Sooooooo! So. We're Dejobaan Games, a small indie (redundant?) studio responsible for a game called AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. If you've used OnLive, you've probably seen the damned thing listed at the top of their games selection because they sort alphabetically. Our next game will probably be called something annoying like !!!00000LoL and be even higher on the list.
I digress.
I like OnLive; I like the guys I've met that work for OnLive; I'm also the Hair Club President. I want them to succeed, because the more ways for folks to get games, the better. Here's our guarantee: If you pick Aaaaa! up on OnLive, and they stop carrying our game in 3 years, we'll give you an offline copy. I'm not sure if folks are having tech issues, but honestly, the licensing issue is really easy for us to fix.:)
I'm an indie developer, and I see our games pirated all over the place despite their being available for roughly the price of a fast food value meal. It feels sorta sucky to be pirated, and while I can't prove it, I suspect that my studio would gain at least little more money if people didn't pirate it.
That said, I don't forsee us ever taking draconian DRM measures to prevent people from playing our games. Piracy will change the way we design them, but I think what will end up happening is that we start creating games that make use of online content. Some examples:
* Level of the Day -- Log in and download your free level right here.
* Matchmaking/Leaderboards -- Pick up the game, and you'll have an account to taunt other people with your mad skills.
* Server-Side Content/Collaboration -- Co-build a level with a friend, online, and make that available to everyone else.
My thought is to offer additional, online-only content that gameplay into having an account. Sure, you can probably still pirate the game, but by picking up a legitimate copy, you have access to all this other neat stuff.
4. Create a polished game and approach (or be approached by) an established studio. Also known as the Portalapproach. Also the flOw approach. "Sony Computer Entertainment approached some future members of thatgamecompany after seeing Cloud and asked them to form a company and signed them on to make three downloadable games for the PlayStation 3. Cloud ended up being a game that wouldn't be possible for a company as small as thatgamecompany to make, so they made flOw instead. thatgamecompany was created on May 15th, 2006."
3. Work your way up in one or more established studios towards the role of game designer. The American McGee approach. "McGee began his career at id Software. He worked on such games as DOOM, Doom II, Quake, and Quake II in the areas of level design, music production, sound effects development, and program coding. In 1998, he moved to Electronic Arts, where he worked as a consultant on many projects and also created his own game, American McGee's Alice." Mind you, that can be the long route, assuming you're even successful.
2. Work with an independent group of hobbyists and promise to split the profits once you make money. This is difficult to pull off, because contributors lose interest when things become difficult. This is enough of a problem that I'd rather have one paid contractor with modest abilities than a dozen unpaid contributors with spectacular abilities. Blech.
1. Establish your own company and finance development as a third party. Many small developers bootstrap with smaller projects in niche or new markets, eventually working their way up towards larger ones. The iPhone is potentially an awesome way to get your title out there. Start by developing a finished game that's small in scope, and demonstrates the very core concepts of your idea. Rinse. Repeat.
My favorite is, of course, to take #1 and run with it. Tighten your belt, and pay a contractor with good references to help you bring your idea to light on the platform where the competition is still pretty weak, and the barrier to entry is low. That was the Palm Pilot during late '90s, and is probably something like WiiWare or the iPhone now.
And if an indie developer is worried about direction, make a simple one level demo and share it with the gaming forums,telling them ahead of time that the game isn't about graphics but bringing back the fun to FPS. I'm sure he'd find a ton of guys like me that would be happy to play test it and give him new ideas,because in the end all the eye candy doesn't mean squat if it isn't FUN.
Our (lucky) 13th title will try to fit the bill for a fun, indie-developed FPS. However, the feedback we've received over the years is that a) it's difficult for an indie developer to get the public's attention with same, and b) many (not all) gamers demand the eye candy. Valve picked up our latest, and people are vocally split into two camps -- "This is fun despite the simple graphics" vs. "This looks like crap, so I won't play it." It's still been good for us, but it's absolutely received less attention for not being both fun and pretty at the same time.
I agree. But I'd also like to make individual artists more powerful (I'm reluctant to use the term "productive"), and hope this mitigates the costs of creating assets that the player only sees once.
Charles Cecil: I think [games are] too expensive. And, while I'll be very unpopular for saying that because the industry is based on it, I think there's going to be seismic shifts. People will only pay for the landmark releases and the hundred million pounds or dollars, you can only afford a few. You look on IMDB and you look at films, I was looking at a film, I'm a BAFTA judge, that costs $50 million to produce and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. It didn't even hit a million dollars at the Box Office. Now film can do that. How it can do that I just do not understand. How can you knowingly produce a film that costs $50 million, earn less than a million dollars at Box Office and then do the same thing again and again?
