the Audio Award jury is now available.

The five Excellence in Audio Award finalists will be announced -- along with a jury statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup -- in early January 2011. All finalists will be playable at the IGF Pavilion on the show floor during Game Developers Conference 2011, with the winner announced on the evening of March 2, 2011 at the IGF Awards.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fans of retro-style action games and/or indie titles with wacky premises, don't miss out on Tempura of the Dead. Released a couple days ago to Xbox Live Indie Games by Japanese group 8bits fanatics, the game has you switching between a submachine gun-toting U.S. President and sword-wielding samurai to fight zombies.

Oh, and you need to juggle zombies' heads in the air several times with your gun and sword, too, in order to save their souls -- once you do that, you enter a Tempura Fever mode allowing you to save the zombies with just a single head juggle. I don't understand it either, but it sounds like a fun mechanic.

You can download the game now for just 240 Points, or grab a free demo. If zombie head juggling and the Lupin/Obama-esque artwork above for the President of the United States isn't enough to convince you to try it out, you can check out Tempura of the Dead's intro movie and some game play after the break. Let's cook them all!

[Via Sciplore]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Steam Birds, the addictive turn-based strategy game, is now available for iOS devices thanks to Semi Secret Software (Canabalt, Gravity Hook), which has added new artwork, music, the ability to share progress between devices, and touch controls to the dog-fighting title.

Originally released as a Flash title by Spry Fox and Radial Games, Steam Birds features 20 missions in which players use bombs, missiles, and poison gas to take down eight different steam-powered enemy aircraft. Gamers input orders for their planes and try to build up combos against the enemy.

You can download Steam Birds on your iPhone/iPod Touch for $0.99 or on your iPad for $1.99 -- though it runs fine on older devices, the game has "the smoothest animations and the most special effects" on newer models. The iPad edition currently has a bug that prevents audio from playing, but Semi Secret has already sent an updated build to Apple.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he looks at fairness and 'critical moments' in - and partially outside - the genre.]

Here is another column on roguelike design issues. This one is also somewhat common to games other than roguelikes that still strive to provide a “roguelike feel.” I use that term meaning games that seek to be more about providing an environment in which interesting situations can arise spontaneously and randomly, instead of all being pre-made by a level designer.

If a game has pre-made levels potential problem situations can simply be made not to ever occur. In a game that generates situations algorithmically, a lot more care must be given to, generally, the rules of the world, and, specifically, the items and monsters within it, so as to be fair to the player.

Player fairness, to the uninitiated, might seem to be a laughable thing for roguelikes to worry about. Is this not the genre that contains Nethack, of that legendary player mortality rate? But in fact Nethack is an almost ludicrously fair game; the fact that 10+ game winning streaks are possible, covering all the races and roles, proves that. When you look closely at it, nearly all causes of death come down to player ignorance or carelessness.

Now both of these sources of mortality are more substantial than they appear. Ignorance of the full breadth of Nethack’s rules is understandable considering just how complex the game is; I have read and studied spoilers for over a decade and have read a fair bit of the source code and I still run into new things occasionally. And perfect care requires a style of play unappealing to many players, again, including myself. But all the same, it is still possible to win the great majority of games of Nethack.

Nethack is so fair that, to a sufficiently knowledgeable player, the game is actually a bit too easy. But one doesn’t have to take fairness to Nethack’s extremes to still recognize it as a concern. All well-designed roguelikes adhere to a certain type of fairness involving something I call critical moments. Understanding them is vital in designing not only good roguelikes, but all kinds of randomly-generated games that use permanent death.

Permadeath defined

A reminder is in order as to what constitutes “permadeath.” Games that use it are those that allow the player to catastrophically fail, losing the game, without recourse to continuing play other than starting over. You might be able to “save” in these games, but upon resuming play the save data is rendered unusable. Saves could be considered analogous to temporarily holding one’s place in a game rather than creating a checkpoint from which repeated resumption is possible. Sometimes I call saving under a permadeath system a “bookmark save.” A more intuitive name might be “suspend saves.”

One fact about games with permadeath is that they must be designed in a much more rigorous manner than games that allow multiple resumptions from a save file. In typical games that provide for saving, generally a player finds a save point right before a boss. When fighting the boss, it generally has a pattern or weak point that is difficult to figure out, meaning the player’s character dies. Although often called “a game over,” the player then resumes from the save point and tries again, using the information from the prior attempt to try to do better this time. This may be repeated many times, until the player is at last successful, the boss is defeated, and the player may move on.

Most games made these days use a system like this. In fact, they have long been designed with the understanding that such a system will be in place. The result is that most games are often not designed in such a way that players will be fairly able to complete a leg of the game on one attempt. These games are expected to be played in many goes, with more information on difficult sections gained on each failed attempt. They don’t even try to give the player enough information to be honestly capable of finishing a tough part upon seeing it the first time. There are often hints, sure, but there is really no effort expended in testing to ensuring bosses are fairly completeable without prior knowledge.

Permadeath games do not have this luxury. Thus it is that much of what players hate about permadeath in games is, truthfully, just as much due to lax design. I observe that, in games that use sparsely-placed save points, the further apart the saves are, the more the implications of the play structure come to resemble those of permanent death. If it takes only a minute to get to a boss after a save, the stakes aren’t as high as if it takes half an hour. In fact, a permadeath system could be considered analogous to a game with a single save point, right at the start of play.

But I digress.

Critical moments

The best way to explain critical moments, I think, is to present them as a series of hypothetical situations. We’ll use Rogue as our example game. Take this situation:

Here, the player has just come down the staircase into a new level. In this case the player seems to be relatively safe. He can move in any of eight directions. There is nothing nearby that can cause him harm. Immediately speaking, it doesn’t matter much what the player does here. He is free to take whatever actions he feels necessary to secure his character’s long-term survival. This is because this is not a critical moment.

Now, let’s look at this situation:

This situation is dire, although very unlikely early in the game. Griffins are among the strongest monsters in Rogue. If the player is low-level, then a single hit from a griffin could wipe him out. For the sake argument let’s assume this is the case. That then makes this a critical moment: if the player doesn’t take the right action this turn, the game could end immediately. The right choice must be made to survive.

We might borrow a term from chess here and say he is “in check,” which is appealing not just for the danger of the situation but because a roguelike character’s movement options mirror those of a chess king. Like when a king is in check, the player must take immediate action to continue play. Note that, unlike chess, there is randomness in Rogue. If the player’s character makes a mistake he may die, or instead the monster might miss on its attack, or it might do less damage than the player has hit points. Most situations in Rogue are like this, but what is important to this discussion is the fact the character might die.

So, if the player chooses to attack the Griffin, well, then if he’s low-level he’ll probably not kill the monster immediately. It’ll then get its turn to counter-attack, which is perilous for him. We need to prevent those monster attacks, or at least postpone them. So that’s a bad move. If the player moves to another space adjacent to the Griffin then it can still hit for its turn, so that’s also bad.

Fleeing

So, the choices here are either to move away from the griffin, or to use some other option. In the former situation the griffin will certainly move another space forward, putting the player in danger again but postponing the fatal attack by one turn. That could be either a good or bad thing:
Good:

• the player will have had an extra turn to heal from prior damage;


• the monster might be naturally slower than him;


• the player might come across the stairs out offering escape (true in Rogue but not always in Nethack or Crawl, where adjacent intelligent monsters can follow down stairs);


• the player might be able to continue retreating in a loop, allowing healing up to full.

• The monster might be faster than the player, meaning some of those running away turns the monster might get a free attack;


• the direction the player is running towards may be a dead-end, meaning the player won’t be able to evade forever. Eventually his back will be to the wall, and he’ll have to flee around the monster, or maybe even fight through;


• another monster might arrive from out of sight in the direction he’s fleeing. Even if it’s a weak monster, when it gets up to the player he’ll have to spend a turn killing it, which will give the griffin a try at cleaning his clock.

In these “bad” cases, if the player has no other escape items then he has actually made a critical error in letting the griffin get this close, an issue we’ll get to later. Item use is the other solution to this situation. Well-designed roguelikes provide a number of these items, one-use, multi-use, infinite use and equippable. If he doesn’t have any of these he’ll have to resort to fleeing, and the possibility of any of the bad things listed above.

Items

The point here is that the end of a game always comes down to such a critical moment, whether it is recognized as such by the player or not. The most devious moments are those that don’t look dangerous.

If:
all critical moments in a game are recognizable and/or avoidable,
the player has complete knowledge of the game rules,
and is playing with sufficient care,

then the player can always survive. An entirely fair game is bound to always provide such situations. (Note, however, that no roguelike is entirely fair: even marvin occasionally loses at Nethack.) On the other hand, it bears no responsibility to warn of check, and so the player doesn’t always know when he must take a particular move to survive.

The player may have to improve his state sufficiently to increase his powers of survival, through increases in power, mobility or vision. Doing so “pushes back” the criticality of situations. If the player has gained many hit points then he will probably be able to survive a single hit by that griffin above. If he can move quickly (potion of speed) or slow the threatening opponent (wand of slow monster) he could escape or use “hit and run” tactics to kill the monster. If he can see an extra space in passages or darkness he might be able to see the griffin coming before it gets adjacent.

But there are also tools that don’t offer a complete escape, or an escape with conditions or drawbacks, or a random chance of failure. To look at a more complex situation: if the player has a scroll of teleportation then he can probably escape from the griffin.

But teleport scrolls are random in operation. They move the player to a random other in-room spot on the level. That may be adjacent to a monster just as dangerous as the griffin; it may in fact be one of the other spaces adjacent to the very griffin causing the trouble! It might seem that this makes the scroll a bad choice, but practically it is a small risk. That is part of what makes the decision to use the scroll an interesting choice. In this case the player would probably want to use a surer escape item to get away from, or even neutralize, the griffin, but if no other choice is available the teleport scroll is still available as a last-ditch option.

The First Law of Roguelikes

To return to the game, let’s consider this situation now:

This is one of those cases where the player doesn’t know if a situation is critical. Rogue doesn’t let you see beyond doors until you step into them.

