It's worth remembering that if you rail against the reviewing world for giving uniformly good reviews, you should at least be grateful when they tell you that a game isn't so good.
It'd be nice to keep the monthly roundups mentioned on games.slashdot. It gives us a good pointer to what's going on in the indy world. This month, it seems not a great deal, but when the really great ones come along this seems a pretty efficient way to find out.
Firstly, The gameplay is still rather different to Pnikies. The blobs and stars are the common elements. The controls are totally different.
Secondly, I paid someone to write the text on my site and she hsa never seen Pnickies. As for myself, I got the idea for Drippy from Pnickies, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the game.
The main difference between the two are the way things fall. In Drippy mutliple things fall simultaneoulsy and you can only manipulate them at the top, It's also better to play using a mouse. In Pnickies I believe you control set pieces one at a time as they fall. Chances are if you like one you'll probably like the other though.
It's an interesting way to develop a game, working from the faded memory of another title. You take new directions in the areas where your memory fails you. I did this once before with a game that I based on the Apple II game serpentine. I only saw the apple game once and I wrote my thing in 1993 or 4 so While I achieved a degree of visual similarity the gameplay was quite different. In more recent years I downloaded a version of serpentine for and emulator and found that I didn't much like the original anyway, go figure:-)
Actually it is a bit of an issue making games for different countries. I'm in New Zealand and I get interesting feedback regarding my games from the US. It's usually little things that you have to change to consider.
For instance in my game Fitznik (http://www.screamingduck.com/Fitznik.php) it was a tough decisiion on one of the death messages. When you blow yourself up with one of you own bombs, you may get the message "Go Darwin!" This may not go down too well in some parts of the states.
In the end I decided that given the game is a puzzle game with actual difficult puzzles, those who would be inclined to be offended wouldn't be up to playing the game anyway.
Another issue is promotion. Different games do well in different areas. By and large the american audience seems to hate Drippy ( http://www.screamingduck.com/Drippy.php ) but people in other parts of the world seem to think it's quite neat.
It would work out better to promote games, more targeted for the region.
And finally. The interweb is everywhere, that means you deal with people at all hours. Having an office on the other side of the world can be handy if you need to have stuff done while you are asleep.
I think the answer to that question, is Everything. And that's why it'll suck (1). I don't want a solution for everything. I want something small and nice that does a particular job well. If I want a different job done then I want something else small and nice that does that well.
I'm actually working on a web plugin for animated content. It's not aiming to be better than SVG or Canvas, the goal is to provide a number of solutions to things that those things don't do. That's not to say SVG is flawed, It is just saying that if you are wanting to do some non-scaled, non-vector graphics, perhapse something else can perfom the task in a more efficient manner.
Say, you're right. The links are down there. I totally failed to find them despite spending a while hunting for them. I had to resort to changing the page number in the url.
It's gotta hurt them in the long run. I go to a fair few sites with ads regularly, but I'm not inclined to go back to theirs specifically because of the ads.
You still can't see it working If it's in your PC
on
Hard Drive Window
·
· Score: 1
Puzzle games seems to be a bit of a misnomer in the casual arena. The puzzles are often at the stimulus/response level of Bejeweled and its kin.
I got it wrong and made Drippy which is more in the Tetris vein. If you look at most of the Casual game portals you won't find many games like this. There is too much decision making involved in where to put things.
With my other games Fitznik and Fitznik 2 I made really hard puzzles. They also don't do so well on the casual portals. For Fitznik, by far the bigggest feedback I have received is that people haven't been able to complete the free demo levels.
I think there is a niche out there for my games, but it's a tough job getting the games in front of the people who will enjoy them.
Th problem with game ideas such as Tempest, Zaxxon and Dig-Dug is that they can't be built into a big game arc like most retail titles. I'm not pointing out a promlem with your argument here, I'm pointing out a problem with the industry.
I miss the Pick-it-up-and-play-it games. More cheaper small, original titles please. Here's a shameless plug for one of my own games (hey, it's feeware). You probably won't play it for more than a week, but you'll have a bit of quick easy (and I think, Original) fun.
So many people are dismissing ray tracing out of hand because the screenshots are not as pretty as some from the latest games.
Let me ask you. Why would you expect teams of electrical engineers/mathematicians/programmers be able to produce a prettier image than a team of extremely talented artists.
The job of the artist is to make it look pretty. The job of the guys making this chip is to provide features and to make it go fast.