I'm going to jump onto the bandwagon and agree that this isn't tenable, and it's because we're ridiculously inefficient about content generation. A Gamasutra article from 2001 posits the following imaginary visual arts breakdown for a project with a budget of $1.1m: .
ART AND GAME DESIGN (24 months)
Producer 10000 x 24 = 240000
Deisgner 3000 x 24 = 96000
3D Artist 3500 x 24 = 84000
Level Designer 3500 x 24 = 84000
Animator 1500 x 24 = 36000
2D Artist 1500 x 24 = 36000
That's over half the game's development budget to create textures, models, and levels, most of which the player will see only once. As it is, the industry's hits subsidize the misses. I think we'll be forced to look for ways to make individual artists more powerful in the next 5 years.
Activision has snagged, founded, or otherwise invested in a number of companies:
1997 - Raven Software
1998 - Pandemic Studios
1999 - Neversoft Entertainment
2000 - Gray Matter Interactive
2001 - Treyarch Invention LLC
2002 - Z-Axis Ltd, Luxoflux Corporation
2003 - Infinity Ward, Shaba Games LLC
2004 - Activision's 25th birthday- take one free acquisition. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
2005 - Vicarious Visions, Toys for Bob, Beenox, Inc.
2006 - RedOctane, Inc.
2007 - Bizarre Creations
It's odd to me how studios gain/lose/change their identities through acquisitions. Toys for Bob was responsible for Star Control II, which remains one of my favorites to this day. More recently, they did a PS2 movie tie-in for Madagascar. I'm guessing that that game was solid, but not the tour de force that was SC2. On the other hand, Maxis is now "just" one of EA's brands, and they've always done stuff that interested me. Perhaps companies just need well-placed pied pipers (Wright; Jobs; Carmack) to retain their identities?
Forget flying cars; this is how the mysteeeeeerious future is supposed to be. I still remember sitting in E&M class back in the day, thinking that if, instead of static images drawn on chalkboard, the charges and fields were animated and interactive, it'd all sink in much quicker. Ditto pretty much everything that has to do with classical mechanics.
Maybe this already exists, but I'd always hoped for a good intersection of games and education that actually encourages students to learn in a lecture setting. "Edutainment" has generally been pretty awful, but I bet there's a way we could integrate learning into an MMORPG such that you can (say) use a knowledge of kinetics to advance your character.
jenious1: I now understand Newton's Laws, so I built a catapult that demolished your castle. Kekekeke!
!pnk101: o yeah??? well im still beating u up at lunch u nerd!!!!1
We've entered with our 12th title, The Wonderful End of the World in the competition, and this year, we have 172 competitors. Some of them have an interesting visual style going for them, such as The Night Journey, and others like Understanding Games are of note because they focus on ludology.
One thing that strikes me about this year's competition is how polished many of the titles are. Indie titles are generally associated with programmer art. But while I doubt Crysis has much to worry about, games like Globulos have clear, attractive art direction, and
Penumbra: Overture looks pretty sleek.
I've purchased a few WD Passports (they're up to 160GB now), and while they seem to be meant more for personal "sync up your stuff!" use, they're not bad for backups. In their favor are the facts that they're powered by USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply) and that they're relatively small. The tradeoff is the modest capacity (I really like that we can call 160,000 megabytes "modest" -- simple pleasures for a simple mind, I suppose) and the price-for-storage (they're much more expensive per gig than the WD My Books).
TFA reviews the My Book Pro, but they also have a USB-only My Book "Essential" (read: Cheaper!) version; anyone tried those?
____________________________________
Dejobaan Games, LLC - Because we love developing games.
Indie Superstar - Because we love webcasting about indie games.
Video games are mostly an entertainment medium at the moment, but I think we'll see more and more people agreeing that there's art somewhere in there.
I often liken early (and even modern) video games to movies where moustachioed villains tie women to railroad tracks while our stalwart hero struggle to rescue her (woo!). That's entertainment, not art. However, movies later had their more respectable Citizen Kanes and Seven Samurais, as I hope we'll have for video games. Not all movies are art (we still have our summer blockbuster action flicks), though we do have artistic "films." Similarly, we'll have video games meant for entertainment, with a handful specifically pitched as art. Call 'em "interactive media."
A side-thought I had is that while most video games rely on making the player feel gratification for their actions ("Hooray, I won!"), an "artistic" video game would be one that didn't rely on this as its primary reward mechanism ("I just finished playing The Illiad, and I detested every minute of it. It was great!"). But I'm just talking out of my rump there, and may be way off.