NOTE: HARRY POTTER VISUAL PUN NOT INTENDED

Although unlikely in a given instance, the strongest monster that can be generated on this level could be on the other side. One of the less fair things about Rogue (and many other roguelikes as well) is that, in a case like this where you blunder into an enemy, it’ll get the first attack on you 50% of the time, and before you even know it’s there. If that attack is strong enough to kill then your game is over solely because you did something you must do, frequently, just to play the game.

It’s not likely for that to happen, but as I’ve said in past columns, success in roguelikes comes from not playing dangerously if you can help it. If you survive in a situation 49 times out of 50, but keep encountering that situation, eventually the dice will roll against you. Even if you just roll once, that’s still a 1-in-50 chance of losing, and slim chances come up sometimes. Thus, the player is advised not to enter doors at all if he can help it.

The trouble is, he can’t help it.

Players are constantly entering doors throughout most roguelikes. All the means of leaving rooms in Rogue either involve doorways or expending a resource of some type. What’s more, on the other side of doors are dark passages, twisty tunnels that the player can’t see more than one space down, which in game terms is the same kind of danger as entering a doorway. Doors are entered only a relative few times each level, but every step taken down a passage might be its own critical moment!

If you we were to extend the player’s sight range in passages the situation is eased a bit, since the player can wait upon seeing an approaching monster and thus get in the first hit. But, assuming monsters have the same vision range as the player, even being able to see two or more spaces away in a dark corridor doesn’t much lessen the criticality of monsters meetings in passages. You might not be in danger of an attack this round, but the enemy still blocks that passage and forces you to move away. Unless the player has an escape item or some such, it merely postpones the inevitable.

When the player enters a new dungeon level, there is a small chance that he’ll begin adjacent to a powerful monster forcing him to flee immediately. And, if the only good direction to flee is a dead-end, it’s even possible that the “critical moment” was the turn before entering the new dungeon level, which the player has absolutely no chance of knowing ahead of time.

Certainly in these cases, the player is screwed. A situation nearly identical to the one pictured below occurred to me while I was taking screenshots for this column:

Situations like these bring us to an important design dictum, so important we might call it the First Law of Roguelike Design:

Provided reasonable play, the player’s character should not be killed or suffer great permanent harm in one attack.

“Reasonable” here means playing in the way intended as “normal” by the developer. If the player can survive, but only by playing in an annoying way, such as, say, from searching every space to ward against the possibility of an instadeath trap, that is bad design. (If the developer does intend that searching to be normal then it’s probably bad general game design.) It also means that, if the player has a temporary condition that makes death more likely, he has no assurance. Being low in hit points means you shouldn’t go exploring dangerous tunnels.

"Permanent harm" here means types other than straight hit point damage, such as substantial strength drain. Those instances have the potential to stack up, so the character might be subject to multiple unavoidable such drains in a game, making him rapidly unplayable.

The Rogue analogy is getting Rattlesnake-bitten enough that your Strength drains to extremely low levels. Strength drain cannot kill by itself in Rogue, but it is possible for it to get so low that the character is impossible to play unless he uses a potion of restore strength, which are not guaranteed items. How much harm is too great? It depends on the extent of the damage and how many turns it takes to get out off the zone in question. The rattlesnake floors in Rogue don’t really last that long. The Vampire floors later, depending on version*, could be hazardous but are the last floors of the game. The drain floors in Super Famicom Shiren are more dangerous, relatively speaking, but are only two levels out of 30.

* Rogue's vampires drain maximum hit points. It seems that Rogue Clone IV's vampires drain maximum strength.

The strictness of the law is less if the game's sight rules were changed to always look at least two spaces away, although this is hard to do in the case of changing dungeon levels. Still, this might be an interesting avenue for design exploration on the part of inventive game authors.

Situational danger & improving state

For illustration purposes I’ve overstated the danger a bit. If Rogue threw griffins at the player from the start it wouldn’t be a very fun game. Fortunately, most monsters aren’t able to kill in one hit. No monster in the game has an instakill attack. Some might do so much damage as to deplete the player’s health in one attack, but only if he is very low-leveled. Thus, part of the necessary process of the game is improving your statistics to make dangerous areas survivable.

There exists one popular roguelike game, however, which is famous, or infamous, for its instadeaths: Nethack. And yet, Nethack is also known among experienced players for fairness. It might even be too fair. How are these two reputations reconciled? Let’s look at some of its instadeath monsters and observe how they obey the stated law of design.

Cockatrices appear fairly early, before the player has had a chance to improve his state much. By one measure they are the most deadly monster in the game, the source of more unique death causes than any other monster. However:
- In melee, cockatrices can only turn the player to stone if he hits without a weapon and isn’t wearing gloves. In other cases, the player “hears the cockatrice hissing,” which either has no effect or begins a gradual petrifaction process. This can be halted by eating a dead lizard or an acidic monster, both of which are common monsters at low levels, and also are among the few monsters in the game whose corpses never rot. It is extremely unlikely the player won’t have at least one melee weapon when he sees his first cockatrice; the only role that doesn’t begin with one is the Tourist, they’re frequent finds on the dungeon floor, and many intelligent monsters are generated with one.
- Perhaps paradoxically, once the cockatrice has shuffled off its mortal coil it becomes more deadly to you, because it is awfully tempting to pick one up (when wearing gloves, of course) and start whacking monsters with it. This is avoidable, simply, by not doing that. If you do, and are carrying so much that you are in burdened state, you are taking a grave risk since falling into a pit trap may cause you to land on the corpse, and pit traps are hidden features.
- There are two genuinely treacherous instadeaths associated with cockatrices. The first: if you aren’t wearing gloves and are blind, and step on a corpse, you are instantly turned to stone the moment you feel it at your feet. Fortunately, a cockatrice is dead usually because you killed it, and if you’re blind you probably killed it in melee so you’ve probably heard its hissing. In those cases, you probably shouldn’t walk around until your blindness has worn off.
- The second case is when an enemy picks up a dead lizard-bird and whacks you with it. This is legitimately terrifying, but surprisingly rare. Only intelligent humanoid enemies wearing gloves can use this trick. In practice this is almost exclusively soldiers, who you won’t even see until the midgame. And again, they don’t try to kill cockatrices themselves to use this trick; it usually only happens when you kill one yourself and they get to the body.

Medusa petrifies your character immediately if you enter her presence while sighted. She is always present and always stands on the downstairs to her level. But she always appears on one of two specific special levels, and once you know she’s there she’s not so bad. Blindfolds (or, in a pinch, towels) can usually found by the time you get to her. Barring those, you can just dig down on her level to bypass her until it’s time to ascend with the Amulet, by which time you’ll have had around 30 levels to scour for items and at least two wishes to boot.

In older versions of Nethack Medusa was much more treacherous; she could be generated in a normal room on an otherwise-ordinary level. That was certainly a case of her breaking the rules.

Some monsters in Nethack are able to cast spells, and if they’re higher than a certain level one of those spells is Touch of Death. These foes generally appear late, but they are one of the most significant roadblocks in the game, the primary reason magic resistance, which provides an infallible defense against Touch of Death, is so important an element in the ascension kit. There are two major Nethack balance variants, Sporkhack and UnNethack, and both take measure to reduce the essentiality of magic resistance. This spell doesn’t break our rule only because by this time the player has probably acquired a means of magic resistance. Yet note that if he hasn’t this is a possible source of danger, perhaps the last really great danger of the game: the only guaranteed wishes are in the Castle, and the courtyard of the Castle usually contains liches, who are capable of using Touch of Death. If you don’t have magic resistance by this point then it’s advisable to genocide them if possible.

Black dragons have a disintegration attack and might come into view lined up. If they choose to breathe right off there’s not much the player can do to avoid the attack. If he’s wearing armor, however, that will get disintegrated first. That will put him in a lot of trouble, and vulnerable to a second blast, but at least he’ll still be alive. This is a reason why black dragons are sometimes a genocide target. It’s important to note that this case turns up surprisingly rarely, although at least one of these dragons usually turns up each game. They are mid-game enemies, and usually the player has a means of detecting them from afar by the time they enter generation.

More dangerous is the canonical Nethack screw-monster, the gnome with a wand of death, found on the dungeon floor. While rare in individual games, every Nethack player encounters one eventually. The only perfect defense against a wand of death is magic resistance, which is hard to come by for most classes in the early levels. This is one of the few things in Nethack that can defeat even perfect play. Fortunately, random death wands are as rare as wands of wishing.

Almost as dangerous early on are strong attack wands such as fire, cold or lightning. Those are not typically instant kills, but they are strong, magic resistance isn’t a perfect defense, and even the appropriate elemental resistances aren’t perfect. In worse cases, the player may actually be forced to rely on one of Nethack “quirks,” the fact that wands can only be fired in cardinal or diagonal directions. Against a demonstrated wand user, the player can usually use the same tricks unicorns use, attempting to move to a knight’s-move away so as to move into melee in the next turn.

There are a number of subtle aspects of Rogue's design that, while not immediately evident, combine to make a playable game. It is random, but not too random. It may be possible to codify these things into a set of "laws" of roguelike design. A possible first rule was presented this time. Next time, we will attempt to provide a more complete set. See you then!

Posted by John Harris at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Solar is a universe sandbox/simulation title that has players wandering space as stars, planets, asteroids and black holes. Judging by thie clip, it's an atmospheric game in which players interact with other celestial bodies, pulling other planets and asteroids into their orbit, and even waging war with rival solar systems.

According to our sister site IndieGames.com, players can foster intelligent lifeforms on your planet's surface that will build defensive turrets and spaceships that can fight against other planets. When they run into other civilizations, they can destroy the other group by smashing into their home planet.

You can already download the Solar "prototype" for just 80 Points on Xbox Live, but indie developer Murudai is working on a "remake/upgrade" titled Solar 2 for Xbox and PC, which is what you see in the IGF 2011 submission video above.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Online apparel shop Triumvir has unveiled a new Street Fight Alpha III line of shirts, or its "Greyscale Collection", which is presented with Bengus' (a.k.a. CRMK) in-game victory poses for several of the world warriors.

