Showing posts with label indie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indie. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Design review of Against The Storm, by Eremite Games


Against the Storm by Eremite Games (Steam page, official site) is a popular 2.5D town-building run-based RTS with a Warcraft 3 inspired aesthetic and a deckbuilding meta-game progression.

You spend an hour building a base while fulfilling randomized mini-goals for victory points. When you have enough victory points, you leave that base behind, and restart on a new map to build a new base to unlock more buildings and resource types and perks to add to your shuffled deck of possible choices. This all ties into an overarching "world map" meta to unlock more bonuses.

It's well-made and I can see why it's popular, but design-wise, I feel it's overburdened with too much stuff...

Friday, May 19, 2023

The joys of the anti-farm sim: "Before the Green Moon" by turnfollow


SPOILER ALERT: This post SPOILS what happens in Before The Green Moon. I strongly recommend playing it first.

Before The Green Moon (on Itch and Steam) is a post-apocalyptic indie Harvest Moon / Stardew Valley / Animal Crossing inspired farm life sim about scraping by, in a decaying rural truckstop town with bored depressed locals you gradually befriend (or ignore).

I was surprised Turnfollow was working in this big systemic genre space, since I mostly know them for their very good linear story games Little Party and Wide Ocean Big Jacket. But you can see the "seeds" of this game (ha ha) in their wartime gardening game A Good Gardener so maybe it's not so unexpected...

From the beginning, you're given an ultimate end goal: earn enough company scrip to buy a ticket to the moon. Instead of a raccoon banker oppressing you with a mortgage, it's a faceless Moon Company exploiting every poor soul left on this post-apocalyptic Earth. Brilliantly, the already astronomical price of the moon ticket actually increases during the game. Imagine if Animal Crossing had the bravery to charge interest on the home loan!

Well, Before The Green Moon is brave, brave enough even to suggest that farming isn't exactly a picturesque Hallmark movie. Instead, you're stuck in this abandoned GameCube game and you need to somehow earn enough to buy a moonshot out of this dump. How are you gonna do it?

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Double Fine PsychOdyssey recaps / viewing guide, episodes 01-17


Last month, game industry documentary makers 2 Player Productions debuted a massive 32-part YouTube game dev doc series Double Fine PsychOdyssey, chronicling the development of Psychonauts 2 from its earliest glimmers of pre-production in 2015 to its final release in 2021. 

I assumed it was mostly for fans but after watching all 32 episodes (on 2x speed, skipping some parts) I've changed my mind and now I think it's essential viewing for all game designers / devs. It shows the everyday work of medium-scale commercial game dev in unprecedented detail: the creative high of successful collaboration as well as the ugly prototypes, grueling bug fixes, and painful miscommunication. There's also a thrill of access, where the camera captures vulnerable moments it wasn't quite supposed to see. The most epic public post-mortem ever.

As a public service, I've written a short text summary and some notes for each episode. This recap post / viewing guide covers only the first half of the series (episodes 01-17) and I'll try to write-up the second half later.

SPOILER WARNING: obviously, these recaps spoil what happens in each episode.

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Indie game capsule reviews: Immortality, Wayward Strand, Cult of the Lamb, Betrayal at Club Low, Atuel

SPOILER WARNING: I keep specific story spoilers vague, but I do have to talk about what happens in the games somehow. So I still kinda spoil the player progression / interactive arc. Sorry.

What are people playing and talking about these days? Well, I don't know anything about that. But here's what I'm playing and what I'm talking about:

  • Immortality
  • Wayward Strand
  • Cult of the Lamb
  • Betrayal at Club Low
  • Atuel

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Capsule reviews, vol. 1


Capsule reviews are short critiques of games that I've been playing. In this post, I discuss Heaven's Vault, Virginia, Islanders, and Two Point Hospital. There's no specific story spoilers, but I do talk about how I think the games work.

Heaven's Vault. The dynamic branching and language system is great and impressive, and the Muslim-inflected sci-fi art direction feels fresh. It's basically a must-play for anyone interested in narrative design. (Maybe the main weakness is the less-than-relatable characters, who basically feel like vehicles to bring about plot beats. Which is probably how the narrative system works! Hmm.)

The game pacing feels awkward for much of the game. You get to do one fun archaeological linguistics detective scene every hour, but to get there, you have to sit through an uncomfortable water slide mini-game. It's meant to give a sense of journey and a bit of rest (as well as pad out the game length) but it's a bad sign when even the fast travel options here feel inconsistent and confusing; sometimes the game lets you go back to your ship cabin to ask for fast travel, and sometimes not.