_____________ Indie Superstar - A video webcast on indie video games!
they followed neither the spirit nor the rules of the system they were supposedly based on, and gameplay was just constant grinding with very little story, puzzle solving, or individuality. The graphics were bad even by the standards of the day.
(Score:1, Flamebait)
Flamebait? I think Nomadic has a point on many counts! Compare Pool of Radiance to Dungeon Master, which came a year before it. I enjoyed some of the Gold Box games, but I always felt like they were stamped out of a machine. The Ultima series and Dungeon Master were dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly ki- sorry. I meant that they felt like they were lovingly created by hand. You could tell that their designers lavished care on them.
____________________________ Indie Superstar - Season 2 Episode 1 on Indie Games and Indie Games.
I always think of EA in its mid '80s form, back when their logo was also their loading screen. (I could swear I read somewhere that the circle was a softball that got lodged in the typesetting, but maybe that's my imagination.) I suppose the point of the Gamasutra article is, in part, that during that period, EA put its designers out there, front and center, whereas nowadays, they're more an amalgam of smaller studios.
One thing that always stuck with me was how, upon seeing the cover for Pinball Construction Set, everyone would assume that the game was called "Bill Budge." Even Sid Meier didn't get that big a billing!
____________________________ Indie Superstar - Our video webcast about the latest indie games. Galaxy Rage - Our upcoming first-person rock opera. Hooray!
I think independents have a chance at providing compelling games journalism in the way that someone like Ze Frank does. (Which is to say: from the fringes, on little or no budget, with an organically growing viewer base.)
We're about to enter Season 2 of our own show, and though we're struggling with format (should the show be 5 minutes long? 30 minutes? 1 billion hours?) and content (should we cover only indies, or all innovations in game development?), we've gotten a pretty good response.
Viva la indie developers with time to waste on experimental crap!
In this case, movies and books had delved into similar subject matter and seldom faced such protest.
One thing that heartens me is that movies, books, and music have covered these subjects and have been protested for it. In many cases, we're now on the other side of that: dealing with (some) tricky subject matter has become acceptable. We can use those mediums to talk about topics that are taboo.
If that can happen for traditional media, it can happen for video games, and that's a Good Thing(tm). I'm optimistic.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Dejobaan Games - Bringing you quality video games for over 75 years.
"Great Works" in video games will come about as a result of natural evolution in game design. Right now, we're strongly focused on visual aesthetics -- we haven't yet achieved photorealism, so every step towards that is exciting. (That's not to diminish the importance of gameplay -- but I liked UT2004 over UT because it was prettier, for one.) But once we achieve that goal, gamers will say, "hey, it's time for something new." Designers will likely branch out and try to create interesting games in other ways -- compelling unrealistic/surrealistic aesthetics; new and interesting modes of gameplay; and (why not?) attention to "serious subject matter with cultural implications."
But I don't think we're through with the "flash" phase yet. Photorealism is still new and interesting to most of us -- and players still buy games for their graphical splendor. Once that stops happening, developers will really start experimenting -- after all, how else are we going to get your money?
(BTW, did anyone see Ernest Adams talk in Worcester yesterday? I missed it, but it must have been great.)
_______________________________ Dejobaan Games - Bringing you quality video games for over 75 years. Indie Superstar - A video webcast bringing you news about games you won't hear about in mainstream media.
One of the largest benefits of many of these programs is that they bring a student through the entire development process, from concept to polishing.
Take De Blob, created by nine Dutch students for (I believe) the city government of Utrecht, in The Netherlands. I think it's a fine game; not perfect, but well-polished and (most importantly) complete. This means that the team has seen both the great and nasty aspects:
* "Let's create a great concept! This is going to be so rad!"
* "Prototype's done. Let's kick the tires."
* "I know we have the same machine. I'm saying it's not working on my machine."
* "That prototype sucked. We need to re-design our core game mechanic."
* "What do you mean we created our art assets too early and have to discard them?"
* "Time for the alpha. Our programming lead just left to become a nun?"
* "This game is so much fun that we play it for hours on end instead of working."
* "We have a bug where the game crashes if you move the mouse too much."
* "Why does everyone outside the dev team not like our game? We love it."
* "I want to quit. I want to quit. I want to quit. Rrrrr!"
* "Okay, now more artwork. Someone tell the artist to stop using 4096x4096 textures."
* "Everything's running smoothly. Beta time! This should be cake."
* "What do you mean, 'nobody can run the beta'?"