"Unlike [our] previous collections, which carried a more serious tone consisting of rugged sketch-art of the characters, the Alpha III Collection features fully completed artwork to give the collection an ominous, subtle, and sleek look," says Triumvir.

The store will sell the tees for $36 each (preorders begin shipping in mid-December), and the first 100 orders will receive "a collectible Street Fighter gift". You can check out some of Triumvir's shirt designs after the break:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our own Christian Nutt is at MIGS in Canada this week, and while most of his write-ups are appearing on Gamasutra, we're excerpting some GSW-relevant ones here, such as this neat lecture from 2D Boy and Indie Fund's Ron Carmel.]

World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel used his Montreal International Games Summit keynote speech to urge large publishers to use their resources to create small internal teams that would work on groundbreaking games from within.

"We need a medium-sized design studio. Something that is larger than a typical indie, but has the same propensity for of talent density, focus, and risk-taking," said Carmel, formerly an employee of major publisher Electronic Arts prior to going independent.

Notably, a focus on profit must be eliminated from the equation. "Creating this within a major developer doesn't present a problem," said Carmel. With a budget of $1-$2 million dollars, 10 staffers could be hired to work on "creatively ambitious and forward-thinking projects."

He likened it to the automobile industry, which alongside its mainstream consumer products works on concept cars -- few of which enter production as regular models. The concept car is, said Carmel, "a marketing expense to build your brand, and say, 'Look at all the amazing things we're creating.'"

It also helps with recruitment. Said Carmel, "there's no reason the larger game companies can't do that."

He also said that developers must move away from the notion that a team comprised primarily of programmers and artists can create a great work. Why do Valve's games have such amazing environments? Because, said Carmel, "Valve has architects on staff."

"Because games are, in a way, a superset of all the mediums that came before them... we need to incorporate the people who are at the top of their respective fields into our game design process."

However, he said, that doesn't mean just hiring them onto projects in limited roles. In his view, everybody has to have their hands in the project. "Cross-pollination [creates a] more cohesive [game] experience because everybody holds in their head the full vision of what the game is supposed to be."

Both examples of teams he thinks approach this model come from within Sony Computer Entertainment. Carmel says that Team Ico, with 2005's Shadow of the Colossus, reached a point "that is about as far as games have come in terms of expressing something meaningful and authentic."

At the same time, Flower and Journey developer Thatgamecompany, which is funded by Sony and works out of its Santa Monica studio, may not be "quite as far along as Team Ico," in Carmel's view, "but each project is significantly more ambitious than the last."

Carmel noted that games are getting more ubiquitous as a medium, too, and that's a concern. "When everybody's playing, them there will be a much greater desire for experiences in games that are a lot more nuanced."

His view is that a group like this could "have experiments and don't work, and try better next time" when separated from strict profitability. He also considered the idea that "a large studio would hire a bunch of indies and create a studio out of that... but I am not entirely sure that would work." The reason? Many current independents choose that road due to a singularity of vision, and may not be team-oriented.

What Separates Indies?

Carmel showed a clip from the acclaimed TV series The Wire early on in his presentation -- one he hoped would illustrate the show as what he calls "the first masterpiece of television... nuanced and authentic."

In Carmel's view, "video games are in a relatively similar place to television, but they're 20 years behind. I don't think we've so far seen a masterpiece of video games. Great works yes, but nothing that's as expressive as the great works of film, television, literature."

Interactivity, he said, is the key here. "With choice comes the possibility for something very interesting... in which your own emotional landscape gets to interact in meaningful tangible ways with a fictional world. They have very barely begun to climb towards reaching this potential."

What's the stumbling block? "The way we develop games is not necessarily conducive to the creation of great works. Very few designers end up pursuing that desire" to create meaningful work -- due to circumstances of their employment or other reasons.

That's why the indie scene is crucial, he argued. "In order to create great works, and to break new ground you have to take risks."

"Unfortunately," he said, "you need a critical mass of resources to create something great. Is this where we're stuck? Either an underfunded indie or a risk-averse mainstream studio? ... Does that ["indie"] label still have meaning for us today now that the independent game scene is well-established and games have been critical and commercial successes?"

In Carmel's view, and thanks to some survey data, he doesn't see lot of difference between indie developers and mainstream developers in many ways -- age, whether they have kids, education, gender, and ethnic diversity are all similar.

The main difference seems to be that they take on more roles working as understaffed indies. "Does the difference in people or environment make a different kind of game than another? I don't think so, it's priorities." Indies, he said, "make games they want or need to make." Meanwhile, developers at studios work under "pretty fine profitability constraints or schedule constraints, and within that they make the best game they can."

Thus, rather than "indie" versus "mainstream", Carmel would view the split as design versus commercial studios -- and at this point he'd lump PopCap and Valve into the "design" camp. When we concentrate, as an industry, on "practices rather than identity, then we can talk about the meaningful differences in our games without creating conflict," said Carmel.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

European publisher 1C Company and Katauri Interactive (King's Bounty) uploaded this debut trailer for their first MMORPG project, Royal Quest, which won't release until the distant period of spring 2012.

The video shows off Royal Quest's very impressive monster designs: card-shuffling robots, undead orcs with swords embedded in their backs, ghouls breaking out of coffins, giant two-tailed rats, and other strange creatures.

By comparison, the actual player characters look pretty boring, even with their special attacks and Chocobo-like mounts. Why would I want to play one of those boring dudes when I could be a rat-mage with a pile of skulls on my back?

The action-oriented title will feature a universe blending magic/tecnology/alchemy, over 100 locations, a PvE modes focused on dungeon-delving and monster-hunting, PvP sections that allow you to fight against other players and capture/own castles, pets, and more.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Celebrating two years of LittleBigPlanet, Media Molecule has posted a look at the genesis of its iconic Sackboy/Sackgirl, from its YellowHead character in the studio's CraftWorld prototype to the lovable and extremely customizable hero/heroine that appeared in the final PS3 product.

The team talks about Sackboy's evolution, the importance of animations to add more character, and the challenges in making a hero that needed to remain distinctive even he's displayed as a tiny figure. Art director Kareem Ettouney also shares an idea the group originally had for Sackboy's zipper:

"There was always a concept of a place where you play, and a place where you build that eventually became the Moon. But at this stage various ideas were flying around - an extra room in the pod, a warehouse somewhere. But then Mark came up with a crazy concept…

Maybe the place where you go to create is… in yourself. Let’s put this zip on Sackboy, he opens the zip, folds in on himself and goes and creates inside himself, because creativity and ideas are all inside you.

I’m kind of glad to say that this idea didn’t manifest. It’s a legacy part of design, but it makes him really distinct."

You can check out more of Media Molecule's early concept art of Sackboy, as well as a video of death animations, after the break:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The GDC Vault service has debuted new Summit-related video talks from October's GDC Online event in Austin, Texas, including a Game Narrative Summit talk from comic and video game writer Antony Johnston, as well as a 3D Stereoscopic Game Summit talk on the history and future of 3D in games.

Following the successful developer and business event that ran in Texas early last month, organizers of the Game Developers Conference series of events are making specially recorded versions of the talks available for free -- while also archiving all of the GDC Online content in video form for future use.

This process started in October with the debut of almost 90 recordings for GDC All-Access Pass holders and other subscribers, plus Brian Reynolds' keynote on lessons from Zynga's Frontierville, and Richard Bartle's acclaimed talk on the history of the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD).

Alongside other free content from GDC Online presenters, the two freshly added free GDC Online video lectures are:

- Experienced comics writer Antony Johnston (Daredevil, Wolverine, Wasteland), who also has experience writing games for EA and Sega, discussed how games can learn from comics in terms of writing and narrative in 'From Comics To Consoles'.

Along the way, British native Johnston, who was well-rated by Summit attendees for his wit and insight, focused on “the similarities and differences between comics and games, the effect of transmedia on both media, and what games writers can learn from studying -- and writing -- comics.”

- In addition, Neil Schneider, executive director of The S-3D Gaming Alliance, presented 'The Past, Present And Future Of 3D Gaming' at the 3D Stereoscopic Game Summit, explaining how modern stereoscopic 3D gaming -- perhaps about to flourish, thanks to console and Nintendo 3DS advancements -- came to be.

In the succinct, retrospective and future-thinking review, Schneider looked at the space's challenges and myths, technical issues that have been tackled, and presented some of the latest consumer research data on acceptance from gamers for stereoscopic 3D both now and in the future.

[UPDATE: In addition, the GDC Online 2010 videos section has added free video talks from Sony's PlayStation Home developer day, including the creator of LocoRoco Tsutomu Kouno, and from IGN/GameSpy's developer day, including the creators of Civilization V on their game modding tech.]

In addition to these lectures, GDC Vault's free videos section includes GDC 2010 lectures from Zynga, Ernest Adams, and NCsoft, plus highly rated lectures featuring 2D Boy's Ron Carmel and Bungie's Brian Sharp, and recently added GDC Europe talks from Guild Wars 2 and others.

The free recordings available are a fraction of the content currently being flowed into the GDC Vault, part of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website. The content repository has recently added several new features, and it's now easier to navigate through the free section of the site, with video, audio and slides more clearly split with browsing and searching.

Full GDC Vault access, including synchronized video recordings for over 200 of GDC 2010's sessions, 65 talks from GDC Europe, almost 90 GDC Online talks, and hundreds of historical video and audio recordings, is available to GDC 2010 All-Access Pass holders -- as well as All-Access Pass holders for other GDC events during the year. Similar recording sessions are planned for December's GDC China and next February's GDC 2011 in San Francisco.

Individual Vault subscriptions not tied to All-Access passes have just launched in a limited-edition Beta invite process -- those interested in signing up to be invited in on a first come, first served basis should sign up on the GDC Vault website.

