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How I Saved the Gaming Industry
Jamie found a nifty blog entry where indie game designer Jeff Vogel writes about game engine and art re-use. He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade. It's an amusing little rant with thoughts that actually might apply to anyone working in engineering.
Most people will dismiss this idea out of hand, saying that I don't know anything about the realities of the business. And they are probably right. I'm just a dumb, little nobody. But I am running a profitable game company. But Electronic Arts and Activision (the company that owns Blizzard!) are losing bazillions of dollars.
Maybe you should pay yourself $15 million a year and then hire a bunch of middle management and pay them more than the developers that do all your actual work. Be sure to insulate yourself from any actual work. That's when you can be considered "in the know" about the gaming industry or more specifically "in the money laughing as consumers suffer through your titles." Then you too can siphon off funds while your company languishes in the red just like the big guys.
My work here is dung.
I was going to post my blog entry on how I single-handedly saved the porn industry.
Here we have a game developer that noticed that good gameplay and good stroy > fancy technology. If only the major studios would come to the same conclusion :-(
I, for one, know what it's like to try to save an entire industry as well.
Before I arrived here as BadAnalogyGuy, I saw Slashdot sinking quickly into an ugly morass of old car analogies.
I try to bring a broader perspective to Slashdot analogy making. And I like to think that I've been successful so far.
It's a tough job, but god knows if left to your own devices, you slashbots would simply keep talking about cars and roads.
where graphics aren't the highlight of a game and game play and story line are the key elements, a game engine only needs to be built once and tweaked per game.
But in todays "OMG SHINY PONIES!!!" game development environment, where it's clear that game play and story take second seat to graphics, the engines need continual extension/modification/rewrites in order to be shiny.
It's not just games. In the finance industry I've witnessed many failures of projects to re-write systems from scratch. Some of the best teams just keep updating their old lumbering system, occasionally slapping a web interface or window dressing on it. But it works! And they ship on time! And they make money! And that money goes to fund these colossal re-write failures.
He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade.
So he's on the far end of the spectrum making it work. I guess if I where him I'd point out the (far opposite end of the spectrum) Duke Nukem Forever style of business where you couldn't settle on a damned engine if your company depended on it. But the truth is that there are plenty of in between companies among the big fish that are using the rehashed Unreal engine or some Flash game engine for a social game. They are probably closer to him than the "must rewrite everything" crowd. I'm impressed with this situation and profits but I'm not sold that this extreme is the best answer. Everyone has a happy medium where they feel most comfortable and big companies probably feel differently about rewriting pieces since they are expected to produce wildly new things with their large revenues. I certainly grow tired of the rehashed music game that seems to be the same damned thing to merely a different song every title.
My work here is dung.
Reminds me of the excellent Write Games, Not Engines.
A lot - and I speak from experience - of prospective games developers get so wrapped up in tweaking their engines that they never actually get around to writing one game, let alone a series. And that's why the Intartubes are littered with the sad corpses of hundreds of open source game engines, some of them rather good, in various states of disrepair and abandonment, and so few really outstanding open source games.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The Quake engine is the canonical example, it's powered more first-person shooters than anything else. It's the basis of Source, fer chrissake, if you go back far enough into the past. And then let's not forget that there's probably more total conversions for Quake than for any other game, and with pretty amazing scope considering their QuakeC limitations... Battletech Quake and Quake Rally come to mind immediately... and wasn't there a jet fighter "sim"?
But then you have to think about the Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo series... While there are some major leaps here and there it's clear that we're not talking about total code abandonment except when quantum leaps in hardware technology are made. Platform games also spring into my head immediately; numerous platformers had sequels based on minor codebase revisions, especially Mega Man. For that matter, Super C didn't exactly appear to replace the code from Contra. And then we can bring up Metal Gear. Don't get me started on Madden or NHL or any other sports game.
Or in short, this is a very valid point, but it's SOP to reuse an engine and fiddle with it eternally. I know I'm not the only one who played through all the Quake mission packs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they can get the storyline and gameplay right, create great immersion, reduce bugs, loadtime, need for 'farming,' etc, then I have absolutely no problem with buying games from that company.
This guy has it exactly right. I don't need a new engine, just new levels or a new story. I would LOVE to pay for new high quality episodes for the original Doom engine. Game after game comes out on the Adventure Game Studio engine, and I love it. I never heard of this guy before, but the Avernum series seems to be supported by Wine (platinum!) so I'm going to give it a shot. When your formula is good, "more of the same" is a great thing.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'll take an ugly but fun game over a pretty but boring game any day. I like high-end graphics as much as the next guy, but not at the expense of gameplay.
I can imagine something looks better than it does...I can't imagine it's more fun to play than it is.