* "It's finally done! Hahaha!"
* "Wait, what do you mean it's not done?"
* "I'm so freakin' tired. Damnit, if I quit, I'll fail the course. Can't quit. Gotta keep going."
* "Finishing the final 10% should only take us 10% of our total dev time, right?"
* "Our playtesters are smashing their controllers against the walls."
* "Okay, our playtesters are finally happy."
* "Time to ship. That wasn't so bad. What's that yellow thing in the sky called, again?"
* "I need a drink."
Presumably, folks who have been through a project of any reasonable size have some idea of how development goes, and can recognize some not-so-obvious mistakes. And the ability to stick with it through a grungy project (and they're all grungy at one point or another) is a plus.
I'm very much into independent/homebrew games... is there a site that's "the place" for the indie/homebrew scene?
It's not quite "the place," but Indie Superstar (shameless plug) does video webcasts (iPod video podcasts too) about games that mainstream media doesn't cover.
That's an interesting thought. The article makes it out to be a bit like a magical cure, but some aspects of it sound good to me. You can often improve the "wow" factor by tossing in "more" of something. Denser foliage; more of the tiny rocks that make up the detail; and so forth. Procedural generation would mean that these wouldn't have to be placed by hand, so this could make it easier to scale the visuals with system power. Similarly, particle sprays are often done procedurally, so being able to tweak those "up" to create more complex fireworks for mysterious future hardware could also work.
Some games are still played for years after they've fallen behind the curve on graphics; this might mitigate the future ugliness, adding longevity to a popular title. Keeping gamers interested in (and talking about) your game makes sense, whether you'll be producing different titles in the future or will be focusing on sequels.
Ultimately, though, my hope is that algorithmic content generation will bring game development costs down for indies. Maybe I'm dreaming.:)
I think that we do compete with the $10M projects, and very directly so. After all, we produce "entertainment," so we're already in competition with movies, restaurants, and fun gadgets for consumers' money. The potential customer doesn't separate indie games out from the AAA titles as much as we'd like. Their money is (presumably) finite, so their purchase of one game means that they're less likely to purchase another, regardless of who created it.
We're not after the same markets to begin with - there's a clear separation between hardcore and casual gamers.
Ah, but this further increases the competition, as a casual indie game is up against both the higher-profile casuals (e.g., the Lumineses and Tetrises) and the myriad free games available on Newgrounds and Miniclip.
I believe that small studios will do better once we get ourselves into the mindset that we're squarely in competition with larger ones. Which is fine, because while we may not all be able to compete at the cutting-edge on photorealism, there's precedence for our creating good-looking games that excel in other areas (Uplink, GalCiv).
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www.dejobaan.com - Competing with companies that spend more money on cocktail parties than we do in an entire year.
I believe that, best-case scenario, the Revolution's controller is going to give developers the "Permission to Think Freely," to borrow the term.
If conventional wisdom is correct, creativity in large game development studios is hampered by publishers' requirements: bring about a return on their investments by recreating past successes. (This means sequels and titles that stick closely to existing genres.) The smallest developers often follow a similar path: they want to start turning a profit so that they can actually eat lunch once in a while. So, they (the ones who are supposed to be doing all the innovating!) tend to stick to tried-and-true themes as well. Just look at all the Match 3 games out there.
Perhaps the Revolution's controller, simply by being completely nutty, is going to give larger development studios the impetus to ask what crazy things they can do with it? Publishers will not only allow this approach, but demand it. Their press releases will be filled with all the newfangled things a particular title will do with the controller.
Maybe.
I do lament the fact that, out of the Big Three, the platform that seems to court indies the most is the one that has received such a lukewarm reception. If Nintendo opened things up similarly, I'd love to be able to develop games for use with the Revolution controller.
But maybe that's just the lazy me talking. When I think about it, there's probably plenty of innovation we can pull out of the keyboard and the mouse.
The narratives I find to be the most interesting are those that emerge from gameplay: the stories you tell your gaming buddies about the unscripted events that occur while you're playing. This would be in contrast to a game's developer-created storyline, such as the plot surrounding Deus Ex (which can certainly surprise and delight, but in different ways), or the Gun storyline, (which seems to be geared more towards providing atmosphere).
There may not actually exist stories written into games such as Elite, but you can get a narrative out of them. Similarly, a Tribes match might go something like this:
We were down 4 points on Broadsides, and were pretty much sunk. But then came The Plan. Five guys in heavy armor bombarded the holy hell out of the enemy base to Shock and Awe. Meanwhile, I flew over, crashed a shuttle into their star player, and entered their base, topside. After the collision, I didn't have any health left. I had to sneeeak past the indoor turrets while the mortars were raining down outside. Man, I was just waiting for someone to come up and check on the generators. But nobody did. I grabbed the flag, flew back to our base with a pixel of health left, and captured. We won the game with 12 seconds left. They were Very Angry.