In addition, game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company. More information on this option is available by contacting Suzanne Cunningham or viewing an online demonstration.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dojin localizer Rockin' Android and Sony Online Entertainment have released Crescent Pale Mist, a 2.5D action game originally released by Japanese group ClassiC-Shikoukairo in 2006, for PlayStation 3 on PSN, priced at $5.99.

In the downloadable game, players take on the role of a magician named Yunou who must use his "Pale Mist" powers to fight his way through six stages (with multiple difficulties) filled with "would-be assassins, powerful sorcerers and supernatural monstrosities" to save the world.

Along with its hand-drawn anime-style visuals presented in HD, Crescent Pale Mist features online leaderboards, 11 PSN trophies, and more. You can also download a Japanese single-stage PC demo for the game here.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

   

Game Informer, the game mag with the largest circulation in the US and probably the world (unless there's some MMO publication in China I'm not aware of), wasn't just born overnight. It was crafted expertly after a long, drawn-out process, which was deftly chronicled in this six-page photo comic printed in the November 2000 edition of GI -- the first one to use the current "wide" format, and an issue I've only now managed to get my hands on.

   

In this rare peek into the process that goes on behind the scenes of a magazine redesign, we see EIC Andy McNamara and his gang (a lot of whom still work at GI a decade later) delving into the intricacies of good print design and how to attract the attention of potential customers via coverlines and eye-catching visuals. It's a fascinating glimpse, I think you'll agree.

   

Sadly, Ferrets magazine ceased publication in 2008 (really), so I'm not sure what McNamara's staff relied upon as inspiration for the mag's most current design. Whatever it is, it's resulted in some of the nicest cover art in recent memory, more months than most. I'd like to think some other weasel species provided guidance this time. Maybe otters.

[Kevin Gifford used to breed ferrets, but now he's busy running Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Petri Purho, developer of IGF 2008 grand prize winner Crayon Physics Deluxe, has released a fun action-RPG for PC/Mac called Maze of Space. The story is that you're supposedly trapped on a space station, but for some reason there are skeletons, orcs, and sheep wandering around.

The first think you'll notice about Maze of Space is its unique art style, which Purho says was inspired by the paintings of Tubbypaws and is designed to render pixels to look like they're painted on wood grain.

The game's controls are simple: use the arrow key to move your character, hit CTRL or Z to fire your gun, hold down ALT or X to strafe, and push I for the inventory. Essentially, you're running around randomly generated stages, killing enemies, picking up loot/equipment, and trying to find the stairs to the next level.

You'll probably die often at first unless you quickly find some great equipment -- once I got a hold of a Laser Mini Gun and some choice equipment (a Knitted Hat of Thor for extra damage and comfy-ness), I was able to shoot my way to the last level, which features a surprising boss.

Maze of Space isn't without its flaws; the speed your character waddles around at can sometimes seem unbearable, a map to show unexplored areas would've been very useful, you pick up a lot of the same items, and there's nowhere to spend your money, but it's a fun way to waste an hour of your morning!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last summer, Brad Crawford spent a month in Japan interviewing folks about "the Japanese Arcade Experience", traveling to Tokyo , Osaka, and Fukuoka to capture footage of the country's game centers and talk to people like Q-Games designer Bear Trickey, professional gamer Ryan "Gootecks" Guitierrez, Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft, and more.

You can see some of what Crawford shot for his documentary about Japan's arcades, titled 100 Yen, in the trailer embedded above. The director hopes to touch on the history of Japanese arcades, the stories of people who visit arcades, how arcades are evolving to keep up with new technology and compete with home consoles, and other topics.

Crawford intends to return to Japan with a small crew to interview additional people, like famed Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara, Osaka Electronic University professor Satoshi Numata, and the Japanese public. He also wants to interview spokespeople from Capcom, Konami, Taito, and other gaming companies.

To fund all this, the filmmaker is hoping to raise $9,000 in the next three months through IndieGoGo. He's so far raised over $5,600, and he's offering a variety of incentives to contributors, including film credits, copies of the future 100 Yen DVD, a collector edition SFIV Tournament Edition joysticks signed by an unrevealed figure, and more.

You can learn more about the project and make a donation here.

[Via Infinite Lives]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent portable game platforms, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and authors Tucker Dean, Jason Johnson, and Ryan Hibbeler.]

This week, FingerGaming covers Square Enix's Voice Fantasy and the indie sequel Today I Die Again.

Also within are the lists for top-grossing, most-downloaded free and paid Apps from Apple's store, as well as reviews for Capcom Arcade and ChuChu Rocket!

Here are the top stories from the last seven days:

- Top-Grossing Game Apps: Restaurant Story, Original Gangstaz Enter iPhone Charts
"TeamLava's free-to-play Restaurant Story sees a boost in popularity after recently adding Game Center support, as Original Gangstaz and Streetview's zoo management sim Tap Zoo also rank as top sellers."

- Review: Capcom Arcade
"It pains me to see some of my favorite games treated this way. The basic idea behind Capcom Arcade isn't a bad one, but until its many major performance issues can be resolved, none of the included games are worth playing."

- Square Enix Launches Voice-Controlled RPG Voice Fantasy
"In Voice Fantasy, all player characters are created by speaking into a microphone -- many varieties of paladins and mages will spring to life depending on the pitch and volume of a player's recorded audio sample."

- Top iPad Game Apps: Let's Golf HD Drops in Price, Leads Charts
"Gameloft's Let's Golf HD takes the top spot in today's paid games chart after dropping in price to 99 cents, pushing last week's sales leader Angry Birds Halloween HD to second place."

- John Carmack Reveals RAGE Spinoff Mutant Bash TV for iPhone
"Carmack describes the upcoming Mutant Bash TV as an arcade-styled first-person shooter featuring many elements from the console and PC version of RAGE."

- Fool's Gold: Bastard Pigeon
"Bastard Pigeon wins a Fool's Gold badge for its truly wonderful name. I was tempted to award it the honor of 'best game about pooping,' but I'm still hoping for a port of the Ubisoft juggernaut Imagine: Babyz."

- Indie Standout Today I Die Gets iPhone Remake
"As the game progresses, new words will begin to appear on the gameplay screen. Players must touch and drag the words to modify the poem, with each new word bringing changes to the surrounding world and an eventual escape for the protagonist."

- Review: ChuChu Rocket!
"Not putting an online multiplayer mode in ChuChu Rocket is Sega's most boneheaded move yet. Multiplayer is ChuChu Rocket. The iPhone is online. Never mind that the original version had online multiplayer over 10 years ago — on a 56k modem, no less."

- Top iPhone Game Apps: Angry Birds Halloween Heads Holiday Sales
"Cut the Rope, along with Angry Birds and its Halloween-themed expansion lead iPhone app sales this week, as Plants vs. Zombies returns to the top ten following a drop in price."

- Fruit Ninja‘s 'Biggest Update Ever' Adds New Arcade Mode
"Arcade Mode includes an exclusive weekly leaderboard, adding a new layer of competition on top of the previously added Game Center score charts and multiplayer modes."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In his MIGS 2010 keynote, attended by our own Christian Nutt, former Xbox exec Ed Fries recapped the development of Halo 2600, explained how constraints make for beautiful art -- and how games may move forward as a medium by working within them.]

At the first day of the Montreal International Game Summit, entrepreneur, former Microsoft exec and hobbyist Atari 2600 developer Ed Fries argued that imposing artistic constraints may be the way forward for an industry currently producing far too much me-too product.

Fries opened up by saying, "If we want to make the video game business an art form, if we want to make art, it follows that we have to figure out something about beauty. I had this close encounter with beauty recently."

He had that encounter while working on Halo 2600, an adaptation of the popular shooter as a game for the Atari 2600. Unveiled at this year's Classic Gaming Expo, it's fully functional and has even had a limited production run on cartridges.

Joking, Fries asked, "How many of the audence are programmers? Oh good, we've got a lot. I'm sorry, to the rest of you."

Originally, Fries read Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's Racing the Beam, a book on the Atari 2600. It got Fries "really excited" to try programming for the system, as he'd coded games for the Atari 400/800 computer system in high school and college.

"On working on [Halo 2600], I had a weird encounter with beauty and it made me want to talk about it with other people," said Fries. This encounter was with the elegance required in programming to the system's incredibly limited capabilities.

Released originally in 1977, the Atari 2600 was created to replicate Pong and Combat, and is incredibly constrained. "Part of my talk is to talk about constraint, and if you're a programmer and you want to work on a machine with some constraints, this is a great one to work on," said Fries of the system.

Fries related these constraints to art history -- particularly Greek vases, another of his interests. Vases created during "the pinnacle of Greek culture" are beautiful in their simplicity. Though later artisans created more complex techniques which allowed for more color, Fries showed two examples, earlier and later, and asked the audience "I have to ask you which is more beautiful -- this, or this?"

His clear choice was the vase created earlier, but with the tighter constraint of highly refined monochrome art.

Four-Color Complexity

The Atari 2600, meanwhile, forces the entire program to fit in 4K of ROM, can only display four colors at a time, and can only execute 76 instructions per line it draws on screen -- meaning all updates have to happen in a short span of time.

Fries took the audience through the process by which he used trickery in code to reduce instructions and create simple, elegant instructions. He called his original impulses the "dumb way" of doing things; the evolved one the "Atari way." "Look how beautiful that code is ... it has that nice, i don't know, purity to it," he said.

Even with these constraints, Halo 2600 is complex. "You fight multiple bad guys, you go into the land of the giants where everything is big, you go through 64 levels, and you fight the boss."

The boss is much larger than Master Chief, and was barely possible given the system's limitations. "If we hadn't saved cycles here, and if we hadn't saved cycles here, this whole scene would not have been possible. I could not have done the boss the way I wanted to -- if I didn't have this beautiful code."

Said Fries, of working on the 2600, "I have to do beautiful work or I can't do work at all."