So it's not fast enough yet. It's a prototype. When it can render decent resolutions at decent framerates then bring in the artists and see what they can do with it.
You will note that there were few sheep in LOTR. This is largely due to sterling work by the team at Weta deveopling sheep removal software. Sheep are even a critcal part of the development of some scenes. Many of the battle scenes were in-fact flocks of sheep that were rounded up and used as seed data for computers to turn them into humans/orcs.
The raw footage of the Battle of Pelennor Fields is a sight to behold indeed.
Being a McDonald's employee does not qualify you to speak intelligently about anything except proper McDonald's hamburger flipping technique. Please shut-up and return to mopping the floor. Thanks.
Being a patent clerk does not qualify you to speak intelligently about anything except proper patent clerking technique.
So, the real question is : are current times so desperate for gaming software shops that developers revert to releasing shareware instead of selling their work as regular products ?
I think you are looking at it entirely the wrong way. I have one shareware game out there doing reasonably well Shameless Plug and I have another finished about to be released. When you sell shareware you aim for a good conversion rate (downloads to orders). A good conversion rate is around the 2% mark for games. So only 1 in fifty buy's your game. It's something you accept, You don't gripe about all those who didn't pay up you just accept those who do. That is not to say that you don't make your game more compelling to increase the conversion rate to, say, 2.3%. But you go into the game knowing the vast majority will not buy.
I don't feel like doing shareware is an act of desperation either. The fact the the conversion rate is a low percentage doesn't matter if enough people buy the game for you to make a living. For instance if my game sold 50,000 copies that would be a phenominal success where it would be considered quite poor for a retail title. Getting 2.5 million to play my demo is the trick.
Finally. You say "instead of selling their work as regular products". Shareware games are regular products. They just aren't retail products. That was the whole point of the CNN article. Shareware is being accepted as a legitimate way to operate. Importantly I do not aspire to be a retail developer.
The bottom line is: we are still in business. if we do things right we make money. We just do it differently.
Even if the stroy does describe people doing things that are based upon false premises, that doesn't mean that the story must be false.
The guy may not have known that emergencey numbers work without available minutes, or that chilling the battery doesn't help.
People have been arguing in this forum about the benefits of brandy. Sugar vs. Alchohol. My guess is that small enough doses spead over time would provide sugar without much heat loss, but it doesnt matter what I think because the only relevent thing is what the guy in the snow thought.
The guy may have been just been incredibly lucky to survive being as stupid as he was.
None of this makes tha story necessarily true either.
I wrote a game Fitznik and it has been out only a few months. I'm currently living off of the proceeds.
Now I couldn't do this If I were living in the US. The NZ dollar is worth 42 US Cents so each dollar becomes $2.38. On the other hand though the sales lifespan of the game is likely to be much longer than I spent developing it. I'm not sitting idle. Another game and expansion packs for my current game will bring me quite a respectable income in total.
Now maybe you can make more if you write a business app that brings in more if it hits the right spot, but I'm not considering the bottom line my end goal. I want to write games, and if I can earn a decent living writing games why should I take more money to do something I don't want to do.
Remember, Commander Keen and other Apogee games sold over 30,000 copies. I wouldn't consider that Little or no. If my game sells 30,000 copies (not that I expect it to do that well) I'll be buying a house.
This article repeats what I have heard often. Possibly because I have seen interviews with Romero saying pretty much this but, I don't think the view that Romero wanted game while Carmack wanted technology is accurate.
After Wolf3d made a big splash Id were quite famous . When you get famous, if you talk people will listen. People were eager to hear about what would be in future games. Romero was eager to tell them, unfortunately there wasn't a great deal of correlation between what Romero announced and what turned up in the end. A similar thing happened with Quake. Romero's comments seemed to be rooted in a "wouldn't it be cool if..." style of thought rather than having a clear plan of the implementation of those ideas.
Admittedly, it can be a bit of a tightrope. I am a game developer myself and there is a tendancy to only put things into a game that you already know how to do. When someone makes a suggestion saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." I know I can be very resistent if it would require going back and redoing a heap of stuff. Many times though, If you do go back the results are very rewarding. You have to balance things though. If you stay in the "Wouldn't it be cool if..." mode of thought you could end up with an absolutely amazing game that never gets released (or possibly even worse, an absoluletly amazing game considering the core technology used but that technology is several years behind everyone elses)
John Carmack is in a better position than most. He is _extremely_ talented. I remember a few years back having a conversation with a mix of some of my programmer and gamer friends. The average (serious) gamer has heard of Carmack these days and thinks he makes really cool rendering engines. That wan't the bit that impressed us programmers. It was the structure of the _rest_ of the game that impressed us. Almost everything is done the _right_ way. This meant that not only could the game show pretty pictures but it was flexible. John Carmacks strong technological focus has allowed far more "wouldn't it be cool if..." things to be added than if he had done things the far more common expedient way.