I would like to see more situations where these plots (in the strict sense of the term) arise naturally out of the play. To answer the article's title, one way to "do storytelling" is to not (explicitly) do it at all! Give players the tools to interact with the gameworld, and let them tell their own story.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooooooo! So. We're Dejobaan Games, a small indie (redundant?) studio responsible for a game called AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. If you've used OnLive, you've probably seen the damned thing listed at the top of their games selection because they sort alphabetically. Our next game will probably be called something annoying like !!!00000LoL and be even higher on the list.
:)
I digress.
I like OnLive; I like the guys I've met that work for OnLive; I'm also the Hair Club President. I want them to succeed, because the more ways for folks to get games, the better. Here's our guarantee: If you pick Aaaaa! up on OnLive, and they stop carrying our game in 3 years, we'll give you an offline copy. I'm not sure if folks are having tech issues, but honestly, the licensing issue is really easy for us to fix.
I'm an indie developer, and I see our games pirated all over the place despite their being available for roughly the price of a fast food value meal. It feels sorta sucky to be pirated, and while I can't prove it, I suspect that my studio would gain at least little more money if people didn't pirate it.
That said, I don't forsee us ever taking draconian DRM measures to prevent people from playing our games. Piracy will change the way we design them, but I think what will end up happening is that we start creating games that make use of online content. Some examples:
* Level of the Day -- Log in and download your free level right here.
* Matchmaking/Leaderboards -- Pick up the game, and you'll have an account to taunt other people with your mad skills.
* Server-Side Content/Collaboration -- Co-build a level with a friend, online, and make that available to everyone else.
My thought is to offer additional, online-only content that gameplay into having an account. Sure, you can probably still pirate the game, but by picking up a legitimate copy, you have access to all this other neat stuff.
Four ways to turn your concept into a video game:
4. Create a polished game and approach (or be approached by) an established studio. Also known as the Portal approach. Also the flOw approach. "Sony Computer Entertainment approached some future members of thatgamecompany after seeing Cloud and asked them to form a company and signed them on to make three downloadable games for the PlayStation 3. Cloud ended up being a game that wouldn't be possible for a company as small as thatgamecompany to make, so they made flOw instead. thatgamecompany was created on May 15th, 2006."
3. Work your way up in one or more established studios towards the role of game designer. The American McGee approach. "McGee began his career at id Software. He worked on such games as DOOM, Doom II, Quake, and Quake II in the areas of level design, music production, sound effects development, and program coding. In 1998, he moved to Electronic Arts, where he worked as a consultant on many projects and also created his own game, American McGee's Alice." Mind you, that can be the long route, assuming you're even successful.
2. Work with an independent group of hobbyists and promise to split the profits once you make money. This is difficult to pull off, because contributors lose interest when things become difficult. This is enough of a problem that I'd rather have one paid contractor with modest abilities than a dozen unpaid contributors with spectacular abilities. Blech.
1. Establish your own company and finance development as a third party. Many small developers bootstrap with smaller projects in niche or new markets, eventually working their way up towards larger ones. The iPhone is potentially an awesome way to get your title out there. Start by developing a finished game that's small in scope, and demonstrates the very core concepts of your idea. Rinse. Repeat.
My favorite is, of course, to take #1 and run with it. Tighten your belt, and pay a contractor with good references to help you bring your idea to light on the platform where the competition is still pretty weak, and the barrier to entry is low. That was the Palm Pilot during late '90s, and is probably something like WiiWare or the iPhone now.
Good luck!
And if an indie developer is worried about direction, make a simple one level demo and share it with the gaming forums,telling them ahead of time that the game isn't about graphics but bringing back the fun to FPS. I'm sure he'd find a ton of guys like me that would be happy to play test it and give him new ideas,because in the end all the eye candy doesn't mean squat if it isn't FUN.
Our (lucky) 13th title will try to fit the bill for a fun, indie-developed FPS. However, the feedback we've received over the years is that a) it's difficult for an indie developer to get the public's attention with same, and b) many (not all) gamers demand the eye candy. Valve picked up our latest, and people are vocally split into two camps -- "This is fun despite the simple graphics" vs. "This looks like crap, so I won't play it." It's still been good for us, but it's absolutely received less attention for not being both fun and pretty at the same time.