Living With a Nerd
Sorry, I actually read it. It got me thinking of the classic Infocom text games. Yes, there was an "engine" of sorts. It was, AFAIK, some kind of scripting language designed for text games. I bet they tweaked and reused it in every game too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"It's not the heat, it's the humidity. It's not the voltage, it's the current. It's not the meat, it's the motion. And it's not the pipe - it's the will." -the Scorched Earth Party
This guy is cocky. And that is a compliment. He is prolly right about his business model being a working one, where others go under. And "cocky" tends to be a compliment in other sectors, too. E.g. the military, where "cocky" generals are, most of the times, the best ones.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
this piece is quite in line with what i has been complaining of in my little rant about mass effect 2 last night in the journal item i posted to slashdot :
http://slashdot.org/journal/249254/Mass-Effect-2--Can-you-say-Eye-fck---Dumbed-down-?art_pos=1
Mass effect, Me2 , Dragon Age : Origins are SO good in implementation, details and polish but SO weak in the MAIN story that, they really leave a sour taste for the buck in your mouth. Dragon age is, basically 'Hey ! A new blight has come. AGAIN. lets beat this blight and wait until the next time bioware needs to issue an expansion'. Whereas, all the side details, ie, background stories of characters, side quests, other events unrelated to main story are all good and galore.
Dragon Age also isnt helped at all by torturous, neverending, lengthy dungeons in which you kill enemy after enemy (Similar enemies) and then a brief respite until you get into the next dungeon sequence in which you will get bored.
Read radical news here
Man, I sure miss Strategic Conquest and Crystal quest. So no I don't care if the graphics are old school. they remain awesomely engaging games. they just don't run on intel macs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is why Microsoft! (I love doing that) came up with C#. I know Sun came out with Java first, but Java sucks. If hardware developers keep changing the hardware dramatically, (F-off Sony) and you are developing for Next Gen systems, you are stuck developing new engines every few years. Until Microsoft really get's XNA together, which doesn't appear to be far off, that is the reality of the business.
Well he has a point, and he sorta doesn't at the same time.
He made a mention to the Dragon Age engine, about reusing it to make 10 games with it.
Well AFAIK The Dragon Age engine is based on the same engine used for KOTOR and many other Bioware games, just updated for the modern era.
I loved his old Scorched Earth website. I love his Poo Bomb book. I like his games. I also don't think it is a sin to reuse what works and focus on story when making RPGs, but would it kill him to take another existing engine and use it?
Since he obviously pulls from Ultima games, why not use Exult or GemRB for instance?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I can imagine something looks better than it does...I can't imagine it's more fun to play than it is.
Very deep. Quoting in lieu of mod points.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
... have single-handedly invented the internet because everyone Al Gore did that :)
Exactly. Back in the 90's there was a space fighter combat game that was ugly as hell but was incredibly fun AND kept it difficult because it had real dynamics. If you thrusted in a direction, you kept going that way until you thrusted in another.
It even had the ability to do multi player across 2 computers using a rs232 cable.
Today? the closest thing we ever got to was Parsec and that died on the vine. everything else today is utter crap where you fly a ship that act's like a airplane. Yuck.
Give me game play OVER pretty any day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure, everyone wants games that play well. On the other hand, the games that make the money are the ones that look graphically impressive on a 30-second trailer. Sure, a game can take off later through word of mouth, but initial sales are critical if you don't want the company to shelve the whole project as a failure before word of mouth has a chance to work its magic. Initial sales are pretty much entirely based on how good a game looks.
They have free demos. Check them out and decide for yourself.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
... the defining method to determine if a game is an RPG or not is if game engine itself penalize someone by denying access to some game content. No joke:
"Where then does that leave the modern RPG? The game where making choices actually results in missing out on things? The game where you don't get to use the best axe because you're focussing on guns instead? While RPG becomes a modern marketing phrase to slap on titles in the hopes of selling additional units and some companies are making real efforts, the truth is, the core mechanics of the most successful RPGs released by the main-stream developers are becoming less and less RPG like."
Two more gems:
- Games that use the same game engine are not new games, with the implication that they are therefore not worth playing 'again'.
- the claim that any company that produces a game labeled as an RPG will go out of business in short order because of that decision.
I could do a point-by-point, but there's no ...erhm... point. I'd just ignore this posting if I were Jeff.
Well AFAIK The Dragon Age engine is based on the same engine used for KOTOR and many other Bioware games, just updated for the modern era.
Actually, it doesn't.
Mass Effect uses the Eclipse engine. This is considered a wholly new engine (although it doubtlessly shares some code from earlier projects, just because it is the same development house and performs similar functions).
Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 and Jade Empire used the Odyssey engine. This in turn was based on the Aurora engine, first used in the Neverwinter Nights games (as well as a number of third-party titles).
Prior to that, of course, Bioware used the venerable Infinity engine, which powered Planescape Torment, the Baldur's Gate and the Icewind Dale games.
Isn't Epic doing this with the Unreal Engine?
Isn't Valve doing this with the Source Engine?
Engines aren't as important as the games themselves. Particularly for a franchise. If Super SF4 used the same engine as Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, then I would be really, really, really sad.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Not for everyone.
This guy has a niche market. If any EA game had his sales it would be viewed as a commercial disaster. Some people love the story based games but far too many people will go for graphics over gameplay every time.