John Carmack has also gone on record in saying that the gameplay is the most important part.
It is also a mistake to think that Id's games ride on technology alone. DOOM and Quake aren't just the minimum work required to make a 3d and networking engine a game -- they are the right game elements as well.
- JohnC in an interview
I think Romero was mistaken when he thought that Carmacks focus was in the wrong place. It may just be that he didn't want the game to be going in the same direction.
That is the key thing about Carmack though. I consinder myself to be a programmer of similar capablilities to John Carmack, I know several others at a similar level. That's not the thing that makes Carmack great. It's that he has a much clearer idea of his vision and the focus to keep to that. He seems to know where hes going so much more than me anyway. Of all the programmers I know I only know one other that I consider equally talented in that respect.
Romero seems an ok Programmer and a talented level designer, but I'm not sure if he has what it takes to be a game design or programming great.
Quake 3 and From the looks of it Doom 3 are good examples of games with a good clear direction. Between these two games ID has actually made a concious effort to focus distintly differant game styles for the benefits of each style. It's things like that that make me anticipate a game so much more than anything I heard about Diakatana. They focus on what they want to have rather than what they want to put into it. There is a diffrance, and I believe it is an important one.
[The article is also a bit misleading by starting the Id story with Wolf3d rather than the people emerging from Softdisk]
You could try Fitznik It's astoundingly briliant and fiendishly dificult and I'm absolutely certian that I've never played a better puzzle game that I have written ever.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth remembering that if you rail against the reviewing world for giving uniformly good reviews, you should at least be grateful when they tell you that a game isn't so good.
It'd be nice to keep the monthly roundups mentioned on games.slashdot. It gives us a good pointer to what's going on in the indy world. This month, it seems not a great deal, but when the really great ones come along this seems a pretty efficient way to find out.
Actually, reflecting on it a bit more, you could say that Drippy is a crossbreed of Pnickies and Klax
There are two reasons for that text.
:-)
Firstly, The gameplay is still rather different to Pnikies. The blobs and stars are the common elements. The controls are totally different.
Secondly, I paid someone to write the text on my site and she hsa never seen Pnickies. As for myself, I got the idea for Drippy from Pnickies, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the game.
The main difference between the two are the way things fall. In Drippy mutliple things fall simultaneoulsy and you can only manipulate them at the top, It's also better to play using a mouse. In Pnickies I believe you control set pieces one at a time as they fall. Chances are if you like one you'll probably like the other though.
It's an interesting way to develop a game, working from the faded memory of another title. You take new directions in the areas where your memory fails you. I did this once before with a game that I based on the Apple II game serpentine. I only saw the apple game once and I wrote my thing in 1993 or 4 so While I achieved a degree of visual similarity the gameplay was quite different. In more recent years I downloaded a version of serpentine for and emulator and found that I didn't much like the original anyway, go figure
Actually it is a bit of an issue making games for different countries. I'm in New Zealand and I get interesting feedback regarding my games from the US. It's usually little things that you have to change to consider.
For instance in my game Fitznik (http://www.screamingduck.com/Fitznik.php) it was a tough decisiion on one of the death messages. When you blow yourself up with one of you own bombs, you may get the message "Go Darwin!" This may not go down too well in some parts of the states.
In the end I decided that given the game is a puzzle game with actual difficult puzzles, those who would be inclined to be offended wouldn't be up to playing the game anyway.
Another issue is promotion. Different games do well in different areas.
By and large the american audience seems to hate Drippy ( http://www.screamingduck.com/Drippy.php ) but people in other parts of the world seem to think it's quite neat.
It would work out better to promote games, more targeted for the region.
And finally. The interweb is everywhere, that means you deal with people at all hours. Having an office on the other side of the world can be handy if you need to have stuff done while you are asleep.