Sure, Cliff; list Hanako's and Moonpod's but not ours. Where's the love?
I agree. But I'd also like to make individual artists more powerful (I'm reluctant to use the term "productive"), and hope this mitigates the costs of creating assets that the player only sees once.
I'm going to jump onto the bandwagon and agree that this isn't tenable, and it's because we're ridiculously inefficient about content generation. A Gamasutra article from 2001 posits the following imaginary visual arts breakdown for a project with a budget of $1.1m:
ART AND GAME DESIGN (24 months)
Producer 10000 x 24 = 240000
Deisgner 3000 x 24 = 96000
3D Artist 3500 x 24 = 84000
Level Designer 3500 x 24 = 84000
Animator 1500 x 24 = 36000
2D Artist 1500 x 24 = 36000
That's over half the game's development budget to create textures, models, and levels, most of which the player will see only once. As it is, the industry's hits subsidize the misses. I think we'll be forced to look for ways to make individual artists more powerful in the next 5 years.
Activision has snagged, founded, or otherwise invested in a number of companies:
1997 - Raven Software
1998 - Pandemic Studios
1999 - Neversoft Entertainment
2000 - Gray Matter Interactive
2001 - Treyarch Invention LLC
2002 - Z-Axis Ltd, Luxoflux Corporation
2003 - Infinity Ward, Shaba Games LLC
2004 - Activision's 25th birthday- take one free acquisition. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
2005 - Vicarious Visions, Toys for Bob, Beenox, Inc.
2006 - RedOctane, Inc.
2007 - Bizarre Creations
It's odd to me how studios gain/lose/change their identities through acquisitions. Toys for Bob was responsible for Star Control II, which remains one of my favorites to this day. More recently, they did a PS2 movie tie-in for Madagascar. I'm guessing that that game was solid, but not the tour de force that was SC2. On the other hand, Maxis is now "just" one of EA's brands, and they've always done stuff that interested me. Perhaps companies just need well-placed pied pipers (Wright; Jobs; Carmack) to retain their identities?
Forget flying cars; this is how the mysteeeeeerious future is supposed to be. I still remember sitting in E&M class back in the day, thinking that if, instead of static images drawn on chalkboard, the charges and fields were animated and interactive, it'd all sink in much quicker. Ditto pretty much everything that has to do with classical mechanics.
Maybe this already exists, but I'd always hoped for a good intersection of games and education that actually encourages students to learn in a lecture setting. "Edutainment" has generally been pretty awful, but I bet there's a way we could integrate learning into an MMORPG such that you can (say) use a knowledge of kinetics to advance your character.
jenious1: I now understand Newton's Laws, so I built a catapult that demolished your castle. Kekekeke!
!pnk101: o yeah??? well im still beating u up at lunch u nerd!!!!1
jenious1: Snap!
Me neither. Try using http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/27/1551232 to display the video.
Wow they took a 400,000 by 13,000 pixel image and compressed it to a 200x200 jpeg
I giggled when I read this. But since I was also wondering: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml.
We've entered with our 12th title, The Wonderful End of the World in the competition, and this year, we have 172 competitors. Some of them have an interesting visual style going for them, such as The Night Journey , and others like Understanding Games are of note because they focus on ludology.
One thing that strikes me about this year's competition is how polished many of the titles are. Indie titles are generally associated with programmer art . But while I doubt Crysis has much to worry about, games like Globulos have clear, attractive art direction, and Penumbra: Overture looks pretty sleek.
One complaint is that interesting IGF entries often don't have websites up by the deadline . I always want to see more screenshots and videos. Indie developers can be such teases.
_____________________
Dejobaan Games - Bringing you quality video games for over 75 years.
I've purchased a few WD Passports (they're up to 160GB now), and while they seem to be meant more for personal "sync up your stuff!" use, they're not bad for backups. In their favor are the facts that they're powered by USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply) and that they're relatively small. The tradeoff is the modest capacity (I really like that we can call 160,000 megabytes "modest" -- simple pleasures for a simple mind, I suppose) and the price-for-storage (they're much more expensive per gig than the WD My Books).
TFA reviews the My Book Pro, but they also have a USB-only My Book "Essential" (read: Cheaper!) version; anyone tried those?
____________________________________
Dejobaan Games, LLC - Because we love developing games.
Indie Superstar - Because we love webcasting about indie games.
Video games are mostly an entertainment medium at the moment, but I think we'll see more and more people agreeing that there's art somewhere in there.