Code reuse can save lots of work, and open source does it fairly well at the source level, but increasing it would reduce work a lot. To increase it requires some work and planning. Object-oriented magic, and a dozen other things, were supposed to magically make all code reusable. Never worked. It's not easy to do, but waste of resources in programming can indeed create quite a lot of problems. And it can be done. One trick is obviously "don't change the base too much". Explains why old binary emulators are so popular.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The big game makers are always striving to present the latest and prettiest games, while their businesses are topheavy archaic slugs (modeled on the entertainment industry).
I'll take an ugly but fun game over a pretty but boring game any day. I like high-end graphics as much as the next guy, but not at the expense of gameplay.
And I'll take a pretty and fun game over an ugly but fun game any day. You can have both, and I don't think there's anything wrong with putting a lot of effort into the graphics engine and art as well. Artistry is artistry.
Is it just me or are "good" graphics overrated? No matter what they do, in the end the overall looks are still not real and only the textures are prettier.
Remember that people played (and still actively play) MUDs - they are not played for the nice looks (ASCII maps is all you have to look at!!!), it's the story that catchy.
I think that the players who are there for the graphics play the games for the shortest time. The more valuable customers that are there for the story and would buy a sequel, updates whatever actually don't care about the looks after first 2 days.
Its not an either or though. Sure, his graphics and engine are not so great. They are limited. But its just him doing the work. There is nothing stopping a 15 or 20 man gaming company from using the same tactics with a more modern engine and graphics created by people who are better than jeff vogal (no offense to the guy, I like his games and they are impressive).
Amborsia Software is a pretty good example. They could do more than they have, but at least the released, what 3 Escape velocity titles on pretty much the same engine (tweaked certainly but not completely re-written and redesigned).
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
you are incorrect. Casual games like bejeweled make money hand over fist. The idea that big flashy games are where the money is at is a myth.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Star Control?
Maybe its like Starcraft were being able to run the game on almost any computer will always win. You have 1% of the market, but that market is hundreds of times larger then the market of high end rigs.
This is good advice for practically every field. If you've done a good job of defining and documenting clean interfaces, it is almost always better to reuse a wheel than to reinvent it (usually badly). The only time a rewrite is in order is when it would actually take more effort to accommodate an existing subsystem.
(This applies mainly in a business context; for free software that is unconstrained by the need to turn a profit, the main question should be which choice will better serve the users, not which choice is quicker and easier for the developer.)
As far as games go, many of the games I've enjoyed most have had relatively primitive graphics but superb gameplay, while I've seen plenty of games that were visually stunning, but not all that much fun to play. For game developers, I'd recommend developing the game first with minimal placeholder graphics and then play it. Is it fun? If yes, then upgrade the graphics. If not, then no amount of eye-candy will save it.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Actually he did rewrite 5 games at least once, the first 3 Exiles games were re-hashed with his "new" engine and his "new" (and crappier) game mechanics as Avernum I-III, and he also re-did Nethergate, which I actually originally liked as being a nice change from his bland Exile world. OK, he did add some things to the "new" versions of Exile aka Avernum, but still... give me a break here. Oops, I said 5, and the one that I haven't mentioned yet is Blades of Exile cum Blades of Avernum.
Same so-so graphics for years, same tired old engine when it would/should have been entirely possible for him to move along to something a little more modern. e.g. Minions of Mirth using the Torque Game Engine and licensing a good deal of art, graphical effects, and commissioning other pieces is leaps and bounds ahead of Jeff's stuff yet still not entirely graphically pleasing, but good enough for more CRPGers I think. (Music was donated for Minions of Mirth AFAIK.) If he wanted to he could EASILY pick up any one of several OSS engines(e.g. Torchlight showed off OGRE pretty well IMNHO) or for little cost, license an engine like Torque(preferably the newer one), and given MoM's art he should be able to get good enough artwork to justify his grossly inflated prices for what is a VERY OLD creaky engine with artwork from the late 80s/early 90s. i.e. IMO Jeff is just being lazy and cheap. He's comfortable with crumbling old game engine, meaning that he has to spend little effort with each game actually programming, along with the endless re-use of the same graphics. (OK the graphics bit isn't so bad as you would expect some continuity in tilesets between games set in the same geographical region(s), however I've grown more and more to appreciate first person centered single character CRPG games, and 3rd person for party based all with 3D graphics.)
Actually given his commentary about re-writing the oldest portions of his engine every game, I'd bet that using some other OSS or other game engine would enable him to spend even LESS time on it once he got things going the first, as he could rely on commercial or OSS updates along with more testing. (Apparently he's never even bothered to look at other engines given his commentary on their "costs", yet apparently quite of few of these AAA games can afford expensive 3rd party engines, have a price point $12 or so about Jeff's and MANY of them still turn a profit, sometimes a VERY good profit.)
A new engine would allow him to implement a FAR more robust scripting engine than what he has, making something like the Blades games actually useful and possibly actually getting some people to create mods for it.