Artificial Constraints

He looked at one of Bach's fugues -- a highly constrained form of composition. "Why would he put himself in such a constrained environment? It got me thinking about this idea of constraint and art. Why do artists in other forms put constraints on themselves? The last 30 years of gaming have been about taking away constraints. As we saw from those Greek vases, progress is a funny thing, but progress and art don't necessarily go hand-in-hand."

Fries showed the audience a slide of a paper dragon -- and then revealed the complex figure had been created by folding a single sheet. "Something really weird happened there," he said. "I told you it was a paper dragon and you were like 'Oh, okay,' and then i told you the constraint, and it became more beautiful in some way."

Said Fries, "In other artforms, people are putting these artificial constraints on themselves. The origami guys are working with one sheet of paper, poets are using meter and rhyme..."

In painting, he said, after hundreds of years of refinement, "the artists got to the point where they could do whatever they wanted, and paint whatever they wanted. What happened? In a way, art got really boring. When everybody can paint reality, everybody could paint the same thing."

In art, realistic still lifes gave way to forms like impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism. And in games, he says, today developers are all creating the same thing -- hyperrealistic shooters that all refer to one another in form and content.

It's time for a breakthrough, he argued -- and imposing constraint could be the key. "As a way to go forward, as a way to avoid the sameness that is happening to our games. I think that in some ways some teams are starting to do this, even if they aren't thinking about this the way I am thinking about this."

Important Opportunities Ahead

Three recent examples Fries ponted to are Kirby: Epic Yarn, in which the entire world is built of yarn and fabric, Minecraft, which is made entirely of blocks, and MadWorld, which only used black, white, and red as colors for its graphics.

"Maybe we've had it wrong. Maybe we've been in this rush to get rid of these constraints that we thought were so limiting to our progress going forward in the gaming business. Maybe there's something to be said for constraint," he concluded.

"If you get rid of the constraints it's kind of boring." He also noted that, as platforms improve, "We have to put artificial constraints on our work because we're losing the real ones." And he advised developers to pick a constraint that gives "a unique look in the marketplace."

There are three key opportunities which Fries suggested constraints can enhance when making games:

1. "They can create an environment in which things can be done really well." This goes back to his experience creating code for the 2600 -- his final code, after many revisions, was much, much more efficient than what he'd programmed at the outset. "Once you have the constraint on the code you can create code that really matters," said Fries.

2. "This creativity you don't get otherwise. The constraint forces you to make decisions you would not have otherwise made," he said.

3. "It can leave space in your work, leave room for interpretation in your work," he said. Poetry leaves much unsaid, and the same can be said for other constrained forms, he argued. If someone were to make a game with only two colors, he said, "then maybe we could make something as beautiful as the Greeks made 2500 years ago."
"Constraint is happening in some ways already. People are doing these 24 hour game jams -- that's a great example of putting an artificial constraint on themselves," said Fries. A student told him recently that his best idea had been born in a game jam project, he noted.

An audience member asked if the ultimate constraint for games is interactivity. "I think that it's true that making games is harder than any other medium really, because the player has control. But I think we're getting good at it too. My thesis is that we're getting to the point where artists got to, that it started to get sort of blah -- because everything started to look the same. I think maybe constraint can lead us away from the blahness."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With funding from the Australia government, Brisbane's Boystown community counseling service has created a video game and book for children whose parents are divorcing. The materials are designed to answer questions about why their parents are separating.

Boystown general manager Wendy Protheroe explained in an interview with ABC News, "What these resources are trying to do is talk to kids in their own language and let kids understand it's not their fault mum and dad are breaking up. Their mum and dad still love them."

"It provides an opportunity for parents to sit with children and go through the games and go through the activity book and have the discussions that are naturally prompted by doing these activities is very important as well," she added.

While there doesn't seem to be any media available online for the game or even a hint at its title, Boystown is giving it away with the book to families for free through Australia's Department of Human Services.

[Via GamePolitics]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Disney/Playdom's Scott Jon Siegel calls on indie game developers to "start taking social games seriously", here's an idea to turn one of the best indie games in recent years, Derek Yu's PC/XBLA action-adventure game with roguelike elements Spelunky, into a Facebook title.

Blue Fang Games' lead analyst Darius Kazemi argues that a social version of Spelunky could be based on the Bejeweled Blitz model, making it "a really fun game you play in short bursts and compete with your friends on a daily/weekly/monthly/all-time leaderboard."

"Core gameplay of Spelunky would remain completely unchanged from classic Spelunky, but Facebook would provide a framework around the game to allow for competition, sharing of stories, and yes indeed, monetization," says Kazemi.

His ideas include adding the ability to buy an item at the beginning of a run, an inventory system that lets you accumulate or gift items, and wall posts that share "a short, funny, unique narrative" based on the success/failure of problem-solving attempts and the context in which they occur (see above image).

You can read Kazemi's social Spelunky proposition in full at his personal site. Also check out his great mock-up of his Spelunky vision and Facebook ruled by indie games below:

[Via @mossmouth]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[In a new series of posts, official GDC historian Jason Scott will be presenting video, audio, photos and attendee recollections from the last twenty-four iterations of CGDC and the site's sister Game Developers Conference event, ahead of GDC 25 in San Francisco next February.]

Hello, my name is Jason Scott, and this is my inbox.

What you see here is the first of what I hope will be hundreds of tapes, documents and artifacts related to the nearly quarter-century history of the Game Developer's Conference.

A short while ago, I agreed to be GDC's official historian and archivist to help celebrate the 25th conference by digitizing as many records of past events as I can. A short time after agreeing to this task, huge piles of boxes arrived on my front porch. The digitization has begun!

In a twice-weekly posting leading up to the 2011 GDC, I'll be bringing you highlights and discoveries from this process, and posting them for you at the GDC Vault to enjoy and share.

While daunting, the collection is pretty straightforward - awards presentations, conference roundtables, panels and speeches given by the attendees of GDC. In most cases, the name of who's presenting, what they're presenting, and when are on the label. Usually. Somewhat.

I've also been given copies of the accompanying papers and brochures that GDC offered to attendees, and expect to do a lot of cross-referencing to figure out what things happened, when.

A lot of material before 1998 is either lost or difficult to find - we didn't have digital cameras and inexpensive life recording in as much force back then, so finding recordings from that period will be a challenge. For more recent vintage, there are many more recordings and artifacts: GDC kept some of the tape masters and professional recordings that were made for broadcast and sale, and a lot of people seem to like walking around the conference center snapping photos.

I'm occasionally asked what the purpose of keeping such archives could be, when the computer (and in this case, the computer game) industry is one that moves so fast that last year's tech is obsolete and forgotten.

Part of it is definitely nostalgia - names that grow to superstar status can be heard in tapes working around ideas that are going to take the world by storm in the future.

It's certainly great to hear or see someone presenting their thoughts on not-yet-released games, and predictions that may or may not have come true. And concern about the amount of storage and CPU available is a perennial favorite, as yesterday's heights are today's lows.

But more than that, in these recordings and stories are life - life captured in an industry that has amazing growth, influence, dreams and nightmares. Ideas spring forth and are quickly disregarded, perhaps dormant and awaiting one of us in the present to reconsider it and move forward with it.

And forgetting where major mistakes were made does, in fact, lead to their repeating. It has value in all sorts of fashions, and by preserving these, I hope you'll find this value for a long time to come.

Gems are already evident just from the first wave of cataloging and digitizations - starting with the next entry, I'll start highlighting some of them for your enjoyment.

Audiotape and videotape only tell so much, of course. That, I hope, is where you all come in. If you were at a GDC in the past (especially distant past, pre-dating 2000), and you have stories, recordings, or anything else related to the events, I'd like to hear from you. We're looking to collect stories, track down facts, and get some of these nearly-lost speeches and presentations back online.

As a starting-off point to learning the history of GDC, you can't do much better than a recent reminiscence and history of GDC by its original founder, Chris Crawford.

Chris captures both his original goals and intent for GDC, and includes the ups and downs of his experiences with it - from his uniquely Crawford-ian perspective - before he and GDC parted ways. And what a picture!

Do you remember things differently? Do you have thoughts or memories to add? The official e-mail for the project is gdc25@gdconf.com. Word of this project has already begun to spread, and so feel free to join the crowd - I'm a good listener.

Let's see how much of GDC's history we can save.

Posted by Jason Scott at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you missed NYC's marvelous Heavenly Symphony event last week -- at which Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Epic's Cliff Bleszinski made an unexpected appearance -- you can take a tour of Babycastles' indie game/art/music show and meet some of the folks who made it happen in this German video column called Bayer in Brooklyn.

Here you'll see several ArtXGame projects played on custom arcade machines (check out the cabinet made from barn wood!) like Kyle Pulver's Jottobots and Derek Yu's Hellen & Calvin's Bogus Journey. You'll also spot Pokemon woodcuts from Mare Odomo (Letters To An Absent Father), posters by Cory Schmitz (EXP, The Controller), and more.

"I've had these discussions before on the internet where people are like, 'Well, I can just download the game and play it at home'," says Babycastles co-founder Syed Salahuddin. "The purpose is not to download the game and play it at home. The purpose is to come here, experience the game in a cabinet, and meet strangers, meet all kinds of people at this space."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The November 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

This issue's exclusive postmortem looks at the creation of Beenox’s Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. The studio had traditionally staffed its production teams with recent graduates.

This approach worked well for Beenox when it was working principally on ports, but designing the large scale Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions was often in conflict with the demands of managing a young team, as they explained:

"We had one creative director and one lead game designer managing the creative and artistic vision for the project. The lead game designer was in charge of level design and game design.

Due to the time and effort it was taking these two people to manage a young team while also designing the game, we ran into situations where the direction was not always crystal clear to the entire staff. On top of this, we were certainly starting to feel the pressure of our deadlines and the weight of the importance of our high-profile brand."

Also in this issue is Game Developer’s list of the top 50 people who helped advance the game industry in 2010, including notables such as Rockstar San Diego's Christian Cantamessa (Red Dead Redemption), Valve's Jeremy Bennett (Left 4 Dead 2), and many more. A full list of honorees will be posted on Gamasutra in the next few days.