I often liken early (and even modern) video games to movies where moustachioed villains tie women to railroad tracks while our stalwart hero struggle to rescue her (woo!). That's entertainment, not art. However, movies later had their more respectable Citizen Kanes and Seven Samurais, as I hope we'll have for video games. Not all movies are art (we still have our summer blockbuster action flicks), though we do have artistic "films." Similarly, we'll have video games meant for entertainment, with a handful specifically pitched as art. Call 'em "interactive media."
A side-thought I had is that while most video games rely on making the player feel gratification for their actions ("Hooray, I won!"), an "artistic" video game would be one that didn't rely on this as its primary reward mechanism ("I just finished playing The Illiad, and I detested every minute of it. It was great!"). But I'm just talking out of my rump there, and may be way off.
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they followed neither the spirit nor the rules of the system they were supposedly based on, and gameplay was just constant grinding with very little story, puzzle solving, or individuality. The graphics were bad even by the standards of the day.
(Score:1, Flamebait)
Flamebait? I think Nomadic has a point on many counts! Compare Pool of Radiance to Dungeon Master, which came a year before it. I enjoyed some of the Gold Box games, but I always felt like they were stamped out of a machine. The Ultima series and Dungeon Master were dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly ki- sorry. I meant that they felt like they were lovingly created by hand. You could tell that their designers lavished care on them.
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I always think of EA in its mid '80s form, back when their logo was also their loading screen. (I could swear I read somewhere that the circle was a softball that got lodged in the typesetting, but maybe that's my imagination.) I suppose the point of the Gamasutra article is, in part, that during that period, EA put its designers out there, front and center, whereas nowadays, they're more an amalgam of smaller studios.
One thing that always stuck with me was how, upon seeing the cover for Pinball Construction Set, everyone would assume that the game was called "Bill Budge." Even Sid Meier didn't get that big a billing!
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Galaxy Rage - Our upcoming first-person rock opera. Hooray!
I think independents have a chance at providing compelling games journalism in the way that someone like Ze Frank does. (Which is to say: from the fringes, on little or no budget, with an organically growing viewer base.)
We're about to enter Season 2 of our own show, and though we're struggling with format (should the show be 5 minutes long? 30 minutes? 1 billion hours?) and content (should we cover only indies, or all innovations in game development?), we've gotten a pretty good response.
Viva la indie developers with time to waste on experimental crap!
In this case, movies and books had delved into similar subject matter and seldom faced such protest.
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One thing that heartens me is that movies, books, and music have covered these subjects and have been protested for it. In many cases, we're now on the other side of that: dealing with (some) tricky subject matter has become acceptable. We can use those mediums to talk about topics that are taboo.
If that can happen for traditional media, it can happen for video games, and that's a Good Thing(tm). I'm optimistic.
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"Great Works" in video games will come about as a result of natural evolution in game design. Right now, we're strongly focused on visual aesthetics -- we haven't yet achieved photorealism, so every step towards that is exciting. (That's not to diminish the importance of gameplay -- but I liked UT2004 over UT because it was prettier, for one.) But once we achieve that goal, gamers will say, "hey, it's time for something new." Designers will likely branch out and try to create interesting games in other ways -- compelling unrealistic/surrealistic aesthetics; new and interesting modes of gameplay; and (why not?) attention to "serious subject matter with cultural implications."
But I don't think we're through with the "flash" phase yet. Photorealism is still new and interesting to most of us -- and players still buy games for their graphical splendor. Once that stops happening, developers will really start experimenting -- after all, how else are we going to get your money?
(BTW, did anyone see Ernest Adams talk in Worcester yesterday? I missed it, but it must have been great.) _______________________________
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One of the largest benefits of many of these programs is that they bring a student through the entire development process, from concept to polishing.
Take De Blob, created by nine Dutch students for (I believe) the city government of Utrecht, in The Netherlands. I think it's a fine game; not perfect, but well-polished and (most importantly) complete. This means that the team has seen both the great and nasty aspects:
* "Let's create a great concept! This is going to be so rad!"
* "Prototype's done. Let's kick the tires."
* "I know we have the same machine. I'm saying it's not working on my machine."
* "That prototype sucked. We need to re-design our core game mechanic."
* "What do you mean we created our art assets too early and have to discard them?"
* "Time for the alpha. Our programming lead just left to become a nun?"
* "This game is so much fun that we play it for hours on end instead of working."
* "We have a bug where the game crashes if you move the mouse too much."
* "Why does everyone outside the dev team not like our game? We love it."
* "I want to quit. I want to quit. I want to quit. Rrrrr!"
* "Okay, now more artwork. Someone tell the artist to stop using 4096x4096 textures."