Anyways, my beef beyond the technical/art/mechanics aspects was the way he moved to his "new" engine re-releasing old games that I had already purchased while simultaneously jacking up his prices to unreasonable levels given the quality. (I stopped caring, mostly about Spiderweb after being burned by Avernum I. Go look at his current prices for his games, I paid little more for Drakensang which was a FAR better CRPG than any of his efforts, and better looking to boot while being produced on a budget which amounts to peanuts today.
Geez! He's just so arrogantly full of himself in that article, that it's er... disconcerting... I think that in the end is that he is so 1-person company centric and afraid to take any sort of risk that his commentary is just marginalized. I'm surprised he didn't work in something about PR and hype while he was rambling on there. OTOH Minions of Mirth was also made by, primarily, 2 people. Jeff really just comes off as a whiny wannabe in the post.
(End note: as to graphics, I still play alot of older CRPGs, and alot of roguelikes generally in TEXT mode, although for some I will use a graphical tileset if there's something halfway decent avilable, so graphics aren't everything but once you start putting yourself into a certain price category you WILL be compared to other games in the same general range, e.g. Drakensang v. Avernum/Geneforge.)
Well AFAIK The Dragon Age engine is based on the same engine used for KOTOR and many other Bioware games, just updated for the modern era.
Actually, it doesn't.
Mass Effect uses the Eclipse engine. This is considered a wholly new engine (although it doubtlessly shares some code from earlier projects, just because it is the same development house and performs similar functions).
Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 and Jade Empire used the Odyssey engine. This in turn was based on the Aurora engine, first used in the Neverwinter Nights games (as well as a number of third-party titles).
Prior to that, of course, Bioware used the venerable Infinity engine, which powered Planescape Torment, the Baldur's Gate and the Icewind Dale games.
Close. Mass Effect actually uses the Unreal 3 engine.
The original Super Mario Bro's on 8-bit Nintendo still remains one of the most enjoyable games to play. It's more enjoyable than the newest Mario on Wii. In fact quite a lot of those games are way more enjoyable than the current string of games that are out. I still to this day enjoy the old school games on a more consistent basis than some brand new larger than life wanna-be blockbuster that HugeGameStudio put out. Tekken 3 is antiquated but yet still better than the latest Tekken. Final Fantasy Tactics rips XIII a new hole in story alone, and it didn't need Dolby Surround to do it. Sadly most game studios have failed to see that innovation is the true push behind making games fun. Making you think in a new way and having to work to imagine a story you are interested in or a new way of accomplishing getting to the end of the level will always be FAR MORE ENTERTAINING than shiny lipgloss on my screen.
Oh, I entirely agree. Games like Trine, Mirror's Edge, Trials HD...sometimes, the visual style plays a HUGE role in my enjoyment of a game.
For myself personally, I'd put it at 85% gameplay to 15% visuals, in terms of importance.
Living With a Nerd
You might be interested in Vega Strike, an OS project. Think I saw it on Sourceforge.net or Fossfor.us
let us not forget the SCUMM!
You find that custom engines for games is the exception, not the rule. Most games start with an existing engine and go from there. Unreal Engine 3 is by far one of the most popular these days. Not just for shooters either, RPGs (Mass Effect 1 and 2, Lost Odyssey, etc) Racing games and so on have all used it. Gamebryo is another real popular one. Firaxis uses it for all their strategy games these days (like Civ 4 and Pirates) and Bethesda uses it for their RPGs among many others.
In the big money game world, it seems to be rather standard practice to have a company that is good at engine development write a game engine, and then to license that for your project. There are, of course, games that use custom engines but I'd venture that the majority license another engine.
Reason is probably just as you state, so that they can spend time writing a game, not an engine.
Freespace two and various mods for it allow for both "Newtonian" flight models and "Dampened" flight models.
Allegiance had a Newtonian model in the original game and I believe it still has a community around it now that the source has been released.
You mad
How many times did Duke Nukem Forever switch engines and start all over?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
indie games profits reach a peak at bejeweled, which grossed about 250mil, and reaching that level is about a one in 100,000 shot. AAA titles begin life right around there, at 200-300mil, for the failures.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They have free demos.
Not for long. EA has been mulling selling demos.
I happen to be in the middle of playing one of his games (Geneforge 5) and I'm really impressed. The crappy graphics took an hour or so to get used to, but the complexity of the world and faction system makes the game worth playing. You really feel torn between the ideals of the different factions, and get to know the personalities of the major players. I think it compares quite favorably to modern big-budget games in that regard. Also the fighting mechanics were solid and didn't get in the way of gameplay.
Tie Fighter did the same thing...SO MANY TIMES I ran into capital ships and whatnot because shortly before I played Tie Fighter was when I got balls-deep into MechWarrior...so I was used to be able to stop almost instantly -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
If they can get the storyline and gameplay right, create great immersion, reduce bugs, loadtime, need for 'farming,' etc
Reducing defects and interruptions for loading is a good thing. But cutting out the need for farming would just turn off any avid player of the Harvest Moon series or that one Harvest Moon lookalike on Facebook (what was its name again?).