But also just on a core minute-to-minute basis, the movement and camera never felt comfortable for me, and The Last Express styled character animation never stopped feeling like a crutch for scoping down production costs. It's interesting how this project made so much (very impressive) progress on "hard" game design problems like dynamic narrative or language simulation, but then tripped on what's considered relatively "easy" solved design problems like 3D character movement, game feel, or encounter pacing.

Again, though, I still think this is a must-play for anyone working in narrative. Just soldier through the less fluent parts.

Friday, March 8, 2019

Why you should almost always localize your games

screenshot from my game Rinse And Repeat, with a sexy shower hunk speaking in Russian subtitles
This post is adapted from a talk I gave at WordHack on February 21, 2019 in New York City.

It's hard to feel validated and respected as an artist or creator on the internet. One common (and unhealthy) barometer of "success" is to measure how many people play your game or look at your work -- did you find an audience and are you reaching that audience? I argue that localizing your project into other languages will help you find your audience. It might not be an audience you necessarily understand or communicate directly to, but for example, a large Russian or Chinese fan base might help offset the hurt of being ignored in English-speaking media, and so on.

If you believe these random stats I found, about ~80% of Steam users live in countries where English is not the main language. This roughly corresponds to the worldwide average, where it is estimated that only about ~20% of the world (native and non-native speakers combined) uses English, and about ~25% of all internet users use English. Note that these are all very generalized numbers with lots of assumptions, but let's assume they're in the right ballpark -- that means English-only games basically ignore 75-80% of the world.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

A MAZE 2018 after-action report


This year I attended A MAZE 2018 in Berlin. It's still probably one of the best video game events in the world; it happens in one of the coolest places in one of the coolest cities around. In the day, you basically hangout in a beer garden and drink some surprisingly affordable beer. At night, hordes of punky post-apocalyptic Berliner teenagers hangout and dance. This unique audience and format makes it all feel pretty special, and I think this year's award show host Tim Rogers put it best: usually people at games events are frantically planning where they're going afterwards, but at A MAZE, the after-party is the festival itself, and many people often linger into the wee early hours of the morning in true Berlin fashion.

There's also a strong participatory focus at A MAZE. Each night, there was an open booth for anyone to plug into and DJ, and "open screens" for anyone to exhibit their projects. There were also stand-up comedy routines, hypertalks, and a "devolution" show featuring various old builds of Superhot to understand its 3-4 year dev cycle. In that spirit of experimentation, I ran a "democratic lighting workshop" where I solicited lighting suggestions from the audience, and then attempted to realize their designs in a Unity scene. We laughed and we learned!!!

But wait, that's not all...

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Dispatches from GDC 2018

In keeping with a tradition I've done for GDC 2012 and GDC 2015, I like to try to condense general moods and topics at GDC. What happened there?...

Post-indiepocalyptic. In past years, I've remarked on the tension between AAA developers vs commercial indie devs vs non-commercial "artists" -- that tension isn't gone, but it's certainly not as big of an issue anymore. Everything everywhere is kind of terrible for everyone. So many people are making so little money that it's hard to distinguish their precarity from another precarity. Besides, a massive political shift is now underway in the form of...

Unionization. I was one of maybe 150 people who attended the unionization roundtable session. My live tweet thread is here if you want my version of what happened. Throughout GDC I heard so many stories that made me realize working conditions are worse than I imagined, and there's a shocking sense of resignation when I spoke to one AAA dev who predicted they were going to burnout with their next 100 hour workweek / 6 month crunch, like it was just this inevitable natural disaster that was definitely going to happen... As someone who trains students in game development, I guess I'm extremely concerned about throwing my students into this giant machine that will mercilessly devour them! (For what it's worth, the IGDA moderator Jen MacLean seems to have walked-back some of her anti-worker positions as a result of the roundtable.)

Generations. I don't know how a lot of other "established" indies feel, but this year when I went to a party or looked out into a crowd, I didn't recognize as many faces as I thought I would. Maybe this is just what happens in every industry, as more people burnout or find something better or in some cases even die. I spent a good amount of my GDC trying to meet new people, and that was utterly exhausting, but I'm still glad I made the effort, because this year felt...

Gayer? I met so many queer and trans people at GDC this year. And one night when I asked someone whether they were going to "the gay party", they asked me to clarify my question: "which gay party?" (!)... As always, I'm reluctant to praise diversity efforts because that implies diversity has been achieved and no more work is needed, but I did feel like there were generally more LGBTQ people everywhere at GDC, or at least more than before, and it was kind of nice.