The November issue also features a detailed article by Microsoft’s David Tuft that looks at the top five problems encountered when creating shadows in games and how to deal with them:

"The term Peter Panning derives its name from the famous children’s book character whose shadow became detached and could fly. This artifact makes objects with missing shadows appear to be detached from and to float above the surface.

One technique for removing surface acne is to add some value to pixel position in light space; this is called adding a depth offset. Peter Panning results when the depth offset used is too large. In this case the depth offset causes the depth test to erroneously pass. Like shadow acne, Peter Panning is aggravated when there is insufficient precision in the depth buffer. Calculating tight near planes and far planes also helps avoid Peter Panning.

Even a small offset can cause objects to lose their shadows. It might be tempting to model a door or a wall with a single polygon but this will almost certainly cause some Peter Panning near the base of the wall. Narrow objects such as walls should have volume. This will increase the depth disparity."

In addition, Game Developer's regular columnists and special guests including Steve Theodore, Soren Johnson, Jesse Harlin, and Matthew Wasteland contribute detailed and important pieces on various areas of game development, with robust takeaways for those working in the game space

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of November 2010's magazine as a single issue.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in July, we featured an attractive t-shirt collaboration between Capcom and Japanese-style apparel brand TokiDoki that pitted the latter's characters (e.g. Bastardinos, Adios) against Street Fighter's world warriors drawn in a cutesy style.

Capcom is now selling that shirt design, as well as hoodies, embroidered hats, and skate decks for everyone to buy online. They're super expensive -- the hat and shirt are $39.95, while the hoodie and skate deck are $74.95 -- but they're all limited edition items.

You can grab all the Street Fighter vs TokiDoki apparel here.

[Via Jgonzo]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When BitComposer Games announced its plans to remake classic tactical PC RPG Jagged Aliiance 2 for release next year, the German publisher said it would introduce a new 3D graphic style and user interface to the 11-year-old game while also addressing "the weak points of the original."

Those weak points apparently include turn-based combat and "fog of war"/line-of-sight system, as the company is abandoning both to make Jagged Aliiance 2: Reloaded "as attractive as possible to players who know the Jagged Alliance series and to those who have yet to play".

Reloaded will feature a new "Plan & Go" system that plays out combat in real-time but allows players to pause the game at any time to react to events. BitComposer says the overall strategy is the same, in that players still need to identify advantageous positions on the map to minimize losses.

"In the 'Plan & Go' system we have omitted the 'Fog of War', which covered most of the map in JA2. Enemies positioned outside buildings are permanently visible, which enables the player to establish a strategy from the outset without having to constantly save and load.

The real-time elements in the 'Plan & Go' system also add new and exciting features such as “Timing” for example. As the enemies are patrolling all over the map, the player must time his movements very precisely to defend himself against his enemies.

Here, the need to quicksave/quick load is greatly reduced, as the risks and challenges are more easily identified and the effect of the risk is reduced to a much shorter time (e.g. a character is sighted before he has reached his target, so the shooting starts earlier than anticipated).

The “Plan & Go” system also enables players to specify the conditions under which his units can attack independently; they can therefore open fire when enemies enter their range of vision.

This offers players the same tactical depth in terms of decision-making, and also intensifies the combat experience, because more experienced players have to pause much less frequently and, for the most part, can let the game progress in real time. In particular, this speeds up battles with large numbers of fighters and which seemed like they would never end in the original game!"

BitCoposer says that with 'Plan & Go', combat is more dynamic, players have to spend less time moving their mercenaries toward battles, and firefights with large numbers of enemies are resolved more quickly. It's also supposed to allow new AI functions like cutting off and flanking enemies.

You can read more of the company's notes on the changes on its Jagged Alliance 2: Reloaded forums.

[Via Versipellis]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Our final write-up on GameSetWatch from the IGDA Leadership Forum, which had some excellent production and business talks from industry veterans -- this one sees Brandon Sheffield covering Laura Fryer's inspirational, practical keynote.]

Laura Fryer, VP and general manager of WB Games Seattle, cautions team leaders to watch for what she calls, "pirates on a burning ship," during her IGDA Leadership Forum keynote in San Francisco on Friday.

She offered the analogy: You have Black Beard and Red Beard on a pirating expedition together. Things are going well, and at a certain point they have a piratey team building exercise -- drinking rum. Everyone's happy until someone knocks over an oil lamp.

Now the ship is on fire. Black Beard blames Red Beard for knocking over the lamp itself. Red Beard blames Black Beard for putting the rum right next to an open flame in the first place. Now you've got swashbuckling while the ship is burning down around their ears.

Does it really matter who's right and who's wrong, when there's a fire to fight? In this type of situation, which Fryer says has happened at least once on almost every project she's been on, she advises the team to "save it for the postmortem."

There's usually no time to get a jury of peers together to figure out the dispute, or the origin of the problem -- you have to focus on the fire first. "If proving [that] red beard caused the fire will solve it, I'll get on that," Fryer says, but if not, people need to focus back on the goals.

Leaders need to be able to identify these sorts of problems, and also figure out how to solve them without ruining relationships. "When you're really put to the test, what are you going to do?" Fryer asks.

"What if being honest about something costs you your job? What if you find a million dollars by the road? What if your friend shows up and asks you to help bury the body?" You can't know anyone, not even yourself, until you've been tested, she says.

Under The Bus

So many leaders will throw their team under a bus in order to save themselves. They hide information because they're afraid of telling their team the truth. But former Microsoft exec and game industry veteran Fryer provided another analogy here -- imagine you're walking down a road, and it seems fine for a while, but eventually you wind up in a valley if you're just going straight.

By the time you're in the valley, you can go all the way back to where things were still okay, totally backtracking. Or you can climb up the side, getting scratched up with brambles, facing a tough journey. Then there's the third, and most common option -- just keep powering through and "hope everything will be okay."

By way of example, Fryer discussed when she was working on the Xbox 360 while in her former position at Microsoft Game Studios. Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney came up and said "you have to add more memory to the box." It was a labyrinthine structure at Microsoft, so it was hard to know who actually makes the choices. At Microsoft, they call it "walking the dog" -- you walk around, try to figure out who can help, and find out who knows about the problem you're having.

People weren't happy to talk about it, and it was definitely a case of the messenger repeatedly being "killed," Fryer says. "I had one executive say this was a big CLM (career limiting move) and I should just stow it. I said I didn't think I was going to have a career if the Xbox 360 failed, and I thought it was going to [fail] if we didn't get more RAM!" Sometimes you have to take that brambly path up the mountain before you wind up wandering into the grand canyon.

Open Communication

In order to not get into those valleys to begin with, you have to have a process in place to figure out what people in the team are actually thinking, especially when you get to a team size of 100-400 people. Fryer has found that a lot of the time when a big problem happens, it turns out everybody knew about it for months, but nobody stepped up.

As a leader, you have to try to stop this problem before it starts, but you can't know everyone in your company, when it's that large. It turns out there's an actual scientific limit to the number of people you can know, while also knowing how they relate to each other. The number's somewhere around 150.

"If you can't talk to everyone, you need to get as few hops between you and everyone else as you can," she says. Like the elementary school game of telephone, the more hops your message takes, the more your message gets changed.

So Fryer does something called skip levels -- she and her other managers try to talk to her bosses, and the people below the leads. "We all like to believe that the people who report to us will always be awesome, but people change," she cautions. And if you don't talk to the people below them, you'll never know about it, and find yourself in a Potemkin Village situation, in which everything seems fine on the surface because everyone's working, but if you just stepped off the path, you may see that it's just a facade.

Fryer also cautions that this needs to happen to you as a manager, as well. Your boss needs to talk to your people, in order to make sure you're doing a good job.

Producers have a lot of responsibility too, and should perform a "walk and talk." "If you're a producer, you need to be getting up out of your cube every day, and walking the floor," says Fryer, because there are things you're just not going to hear if you're at your desk.

"Not only are you giving information, you're hearing about how awesome some people in your group are," she adds. If you comment on it, they're thrilled. If your boss' boss knows about the awesome animation you did, that's validating. But sometimes you're giving hard messages. "One of the things about giving hard messages is they don't get better with time," she says. "Pain deferred is pain multiplied, always."

A Noble Cause

But ultimately people have to be happy, and focused on the major goals, and then doing postmortems to get all the kinks out of the system from those "pirates on a burning ship" times. "You need to do [postmortems] every time," she says. "Everyone makes mistakes, but let's make all new ones next time, let's not make the same ones."

Ultimately, it comes down to the old cliche that people are an organization's best commodity. "Are we taking care of each other? Are we respecting one another? Do we trust each other?," she posed.

"Nobody lays on their death bed saying 'god, I wish I'd spent more time in the office!'" she joked. But at the same time nobody regrets doing what they love. "Being a leader can be a noble cause. You can be honest, you don't have to compromise your principles," says Fryer. "So please, go out and be the best leader you can be. Do the right things for your team, and do the right things for yourself."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

GDC China organizers have announced a host of new Chinese speakers, including NetEase, 6waves, Joyport and Ubisoft Chengdu notables, alongside a multitude of Western talks for next month's leading Shanghai-based event.

With the schedule for the event filling up with both notable Western and Chinese speakers, organizers are taking the opportunity to highlight some of the higher-profile Chinese speakers recently added to the program for the event.

Some of the newly added talks, which will be simultaneously translated between Chinese and English languages, as will all of the event's lectures, are as follows:

- In 'Establishing a New International Development Studio, Richard Tsao of Ubisoft Chengdu (Scott Pilgrim) discusses how "the key to creating an international development studio is hiring the right kind of people, providing training, and placing them in an appropriate work culture bubble that fosters global game development values."

With examples from the major Ubisoft studio, "attendees in this talk will learn what are the global game development values that are necessary in any studio."

- The Social Network summit sees Arthur Chow, COO of 6waves, discussing 'The Global Phenomenon of Social Games: How to Monetize the Global Audience'. As the description notes, "within two short years, 6waves has [assembled] a network of over 50 million monthly active users", and Chow will look at how "distribution, localization and monetization" helps 6waves "to maximize the significant opportunities in the increasingly competitive Facebook market."