Low end graphics shouldn't necessarily equate to "ugly" perhaps just dated. An ugly game will be ugly no matter the resolution or polygon count of the art assets.
Good looking games sell. This is no different to Apple and their products. Dress it up to look damn sexy and people want to own it and be seen with it, regardless of what's under the hood. Also no different from the 'ideal' mate that, beyond the looks, can easily turn out to be not quite so ideal. It all starts with looks, the window dressing. Human nature.
While it's true that you can have both, the question is what do you play after you've finished those 3 games.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Give me game play OVER pretty any day.
Of course, the issue is that different people have different expectations for gameplay. You obviously prefer the more realistic physics as part of the game. Others prefer for the game portions to be interesting, rather than realistic.
For example, racing simulators versus racing games. The sims (the hardcore stuff, like SimBin) often have very little game attached to them beyond 'here are cars and tracks, and all the physics and race rules to use them'. This appeals to your hardcore drivers who care more about lift-throttle oversteer and their tire temperature and pressure, but not to your typical 'gamer'. They want a career mode, the ability to purchase and install vehicle upgrades, and a compelling reason to race the tracks (beyond dropping a lap time by 0.005s). Both are gameplay, but very different types.
I guess what I'm saying is that unlike what you seem to be implying, realism != gameplay. Sure, we're seeing a lot of games which merge the two (you could say the first one was Asteroids), but just because an FPS is more realistic than TF2 or Quake doesn't mean it has better gameplay.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
The point of the engine rewrite treadmill in large companies is not to create better games, it's to raise player expectations and build a high enough barrier to entry that only the largest companies/IP-holders are left in the market.
Just like the movies, if you have the money to attempt to dominate the market, you don't win on good scripts because anyone could come along out of left field and write one of those, you win by having production values/effects/names that no small player can afford to match.
It doesn't have to be a conscious strategy to do this, it's just the natural way the market will evolve - eg: the peacock's tail
If only the entire software industry could figure that out. They're always too busy creating the next cluster fuck to be bothered making something solid. Well, most of the commercial houses that is. Open Source seems to stress quality over speed to market.
I haven't played a space shooter in several years, but I think one of the ones off sourceforge had true physics movement (Vegastrike or the Privateer remake or one of those).
As for Parsec, it wasn't fun (yet) and lost its development team.
Personally, I don't see a hardcore space physics game being fun at all - you don't need just vector based movement - there would be no sound, burning, or explosions. I'm even skeptical about explosive decompression. Most combat would take place at massive distances, not up close dogfight style. It would be about as satisfying as eating gravel. A mix of real and movie physics can be fun, but also frustrating - you can get something like Darkstar One, which I enjoyed once I got into it, but the learning curve was high. Supposedly the X series isn't bad, but I haven't played it (X3 is now on Steam I believe), so I don't know what gameplay is like.
I think you're confusing profits with income...
If a game sells $300M of units but cost $301M - it lost money.
If a game sells $4M of units but cost $100k - it made lots of money.
(However, in terms of "jobs" and "paid developers" - the big game is better because most of that cost is developer salaries.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
When I start a new game, I spend 3-4 months rewriting the worst or most dated part of my engine, and then I take that old (but solid) engine and make the coolest story I can with it.
So it seems that he does rewrite his game engine in some respects. Not a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" kind of rewrite that so many IT teams tasked with saving the company are tasked with. But bit by bit, it gets rewritten.
Having had some experience in maintaining "old" code, this approach works best when the original product is well written, well documented, the design team is up to speed on it, and management maintains that team (and its resources) rather than disbanding them after the delivery date. Massive rewrites (and the headaches that go with them) occur when a product is allowed to languish until such time as its performance becomes a critical issue. Then the code cowboys are brought in to start from scratch (because nobody remembers where the source, let alone the documentation was stored). Something brand new gets built, the people of the town (users) hail the IT team as heroes. And hopefully most of the critical bugs can be patched before the coders ride off into the sunset. Hence, my sig line:
Have gnu, will travel.
Corporate America.
I'm surprised the shareholders aren't out in the streets with pitchforks.
Deleted
I dunno. I was completely addicted to Master of Orion and Master of Magic back in the day, but sparking them up now in their 320x240 glory makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
After 10 minutes or so you don't notice and the game is fun again, but you aren't going to get the uninitiated to spend that 15 minutes.
I thought most of the cost was marketing?