I think the answer to that question, is Everything. And that's why it'll suck (1). I don't want a solution for everything. I want something small and nice that does a particular job well. If I want a different job done then I want something else small and nice that does that well.
i tool-pic-1-p21.jpg
I'm actually working on a web plugin for animated content. It's not aiming to be better than SVG or Canvas, the goal is to provide a number of solutions to things that those things don't do. That's not to say SVG is flawed, It is just saying that if you are wanting to do some non-scaled, non-vector graphics, perhapse something else can perfom the task in a more efficient manner.
That's the long way of saying; I don't want to do eveything with one of these http://www.mediasalesltd.com/images/lg/10-15/mult
(1)I don't have any special knowledge to confirm that it'll suck, I just have faith in microsoft
Say, you're right. The links are down there. I totally failed to find them despite spending a while hunting for them. I had to resort to changing the page number in the url.
It's gotta hurt them in the long run. I go to a fair few sites with ads regularly, but I'm not inclined to go back to theirs specifically because of the ads.
What you need is a portible one. like this
Puzzle games seems to be a bit of a misnomer in the casual arena. The puzzles are often at the stimulus/response level of Bejeweled and its kin.
I got it wrong and made Drippy which is more in the Tetris vein. If you look at most of the Casual game portals you won't find many games like this. There is too much decision making involved in where to put things.
With my other games Fitznik and Fitznik 2 I made really hard puzzles.
They also don't do so well on the casual portals. For Fitznik, by far the bigggest feedback I have received is that people haven't been able to complete the free demo levels.
I think there is a niche out there for my games, but it's a tough job getting the games in front of the people who will enjoy them.
Th problem with game ideas such as Tempest, Zaxxon and Dig-Dug is that they can't be built into a big game arc like most retail titles. I'm not pointing out a promlem with your argument here, I'm pointing out a problem with the industry.
I miss the Pick-it-up-and-play-it games. More cheaper small, original titles please.
Here's a shameless plug for one of my own games (hey, it's feeware). You probably won't play it for more than a week, but you'll have a bit of quick easy (and I think, Original) fun.
http://www.screamingduck.com/dvl.php
Can I see you proof that humans can solve the halting problem?
So many people are dismissing ray tracing out of hand because the screenshots are not as pretty as some from the latest games.
Let me ask you. Why would you expect teams of electrical engineers/mathematicians/programmers be able to produce a prettier image than a team of extremely talented artists.
The job of the artist is to make it look pretty. The job of the guys making this chip is to provide features and to make it go fast.
So it's not fast enough yet. It's a prototype. When it can render decent resolutions at decent framerates then bring in the artists and see what they can do with it.
Why keep constructing these veritable straw men?
Because all too many companies are headed by CEOs such as these.
You say they should be fired, they should pay fines they should go to jail. I agree. The problem is that they don't!
Far too many are rewarded based upon what they promise, not what they Deliver.
You will note that there were few sheep in LOTR. This is largely due to sterling work by the team at Weta deveopling sheep removal software. Sheep are even a critcal part of the development of some scenes. Many of the battle scenes were in-fact flocks of sheep that were rounded up and used as seed data for computers to turn them into humans/orcs.
The raw footage of the Battle of Pelennor Fields is a sight to behold indeed.
If you don't like sequels, Don't go to them.
Being a McDonald's employee does not qualify you to speak intelligently about anything except proper McDonald's hamburger flipping technique. Please shut-up and return to mopping the floor. Thanks.
Being a patent clerk does not qualify you to speak intelligently about anything except proper patent clerking technique.
However...
I don't feel like doing shareware is an act of desperation either. The fact the the conversion rate is a low percentage doesn't matter if enough people buy the game for you to make a living. For instance if my game sold 50,000 copies that would be a phenominal success where it would be considered quite poor for a retail title. Getting 2.5 million to play my demo is the trick.
Finally. You say "instead of selling their work as regular products". Shareware games are regular products. They just aren't retail products. That was the whole point of the CNN article. Shareware is being accepted as a legitimate way to operate. Importantly I do not aspire to be a retail developer.
The bottom line is: we are still in business. if we do things right we make money. We just do it differently.
GarageGames seems to be having a bad time of it.
If you want to have a look at what the shareware gameing world is up to you could try some of the others doing great games.
Dexterity
Mountain King Games
Retro64
Phelios
In fact, too many to list. All of those sites have links to others. You could spend days following them all.
Or you could try some of the new emerging quality shareware game news/review sites.
Diygames
Bytten
Shareware Gaming Magazine
GameTunnel
Even if the stroy does describe people doing things that are based upon false premises, that doesn't mean that the story must be false.