- Bo Chen, CEO of Joyport Technology, is giving a talk called 'Designing Successful Strategy Webgame - How We Did That with Kingory', offering introduction to the browser-based game industry's background and the success of Kingory products by discussing his company's decision making process, product design, team building approaches, and the "successful and unending efforts to improve user experience."

- 'Tianxia II: Continuously Optimizing The Development Process' sees XiaoJun Hui of notable Chinese firm NetEase discussing how their much-played online game was created, focusing on "protecting the fundamental interests of the majority of players, focusing on iterative development and continuous improvement through every detail of the game, making it entertaining, and to show the good spread of traditional Chinese culture in the game."

These leading Chinese speakers join notable new speakers from Activision, CCP, and XPEC, as well as already-confirmed speakers from Happy Farm, Bigpoint and League Of Legends. These lecture announcements immediately follow earlier confirmation of Blizzard, Flagship and Cryptic alumnus Bill Roper as one of the keynote speakers, plus major talks from Volition, Slant Six and BioWare staffers, and Summit sessions from the makers of Angry Birds and Monaco.

Now in its 3rd year, Game Developers Conference China offers "valuable and timely insight into the world of game development in China for an audience of both local and international developers", according to its organizers. Overall, the December 5th-7th event provides a forum for local and international developers to explore business opportunities, expand their reach to a unique market, and discover the on-going trends emerging in this region.

In addition, GDC China organizers have announced a strategic partnership with Digi China, a Ministry Of Culture co-sponsored event which recently took place in Beijing, and which is a "showcase for newly emerging digital products and services including games, video games, music and online literature."

As the only dedicated game development event endorsed by the Ministry of Culture, the two events will help each other with organization and market promotion in subsequent years, working on the teams' "decisive responsibilities to push the robust development and multicultural online game exchanges of China’s game industry."

GDC China's online registration ends on November 30th, and for more information about the event, please visit the official GDC China website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We round up the week's top news and new digital releases from sister console digital download site GamerBytes, featuring new information about Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, DSiWare and PSN Minis.]

This week's been a bit of an odd one -- some great PlayStation Network games like Castle Crashers, Blacklight: Tango Down, good WiiWare games like Robox and Bookworm DSi, and King of Fighters 2002 and Yu-Gi-Oh! coming to XBLA.

In addition to those debuts, there's all kinds of intriguing news -- such as 5th Cell making an XBLA game, a new version of Bejeweled on the way, and some good WiiWare stuff too.

Here's the top stories over the last seven days:

Store Updates

XBLA Update - King Of Fighters 2002, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Game Room

NA Nintendo Update - Robox, Gene Labs, Street Slam And More

EU Nintendo Update - Bookworm DSi, ThruSpace, WiiWare Demos And More

NA PlayStation Store Update - Hoard, God Of War Collection, No Heroes Allowed!, Soldner-X 2: The Final Prototype DLC And More

EU PlayStation Store Update - Castle Crashers, Blacklight: Tango Down, God Of War HD And More

Top News

Bejeweled Blitz Live Coming To XBLA (XBLA)
New PopCap rendition of the puzzler coming to XBLA.

Giant Bomb Quick Look: Haunted House (Atari) (XBLA)
It's Haunted, but is it good?

Trailer: Pac-Man CE DX (Namco Bandai) (XBLA / PSN)
Waka-waka-wakaakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakaka!

Trailer: Hybrid (5th Cell) (XBLA)
Scribblenauts developer creating XBLA shooter.

Trailer: Inkub (Cosmonaut Games) (WiiWare)
New tower defense game coming to WiiWare.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might have seen eBay seller VigilJeff for recently selling the original painting created used as the boxart for Digital Pictures' notorious Sega CD game Night Trap -- that auction ended at a surprisingly high $1,525!

He now has four new items up for grabs: pre-production Virtua Fighter statues for Sarah and Akira (sent to Sega's licensing department before they went into production), a Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon animation cell with a unique Dic TV frame, and a one-of-a-kind scroll (pictured).

The scroll was drawn by one of four Sonic Team members that flew into San Francisco to work on the American release of Nights into Dreams. Says the eBay seller, "[It] was so far behind schedule that [they] were brought in to save our butt and get this game released on time as already promised on national TV."

VigilJeff also shares this great story about the Sonic Team developers' dedication: "It was kinda funny because Sega leased the rooms at the Marriott, and these guys brought sleeping bags and slept in [their cubes at the office] the whole month and a half they were here."

He explains how the scroll came into his possession:

"Even though they spoke very little English and I spoke no Japanese, whenever they needed something, they would e-mail my department and I would get it up to them, so I got to be pretty good friends with them, especially one guy, and even if I could remember his name I couldn't pronounce it.

But anyways, at night or when he had time, he would be working on this scroll painting & drawing and writing. I don't even know what game the characters are from that one. I'm sure one of you gamers out there will know right off, or if someone can read Japanese the writing will tell you.

And the cool thing about all this, when I went to drop them off at SFO for [their] flight back home, I unloaded all [their] stuff onto two airport carts, the guy grabs this scroll out of one of his bags and hands it to me and in his best English says, 'Thank you for all your help. This [is] for you.'

I didn't know what to say, so I bowed my head to them and shook [their] hands and said have a safe flight and went back to work."

Apparently, there's a story behind the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon animation cell and its strange frame, too, but VigilJeff didn't have time to write it up and thinks people are sick of hearing about his Sega adventures. Not at all; I could read these stories all day!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Inspired by Torontron, the arcade cabinet built specifically to play games from Toronto indie developers, the recently created Winnitron 1000 is a refurbished '80s arcade machine that features titles created by Winnipeg's independent game creators.

Winnitron is designed to encourage local developers to come together, collaborate on new ideas, and create new titles that will be made available to play on the cabinet. The machine has a WiFi card that connects to a server and downloads new games automatically.

The arcade cabinet's creators -- Tom Rab, Kert Gartner, Joel Forest, Jeff Lindsay, Noel Berry, Marlon Wiebe, and Infinite Ammo's Alec Holowka -- held a game jam a few weeks ago for Winnipeg developers to make and adapt games for the machine (see video above).

Right now, it plays a dozen indie titles: 4fourths, Paper Moon, Verge, Leap4Blue, Precipice, C4ke, Wave, Snowpaw, Krunch, Indie Brawl, Robots Robots Everywhere, and TrashPilot. The setup is meant to run games with four-directional movement and two-button controls.

Winnitron will appear at upcoming events like New Media Manitoba's Demo Camp o November 17th and LoPub's "Data Dance Chiptune Dance Party and Popup Arcade!" on December 4th. It will eventually be installed at Red River College for students and visitors to "experience what the Winnipeg game development scene has to offer".

[Images via Chrissy Chubala]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Along with its Famicom-inspired Scion and playable indie games, the upcoming Giant Robot-curated Pixel Pushers show will feature new pieces from Jude Buffum, the noted pixelartist we've featured many times before for his 8-bit Keyboard Cat, Masters of the Universe, and other pop culture pieces.

For his latest series, Buffum decided to explore "the carnivorous side of the world of video games", showing us the tasty portions and dinner potential of video game bosses, enemies, and allies. Hylian bacon from Ganon's shoulder! Mmmm.

"Though I myself eat meat, enough of my friends and loved ones are now vegetarians or vegans, so it’s something I’ve been experimenting with," says Buffum. "I suppose these pieces are a by-product of that exploration. That, and my long-time obsession with meat diagrams."

You can see more of the artist's planned pieces for the Pixel Pushers exhibit on his website. He's also selling limited edition giclee prints through his online shop.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[The Spoony Bard is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by writer James Bishop that probes the depths of the characters, dialogue and writing in video games. This week, it comments on an unfortunate narrative trend in role-playing game hybrids like Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story.]

The premise behind the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter ads is simple. The substance in the bucket tastes so much like butter that it is hard to believe—wait for it—that it’s not butter. Though it may not seem like it just yet, I promise I am going somewhere with this.

The ads only work because the compound in question performs, behaves and otherwise is identical to the product it is imitating. In theory, it has all of the benefits with none of the detriments. That’s what they try to sell you, anyway.

In reality, it is often hard to produce identical results from disparate parts. True, one plus four and three plus two both equals five, but combining larger, more complicated and possibly abstract forms adds a seemingly infinite level of complexity to the situation. The more moving parts in any given process, the more likely it is that one of them will malfunction and bring things to a grinding halt.

Thus is the sad, sad case of the multitude of RPG hybrids in video games.

A Difficult To Reach Core

In order to not step too much on the toes of Mr. Matulef’s primary concern, this column intends to look more closely at the narrative present at the core of most role-playing games like a creamy, nougat-filled center and how the gameplay in hybrids can get in the way of said nougat.

Did someone say ludonarrative dissonance? Sure, if the jargon fits, why not use it.

In the case of some games, however, it isn’t so much that the gameplay opposes the narrative as it is that it actively hinders it in seemingly unintentional ways. There is less of an element of opposition and more of something similar to a drowning person pulling their supposed savior under with them.

Similarly, if it were to suddenly become an actual chore to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, even an anthropomorphic owl in a classic commercial wouldn’t bridge the gap. At some point, it just isn’t worth it and all the charm in the world won’t change facts.

And the fact is that most hybrids, like Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, are poor substitutes for a traditional RPG.

The Specific Problems Of An RPG Hybrid

Having never played the previous incarnations of the Mario & Luigi series, I’m not particularly qualified to comment on their particular hybridizations. What I can say for certain, however, is that the “doing and learning” didn’t quite work for me in this one. I have fought the game itself for 17 hours and can’t bring myself to finish it no matter how adorable I find Fawful, the main villain, or the world he inhabits.

The problem is the schlocky, glossy RPG veneer that the developers insisted on laying over top of what might otherwise be an enjoyable game.