This is so true
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Let's say I'm interested in fiddling with some game design stuff. OK, I'm sold; I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I'm interested in implementing my own RPG mechanic, with a rather open-ended ability system. I have precisely zero interest in audio/visual engine aspects and would accept and try to work towards almost any platform that was reasonably robust (graphics, rudimentary or otherwise, would probably be necessary for my concept, though). I've got a certain amount of it fleshed out pen-and-paper style, complete with what I'd say is 15% of the mechanical content (content prototypes, rough rules for opponent AI, rules for content scaling and (pathetically trying) to keep a reasonably open system from running away with itself, etc.) that I'd want in a game release -- ultimately, as far as the game is concerned, a dragon is just a really big giant rat, so from my perspective, the hurdle in making a dragon is a matter of having the story frame it, having the engine call for it at the right time, and finding/begging/procuring some graphics to represent it. Anyway, while the design seems intuitive to my gaming posse (i.e. someone else has told me I'm not totally nuts), the computation required gets very prohibitive for tabletop play. FWIW, my avatars don't have STR/DEX/CON, HP/MP type stats, but rather several inventory-like pools they draw on, and combat proceeds based on a synchronous AP-expenditure model, so it's technically turn-based, but without "rounds" or distinct player/enemy phases. This is where computers should step in and put the grunt work behind us, right? Where can I get a reasonably functional platform for a traditional RPG -- maps, event handling, prototypes for player data management -- that will readily let me tear out the rest of the game logic and substitute my own?
I disagree. I know there's a lot of platformer nostalgia - and hey I still play Mario from time to time, but it really isn't that fun. It's linear, it's static, it's frustrating, and there is no story. Platformers died because they're all the same. The differences between Mario and Sonic and Megaman are Castlevania superficial.
Not that that's saying much.
Again, I have to disagree. Megaman drove it's franchise into the ground, Mario got lucky with timing and just as it was getting stale along came 3D. Many of the recent Zelda games are superior to the originals, and examples like Tekken and Final Fantasy are examples not of the gaming industry dying, but of watching studios trying to get every last penny out of their golden boy. I'd rather play Bio Shock than Duke Nukem or World of Warcraft than Ultima online.
The problem with looking at old games is that you only remember the good ones. There was a whole lot of derivative stink available for the NES, but you're only fondly remembering the groundbreaking ones. I played Ghostbusters on the NES, and even as a 15 year old, couldn't figure out how someone could sell that crap. I had an Atari 2600, and really, how many pong/breakout clones can you produce? I too would rather play Half-Life over Crysis, but that's a little like saying that movies were better in 1959 than now because you'd rather watch Ben Hur than Avatar - forgetting of course that 1959 also gave us Plan 9 from Outer space.
Linewars? Played the daylights out of that.
Fuck yeah Dwarf Fortress, Nethack, DungeonCrawl, DoomRL, Splunkey, MazeCrawl, Slash'em, DuesEx, X-Com, FinalFantasyTactics, disgaia, Odin Sphere, Natuk, and yes, the original EXILE.
I believe what's being referred to is "games for gamers," not "games for casuals and stay-at-home moms."
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
You go back to WoW and get neither, obviously.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
based on the blog, I didn't see the OP as a shot at the developer; it looked more like a complement. Reusing a perfectly good game engine (or storyline) and making an interesting new game (or story) with it is a real good business model. The comment about people liking interesting game play over gee whiz graphics only reinforces that. Many successful authors do that - read one Ludlum / WEB Griffin / Clancey novel and you've "read" them all; but their storytelling still pulls you in even if you know how the plot and characters will playout. As a consultant, I'm a firm believer in the "Create once, sell as often and for as much money as the market will bear as long as possible. Lather, rinse, and repeat."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Actually, it'd probably be a pretty novel experience playing a game which realistically simulates space combat... It'd become a matter of relative speeds - you're probably already moving at a ludicrous clip, the trick is to dance in and out of range at the maximum accurate weapon range using braking and thrusting maneuvers.... Forget changing direction rapidly, but you could probably do some minor jinking to avoid long-range damage.
The Lucasarts X-Wing and Tie Fighter games had a mechanic which would blend well with that style of combat - namely shield juggling. Assuming you'd allow enough of a fudge factor in your science to permit some analog of a force field, changing the orientation and concentration of a field to deflect incoming fire from multiple directions is a tricky but engaging mechanic.
Finally, it wouldn't have to be completely soundless - remember electromagnetism - assuming hull sensors which picked up and amplified emp and vibrations caused by passing through magnetic fields from shots or engine wake, you could hear a lot of really odd sounds. And as far as explosions, don't forget the stuff that a ship is made of has to go somewhere if it blows apart, and that somewhere is pretty much everywhere. Anything blowing up behind you (movement-wise) would be eerily silent and anything blowing up along your vector of movement would sound like electromagnetic shockwaves and a nasty hailstorm.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Jeff Vogel wrote FF1-6? Only read the first three paragraphs to the block quote. Arguably 7-9 contain the same core mechanisms. Only in 10 do you lose the "go anywhere overworld map".
moox. for a new generation.
Jeff Vogel's games are all excellent... his advice is worth listening to.
Why can't I have both? Seriously? Are the same people responsible for story writing and engine design? Well maybe they shouldn't be.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Reuters reports today that RPG players from around the world are revolting against Wizards of the Coast and other RPG game developers, who have not updated their venerable paper technology in more than a century. Some of the protesters have also raised concerns about a similar stagnation in pen technology, which last saw a major update with the introduction of motorized squiggly pens more than 15 years ago.