The guy may not have known that emergencey numbers work without available minutes, or that chilling the battery doesn't help.
People have been arguing in this forum about the benefits of brandy. Sugar vs. Alchohol. My guess is that small enough doses spead over time would provide sugar without much heat loss, but it doesnt matter what I think because the only relevent thing is what the guy in the snow thought.
The guy may have been just been incredibly lucky to survive being as stupid as he was.
None of this makes tha story necessarily true either.
All they need to do is wait for a big sports event and place a huge tv screen just out of town and supply a lot of beer.
Supply enough beer and you've got all the time in the world. They won't be finding their way back in a hurry.
I want my zero-G sauna, dammit
Uh dude, can you get a velco towel like the rest of us? It's doing that thing again.
I wrote a game Fitznik and it has been out only a few months. I'm currently living off of the proceeds.
Now I couldn't do this If I were living in the US. The NZ dollar is worth 42 US Cents so each dollar becomes $2.38. On the other hand though the sales lifespan of the game is likely to be much longer than I spent developing it. I'm not sitting idle. Another game and expansion packs for my current game will bring me quite a respectable income in total.
Now maybe you can make more if you write a business app that brings in more if it hits the right spot, but I'm not considering the bottom line my end goal. I want to write games, and if I can earn a decent living writing games why should I take more money to do something I don't want to do.
Remember, Commander Keen and other Apogee games sold over 30,000 copies. I wouldn't consider that Little or no. If my game sells 30,000 copies (not that I expect it to do that well) I'll be buying a house.
A breast bed!
Just imagine it, so warm and wobbly, and nipples! So many nipples!
After Wolf3d made a big splash Id were quite famous . When you get famous, if you talk people will listen. People were eager to hear about what would be in future games. Romero was eager to tell them, unfortunately there wasn't a great deal of correlation between what Romero announced and what turned up in the end. A similar thing happened with Quake. Romero's comments seemed to be rooted in a "wouldn't it be cool if..." style of thought rather than having a clear plan of the implementation of those ideas.
Admittedly, it can be a bit of a tightrope. I am a game developer myself and there is a tendancy to only put things into a game that you already know how to do. When someone makes a suggestion saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." I know I can be very resistent if it would require going back and redoing a heap of stuff. Many times though, If you do go back the results are very rewarding. You have to balance things though. If you stay in the "Wouldn't it be cool if..." mode of thought you could end up with an absolutely amazing game that never gets released (or possibly even worse, an absoluletly amazing game considering the core technology used but that technology is several years behind everyone elses)
John Carmack is in a better position than most. He is _extremely_ talented. I remember a few years back having a conversation with a mix of some of my programmer and gamer friends. The average (serious) gamer has heard of Carmack these days and thinks he makes really cool rendering engines. That wan't the bit that impressed us programmers. It was the structure of the _rest_ of the game that impressed us. Almost everything is done the _right_ way. This meant that not only could the game show pretty pictures but it was flexible. John Carmacks strong technological focus has allowed far more "wouldn't it be cool if..." things to be added than if he had done things the far more common expedient way.
John Carmack has also gone on record in saying that the gameplay is the most important part.
I think Romero was mistaken when he thought that Carmacks focus was in the wrong place. It may just be that he didn't want the game to be going in the same direction.
That is the key thing about Carmack though. I consinder myself to be a programmer of similar capablilities to John Carmack, I know several others at a similar level. That's not the thing that makes Carmack great. It's that he has a much clearer idea of his vision and the focus to keep to that. He seems to know where hes going so much more than me anyway. Of all the programmers I know I only know one other that I consider equally talented in that respect.
Romero seems an ok Programmer and a talented level designer, but I'm not sure if he has what it takes to be a game design or programming great.
Quake 3 and From the looks of it Doom 3 are good examples of games with a good clear direction. Between these two games ID has actually made a concious effort to focus distintly differant game styles for the benefits of each style. It's things like that that make me anticipate a game so much more than anything I heard about Diakatana. They focus on what they want to have rather than what they want to put into it. There is a diffrance, and I believe it is an important one.
[The article is also a bit misleading by starting the Id story with Wolf3d rather than the people emerging from Softdisk]
You could try Fitznik It's astoundingly briliant and fiendishly dificult and I'm absolutely certian that I've never played a better puzzle game that I have written ever.
;-)
Imagine being able to give your mind a piece of of your computer.
Read "The Peace War" - Vernor Vinge