* "Everything's running smoothly. Beta time! This should be cake."
* "What do you mean, 'nobody can run the beta'?"
* "It's finally done! Hahaha!"
* "Wait, what do you mean it's not done?"
* "I'm so freakin' tired. Damnit, if I quit, I'll fail the course. Can't quit. Gotta keep going."
* "Finishing the final 10% should only take us 10% of our total dev time, right?"
* "Our playtesters are smashing their controllers against the walls."
* "Okay, our playtesters are finally happy."
* "Time to ship. That wasn't so bad. What's that yellow thing in the sky called, again?"
* "I need a drink."
Presumably, folks who have been through a project of any reasonable size have some idea of how development goes, and can recognize some not-so-obvious mistakes. And the ability to stick with it through a grungy project (and they're all grungy at one point or another) is a plus.
While that's not enough to recommend these programs outright (and there many be many other points that make them not worthwhile), I view it as a big benefit.
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Indie Superstar - Indie games news in an exciting video webcast. Woo!
I'm very much into independent/homebrew games... is there a site that's "the place" for the indie/homebrew scene?
It's not quite "the place," but Indie Superstar (shameless plug) does video webcasts (iPod video podcasts too) about games that mainstream media doesn't cover.
That's an interesting thought. The article makes it out to be a bit like a magical cure, but some aspects of it sound good to me. You can often improve the "wow" factor by tossing in "more" of something. Denser foliage; more of the tiny rocks that make up the detail; and so forth. Procedural generation would mean that these wouldn't have to be placed by hand, so this could make it easier to scale the visuals with system power. Similarly, particle sprays are often done procedurally, so being able to tweak those "up" to create more complex fireworks for mysterious future hardware could also work.
:)
Some games are still played for years after they've fallen behind the curve on graphics; this might mitigate the future ugliness, adding longevity to a popular title. Keeping gamers interested in (and talking about) your game makes sense, whether you'll be producing different titles in the future or will be focusing on sequels.
Ultimately, though, my hope is that algorithmic content generation will bring game development costs down for indies. Maybe I'm dreaming.
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We don't compete with the $10M projects.
I think that we do compete with the $10M projects, and very directly so. After all, we produce "entertainment," so we're already in competition with movies, restaurants, and fun gadgets for consumers' money. The potential customer doesn't separate indie games out from the AAA titles as much as we'd like. Their money is (presumably) finite, so their purchase of one game means that they're less likely to purchase another, regardless of who created it.
We're not after the same markets to begin with - there's a clear separation between hardcore and casual gamers.
Ah, but this further increases the competition, as a casual indie game is up against both the higher-profile casuals (e.g., the Lumineses and Tetrises) and the myriad free games available on Newgrounds and Miniclip.
I believe that small studios will do better once we get ourselves into the mindset that we're squarely in competition with larger ones. Which is fine, because while we may not all be able to compete at the cutting-edge on photorealism, there's precedence for our creating good-looking games that excel in other areas (Uplink, GalCiv).
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www.dejobaan.com - Competing with companies that spend more money on cocktail parties than we do in an entire year.
I believe that, best-case scenario, the Revolution's controller is going to give developers the "Permission to Think Freely," to borrow the term.
If conventional wisdom is correct, creativity in large game development studios is hampered by publishers' requirements: bring about a return on their investments by recreating past successes. (This means sequels and titles that stick closely to existing genres.) The smallest developers often follow a similar path: they want to start turning a profit so that they can actually eat lunch once in a while. So, they (the ones who are supposed to be doing all the innovating!) tend to stick to tried-and-true themes as well. Just look at all the Match 3 games out there.
Perhaps the Revolution's controller, simply by being completely nutty, is going to give larger development studios the impetus to ask what crazy things they can do with it? Publishers will not only allow this approach, but demand it. Their press releases will be filled with all the newfangled things a particular title will do with the controller.
Maybe.
I do lament the fact that, out of the Big Three, the platform that seems to court indies the most is the one that has received such a lukewarm reception. If Nintendo opened things up similarly, I'd love to be able to develop games for use with the Revolution controller.
But maybe that's just the lazy me talking. When I think about it, there's probably plenty of innovation we can pull out of the keyboard and the mouse.
There may not actually exist stories written into games such as Elite, but you can get a narrative out of them. Similarly, a Tribes match might go something like this: I would like to see more situations where these plots (in the strict sense of the term) arise naturally out of the play. To answer the article's title, one way to "do storytelling" is to not (explicitly) do it at all! Give players the tools to interact with the gameworld, and let them tell their own story.