Wizards of the Coast could not be reached for comment, but will hold a press conference later today where they are expected to address the issue. Former WotC employee and lead designer of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, Monte Cooke, had this to say: "I don't understand what is wrong with these morons. I mean, the game isn't about paper, or even pens. It's never really been about the technology. It's about creating a memorable story, and giving the player the chance to play the role of a hero. I could run a great RPG on a cave wall with nothing but a bloody finger to draw with."
Perhaps not surprisingly the social web has already picked up on the story, polarizing large groups of twitter members and spawning countless facebook groups. Interestingly, a similar group of dissenters is gaining steam among the board gaming community, claiming that boards are long over due for an update. Citing Monopoly as a major contributor to the industry's unwillingness to move beyond pasteboard.
More at 11.
They did, then they forgot it. TFA mentions the possibility of making multiple games on the Dragon Age engine, which is exactly what happened with its spiritual predecessors Baldur's Gate and, to a point, Neverwinter Nights.
Still, that's a recipe on making the largest number of quality videogames for the least expenditure of money. What studios are interested in, however, is making the most *money* for least investment, and there's plenty of proof already that making something shiny-but-stupid will net you a lot more money than the opposite.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Buy a nintendo
Others prefer for the game portions to be interesting, rather than realistic.
The thing is: "realistic" often results in "interesting". As with real physics you get emergent behaviour and dynamic gameplay situations, while with made up hacks you just sit there and wait for the next script trigger, which is often predictable, completly boring when it comes to replay and insanely immersion breaking. That doesn't mean I want every game to be like Falcon4.0 where you have to read hundreds of pages of manual before you can get anything done, instead you can simply mix realism with accessibility add-ons. Driving games are slowly getting there, they are starting to provide both a reasonable amount of realism while at the same time providing optional breaking assistants, dynamic drive lines or even time-rewind, thus giving you accessibility without turning into a flat arcade game. And also lets not forget that realism can also be abused for fun, Indy500 might have been one of the most realistic racing games of its time, but it was also a hilariously awesome crash simulation. Don't like the drive? Just turn around have and have some fun with the replay feature while you crash into oncoming cars.
The sad part is that the driving genre seems to be the only one which seems to "get it", most other genres out there just ignore reality and turn into a series of script triggers, never willing to actually teach the player something new, instead its just "aim, shoot, rinse and repeat".
...I'm suffering from an accute case of the Sowhats.
(Well, Id be rich and not bother doing anything. But lets say I did...)
I would expend my efforts on developer tools, not game engines.... Correction: content authoring tools, not developer tools or game engines.
My perfect end-game would be that some map developer could load in the raster format of a 1:50000 topo map, set some parameters like "Forest = Canadian Shield" "Season = Summer", click go, and boom, you have a new map. Trees where there are trees, buildings where there are buildings, roads, etc, etc. You don't only have roads that are relevant to the "story", you have roads and trails randomly as in real life. Your buildings all work, you don't have sealed doors because you got lazy.
Either there is a library of 1,000 trees, or the tool just generates some; there is a library of 5,000 buildings, or the tool generates some, etc.
So my money would be spent on building up that library of 1000 trees and 5000 different buildings, and auto generating the landscape from real GIS data.
Now, I grant that I don't know anything about developing maps, and I'm sure that the actual map part isn't the hard part. For something like Half Life, you are really building a special map around a story. But for some really hard core FPS - a team CTF, or whatever... the maps get boring. Some moderate player can be an expert at a given map and really dominate over an expert FPS player.
If you can generate a map in an afternoon, then you would. And that really would remove any bonus people get from being map experts.
instead you can simply mix realism with accessibility add-ons. Driving games are slowly getting there, they are starting to provide both a reasonable amount of realism while at the same time providing optional breaking assistants, dynamic drive lines or even time-rewind, thus giving you accessibility without turning into a flat arcade game.
But that ignores that not everyone wants realism, even superficially. Some people want to play an arcade game. For those people, intentionally violating the laws of physics for the sake of fun is a good thing. See Mario Kart, Street Fighter, Team Fortress 2, Geometry Wars, etc. for examples.
That's why we have developers making simulations, pseudo-sims, and arcade titles: they each have a merket, and there is not one-size-fits-all solution.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
You know, one thing we don't see much, but I do kind of wish would happen more, is modernized updates of classic games. For example, take the Elder Scrolls series by Bethesda Softworks. I've spent many hours enjoying ES III: Morrowind, and ES IV: Oblivion.
They released the the first two games in the series as free downloads, which I downloaded, and started to play. The thing is, graphics which looked sort of alright on a 640x480 CRT end up looking eye-meltingly, headache inducingly bad on a 1920x1200 LCD.