Chris Kohler sums up my feelings on the matter perfectly, saying that “classic RPG gameplay doesn’t really exist in Bowser’s Inside Story... Sure, the form is there, but the function is not. You gain levels … but it doesn’t matter, because your character doesn’t really change. You find new armor and items … that are only marginal upgrades. You earn new special moves … but you don’t really need to bother using them.”

Even with these problems throwing up roadblocks at every turn, I still managed to plug a great many hours into a game with multiple different gameplay mechanics that, in effect, either don’t matter or never see regular use.

I wanted to see how it ended.

Why RPG Players Play Broken Games

Apparently, this is not uncommon. Josh Sawyer of Obsidian Entertainment has noted previously that “mechanics really don’t matter” to a great many RPG players. Furthermore, they “will gladly march through a game that they hate if they enjoy the writing and story.”

In some cases, it feels like the promise of an RPG hybrid experience works more like a trap and less like an actual mechanic. Once it manages to lure a traditional RPG player into the game, it doesn’t matter how awful the gameplay is as long as the writing is witty and the world is engaging.

Bowser’s Inside Story failed in fooling me as I gradually became aware of what it was trying to accomplish. The lack of actual RPG progression, beyond lip service, left a general malaise over me whenever I tried to power up my DS. I had absolutely no desire to play a minigame for the 4,278th time in order to make it to the next area where I would surely be given a marginal upgrade of an existing ability that I had no intention to ever initiate. In a word, the game’s mechanics were and are redundant.

But to give credit where credit is due, the game is certainly full of charming characters, quotable dialogue and overall silliness that forced my trek through its literal bowels to continue for longer than I expected. Long after I have stopped spewing vitriol about the game’s mechanics, I’ll be quoting Fawful. “I HAVE CHORTLES” is just way too amusing to ever let die, even if I’m the only person alive that thinks so.

The writing can’t carry the entire weight of the game, however. Much like a stew, a game is only as wonderful as the different elements from which it is composed. Some consumer reviews might wave off this column’s criticisms as being unable to see the forest for the trees. To these detractors, I have but one question: is a forest not made of trees? In other words, a stew with rotten meat inside can still be a bad stew even if the vegetables are amazing.

Hopefully, given time, developers will begin to realize that providing a full experience is more profitable than merely waging war on the psychology of their consumers. With games continuing to gauge addictiveness as a valuable attribute, it does seem like there is a slippery slope ahead. This shouldn’t serve as a warning, though, but merely an observation: be mindful of what design practices you’re promoting with your wallet.

[James Bishop is a freelance writer for various outlets, holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Indiana University Southeast and is not fond of the Oxford comma. He can be reached via Twitter or at jamesrollinbishop at gmail dot com.]

Posted by James Bishop at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Company of Heroes Online producer Greg Wilson talks to our own Kris Graft about the challenges in adapting a retail RTS into a downloadable free-to-play game based on microtransactions, in a world of instant web gaming gratification.]

The free-to-play, microtransactions-based gaming market is dominated by social network games and MMOs -- you don't see too many core-focused free-to-play real-time strategy games.

There's a reason for this: the typical "core" RTS player is happy with paying $50 for the retail version of a game like StarCraft II, Supreme Commander or Company of Heroes. Or at least that's what many traditional RTS developers seem to assume.

THQ subsidiary Relic Entertainment, developer of acclaimed RTS franchises like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, is challenging the idea of the $50 retail RTS standard with Company of Heroes Online.

The title is a 3D rendered, high-production microtransactions-supported game that adopts the free-to-play business model. Recently launched in North America, the game was previously being tested in China, where free-to-play is a popular scheme.

"I hope [free-to-play] does continue to grow," said Greg Wilson, producer on COHO. "I think things like Facebook and other social gaming platforms, when they [adopted] this free-to-play thing with microtransactions, it really shows that people out there have more time than we thought they did."

He added, "It's a question of how do we show these players that our games are worth their time. ... Provided the games are presented in a slice that's palatable for them."

COHO is derived from the well-received Company of Heroes franchise, a traditionally-published RTS series that debuted in 2006 under the slap-on-a-price-and-set-in-on-the-shelf retail business model. The free-to-play version is not only trying to capture the core players that are fans of the original version, but also new players who are RTS fans, and perhaps players totally new to the genre.

There is a precedence for microtransactions-based success in a genre closely related to the more traditional RTS -- Riot Games' League of Legends. The game is derived from the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients and is a free-to-download, microtransactions-supported game that has found success through Riot's keen focus on hardcore fans of the emerging "Action-RTS" genre.

Depth As A Blessing, Depth As A Curse

But even the successful Riot Games will admit that the learning curve is a hurdle for new users in League of Legends. It's that accessibility factor that is also one of COHO's more significant challenges -- there's little point in lowering the barrier to entry with a free-to-play model if a new player will just run into another barrier in the game's learning curve.

"COHO is an extremely deep game, and that is part of our blessing, but it's also the challenge that we have, because there's so much to learn," Wilson said. "...Most people expect to get rocked [in online multiplayer]. You go in and you just get destroyed, and it's only through perseverance that you actually learn how to play most of these games properly. Or if you're lucky enough to have friends to walk you through it, that's a real benefit there."

Relic hopes to foster a COHO community with global chat, Facebook Connect and other integrated social elements. "Really, that's where you learn most -- you learn from somebody that understands or is willing to walk you through the process," he said.

Additionally, COHO gives away for free the full 15 single-player missions from the original retail title and allows for "comp stomp" matches versus the computer, giving new players the chance to learn basics about build orders, units, the cover system and other key gameplay components. Relic has also completely redone the tutorials and made the easy A.I. easier so that it's less aggressive, said Wilson.

As a "work in progress," Wilson said that Relic also tracks a wide array of player metrics which are then forwarded to the design team in order to make appropriate gameplay adjustments. Relic plans to patch the game regularly, every 30 to 60 days. "If we happen to see something that we don't like, we can make that change relatively quickly," said Wilson.

But even if COHO is the easiest game to pick up and play, and totally free to start playing, in an era of almost instant Facebook, Flash and other web-based gaming, COHO still has an inherent barrier -- a 6.5GB download.

The Download Barrier

Wilson explained that web-based technology was "definitely on the radar" during the development of COHO, but with the game using Relic's proprietary Company of Heroes and Dawn of War II Essence engine, web options were limited.

"The scope of converting [Company of Heroes] to a [free-to-play online game] and building a lobby, clustered server tech, and toolset to support external operators turned out to be enough work for one year," Wilson joked.

There are plenty of other games, namely in the the MMO genre, that are downloadable, microtransactions-based and free-to-play. The developers behind all these games would concur that any download or extra mouse clicks present a barrier to new players -- getting new users into a game and playing as fast as possible is crucial.

"We've certainly had a bunch of discussion about the size of the download and its potential impact on new users and how we might be able to address it in the future," Wilson explained. "For some territories, Korea for example, downloading 6.5GB can be as quick as 10-15 minutes. For others, like China and some places in Australia, it can be considerably longer."

"We’ve investigated some streaming tech and have also considered breaking up the content into smaller chunks, letting people download the bits they are interested in. No decisions have been made yet, though."

Relic also created a torrent-driven patching system that's built into the COHO launcher, Wilson said. "The lobby also seeds other users while you’re not in an actual game -- totally configurable by users, by the way -- so when you're chatting in the lobby you are helping new users to download faster," he explained.

"I'm really hoping people won’t be turned off by the initial download size. We are giving away some of the highest rated PC RTS content of all time for free, after all," argued Wilson.

He's hoping that a growing number of high-production free-to-play games will coax some social gamers to move on from Facebook games. It's a hopeful theory -- the average FarmVille fan doesn't seem like COHO's target audience -- but the theory is one that Relic is at least partially banking on.

"What we're hoping is that as the casual user gets bored of those kinds of [social network] games, those really simple, medium quality games, and look at something more like COHO or some of the other quality free-to-play games," he said.

"I hope [free-to-play] persists, I hope it grows, and I hope the community of developers manages expectations properly by not making their games unfair, and not making the cash-grab for selling super-powerful items," he said.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this edition include a 2D action game that features objects falling out of the sky, a minimalist co-operative puzzler, a competitive hotseat multiplayer game, an arcade-style blaster for your browser, and a driving game that involves running down zombies.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'The Incident' (Big Bucket Software, commercial indie)
"The Incident is a 2D action game made by Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan (featuring chiptune music by Cabel), where players have to help a man named Frank Solway survive falling objects from the sky that threaten to trap and bury him alive. The main campaign consists of seven stages to play through in total, and there are frequent checkpoints in every area that allows you to resume your progress with little effort."

Game Pick: 'Thomas Was Alone' (Mike Bithell, browser)
"Created over the weekend, Thomas Was Alone is a minimalist team-play game. Starting with a single block, the idea is to move 'Thomas' into the dotted lines in each level. Over time, Thomas makes friends, and each of these blocks must also be moved into their appropriate outlines."

Game Pick: 'Siamese Enemies' (Krimelo, freeware)
"In Siamese Enemies two players take on the roles of conjoined twins, helping each other grab organs and reach the operating table. Each player then must grab the organs and stitch them into their own body. Finally, both players use their new organs to rush back to mother - and whoever makes it there first wins."

Game Pick: 'Red Riot' (BulletProof Arcade, browser)
"Red Riot is an arcade-style blaster in which you zoom around the sky, laying waste to tanks, towers and UFOs with upgradable lasers and special powers. Levels become progressively more difficult as you go along, although a lot of the unlockables require you buy nasty Mochi points which is a bit of a downer."

Game Pick: 'Road of the Dead' (Evil-Dog and SickDeathFiend, browser)
"Road of the Dead puts you in the seat of a car speeding down a straight highway, attempting to escape both the army and a zombie outbreak. Initially it seems like there isn't much to it - drive forward, hit the zombies, don't hit the cars or civilians. Easy enough. Slowly, however, the story begins to open up and you'll realise that you're about to lose way more time to this game that you originally thought."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)