I'd pay money, I think, for versions of Elder Scrolls: Arena and ES II: Daggerfall which are native ports to Windows (currently you have to run them in DosBox, and the resolution if fixed at 640x480), and which have the models and textures and things updated to allow for abritrary resolution (that is, on most modern engines, you can run the game at whatever resolution you want, and the engine just scales the graphics, because 3D graphics are basically vector-graphics which can be arbitrarily scaled).
I don't need the best graphics in the world, I really don't. I can still have fun playing a good 2D game, even. But, I still think there could be money to be made updating great classic games to run better and look better on modern hardware and operating systems.
Have you actually played Crysis? There's actually a pretty decent game there, under all the glitter.
I've got no problem re-using engines, artwork, characters or anything else in games, as long as the narrative and situations are interesting.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
One thing to consider is that the quality of the engine can impact the quality of the storytelling. The capabilities of the tools you give your artists and designers determine how free they are to run with their imaginations. I think one of the best RPG stories ever told is Final Fantasy VI, not just because of the story itself but because of the production and direction: how the gameplay, graphics, dialogue and music were all interwoven together in a way that was both immersive and compelling.
It sounds like this guy has been very successful in telling new stories in his old engine with the same assets. And I figure I'd rather play a crappy-looking game with a good story than a good-looking game that bores me. But forcing it to be a choice of one or the other is ultimately imposing limits on the quality of what you do, which may matter to you as an artist if not so much to your bottom line.
Dan.
Actually, it'd probably be a pretty novel experience playing a game which realistically simulates space combat...
Novel, but boring. Who has the more accurate targeting system for their laser weaponry? As soon as they reach that range, their laser destroys the other craft. End of battle. Remember that any projectile can likely be destroyed by lasers or other projectiles before it reaches you.
You don't actually expect that 'realistic' and 'energy shield' go in the same sentence, do you?
As I stated above, at some point increased realism decreses the fun of a game.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
AAA titles don't cost that much to make or market. Generally under 5M to develop, under 20M total costs including marketing. That's down in the noise compared to the typical gross.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So, big fan of Dorf Fortress, then?
If you can get a hold of it, you may want to check out I-War. I have no idea if it's aged well or not, but back in the day it was pretty amazing. Very deep gameplay (including Newtonian physics, as in the game you're referring to), good story, and graphics that, at the time, were absolutely gorgeous. Had more fun with that one than with Freespace.
hear hear :)
when they get it right its more by good luck than good management...
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Is this some new form of hyper-sarcasm?
The issue is, that there are (believe it or not!) games out there that have good gameplay, story AND good graphics and other technology. There are also games without fancy technology that suck.
So the issue isn't one of good gameplay and good story vs. fancy technology at all, it's simply about good games vs. bad games. The nostalgic view of all the games of old that were amazingly fun but didn't look great is forgetful of all the games of old that looked shit, and also played shit too.
Game quality and technology aren't mutually exclusive, it's just that it's easy to forget the crap bad looking games, and easy to remember the good crap looking games meaning people end up with this flawed viewpoint that they are mutually exclusive.
I'd take the games with good gameplay, storyline AND shiny graphics personally. For me games like Mass Effect 2 are fine recent examples of this.
RPGs don't need the latest and greatest graphics. Story is the most important aspect IMO.
Gold Box re-imagined:
http://goldchest.sourceforge.net/
Here we have a game developer that noticed that good gameplay and good stroy > fancy technology.
Ya, Zangband rules!
I saw a comment from him in the paper today that his inevitable sequel to Avatar won't cost him as much as the first one, because he's already developed a lot of the 3D assets he'll be using.
Did you deliberately omit adom?
Yeah, I never liked it.
The tiniest of microparticles left in a stream behind the ship... Microscopic chaff sparsely spread, producing the attenuation that an atmosphere would provide in terrestrial battle, rendering the laser ineffective at long range. Powering a laser produces heat. Heat is difficult to disperse in space. Produce armor plating or a directable reflector which is capable of surviving a few nanoseconds of laser, a discharge mechanism which dumps out a huge clump of reflective chaff in that time, and then leaves behind a trail of lighter weight chaff and soon you have a situation where it'd do more damage to the attacker to shoot (from the heat from their emitter) than it does to you to catch.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Megaman drove it's franchise into the ground, Mario got lucky with timing and just as it was getting stale along came 3D.
What what?? "Lucky"? The timing of the first 3D Mario was not lucky, it was completely planned and deliberate. Platformers basically ceased to exist with the advent of N64. Nintendo said "Let there be 3D games" and the big game houses said "OK". Some franchises just weren't worth hoisting into 3D worlds, like Megaman. Be very glad you weren't assaulted with BattleToads Avoid Fast Moving 3D Objects, or Double Dragon Shootout, or Donkey Kong Country Jumping in 3D Edition. Mega Man wasn't driven into the ground, it was left to RIP where it belonged, and it's life was stretched out the entire lifetime of the SNES from what I remember. Now, platformers are 'in' again because of a shakeup in distribution channels. PC games were driven into the ground chasing silly trends.. Puzzle, Sim, RPG, RTS, FPS, console ports... I'm still waiting for those glory days to come back :\