Overall. Everyone was tired, but there was a sense that maybe it was worth staying.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Apply to NYU Game Center 2018 Summer Incubator


Applications for the 2018 NYU Game Center summer incubator are now open! If you have a solid game prototype or a half-finished game, but you don't know how to finish it or how to do all that "indie biz" stuff, then this incubator might be a good fit to help you move toward release and financial sustainability.

The incubator is a 3 month period in the summer that also pays you a living stipend to come live / work in New York City, where you get mentored by faculty (such as the notorious Bennett Foddy???) as well as other local devs. In 2017, there was also a comprehensive series of workshops on how to negotiate, how to do market research, how to register as a business, and the devs even visited Kickstarter and other local partners around NYC for advice and feedback. You also get to meet a bunch of other indie devs, co-work in a friendly environment, and make new friends. (For more details, see "Incubator Curriculum")

The catch is that if you make more than $10,000 in a year from the game, then you pay 10% of the rest of your revenue back into the incubator to fund future projects. If you don't end up making money, then you don't pay anything. You still maintain ownership of your game and IP, and you can also negotiate these terms if you want -- but compared to a lot of funding deals, this is already pretty generous.

Here's some more info and rough math to help you decide whether it's a good fit for you:

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Mapping the sea floors of Subnautica


This post spoils the core gameplay and player progression in Subnautica, but not the specific story nor scripted plot events.

Subnautica is a long open world survival game set in a vast deep ocean. In it, you have to forage for food, manage your oxygen when diving into caves and deep sea trenches, and collect resources to build your own underwater base(s) and submarine(s) to find out What Really Happened Here.

Much like the other first person indie survival game The Long Dark, Subnautica features no combat, no world map, and essentially no NPCs or quests to complete for anyone. The few lethal weapons are either cumbersome and annoying to maintain (poison gas torpedoes must be crafted and loaded) or practical but anti-juicy (your knife)... but most importantly, unlike The Long Dark's focus on hunting, killing creatures in Subnautica *never* yields any reward or drops -- even when the game confusingly asks you to collect shark teeth but killing sharks never yields any shark teeth.

(Why? Well, there's a few story threads about how use of force cannot get you what you want, as well as a faint anti-capitalist / anti-colonialist message. But the smoking gun of authorial intent is in the credits: a dedication to the families of Newtown, Connecticut. The design lead has also talked about their no-gun philosophy.)

PC Gamer already did a nice roundtable about Subnautica's early climactic story moment, so instead I want to focus on Subnautica's most interesting systemic feature: its depth-based 3D level design, and implications on the rest of the game.

Friday, January 26, 2018

It's all about how you use it: on NSFWare, by Pierre Corbinais


This post is SFW-ish (somewhat Safe For Work, depending on your workplace)

Pierre Corbinais has a long history of making short poignant games about relationships and intimacy. (Before I had played this game, my personal favorite had been Tiny Soccer Manager Stories.) His choice of tool, Adventure Game Studio, is especially interesting -- this tool is very much not designed for Corbinais' abstract staging and gestural interfaces, but he makes it work anyway.

NSFWare, then, is a joyous and colorful collection of simple reflex-based games in an engine that is constantly trying to destabilize it. (When you press ESC, the quit menu confesses that it doesn't know whether the game is broken or not.) Corbinais' use of low-res neon pixel art is extremely effective here for several reasons: the bright nonrealistic color choices help soften the politics of porn, limited use of animation helps draw your attention to specific sex acts no matter how "small", and the chunkiness also helps mask how the engine wasn't designed for animated sequences like this at all.

Combined with the catchy minimalist beats and the retro-style rotoscoped animation handpainted in the Paint of Persia tool from diverse footage at Pornhub, this game makes a strong case for sex as craftsmanship: it's not how impressive or advanced your tool is, it's more about how you use it.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

The joy of learning how to freeze to death


This post spoils some gameplay systems in The Long Dark.

I still remember the first time I played Minecraft, back before the quests and tutorials and candy dispenser walls: I woke up on an unknown shore and followed the setting sun. At night, a dozen monsters chased me across a valley. I desperately dug a burrow with my hands, and barricaded myself inside -- but I didn't know how to make torches or even how to get wood or food, so I just sat quietly in that dark dirt hole and waited for death.

In contrast, I was recently playing some of the new Assassin's Creed game set in Ptolemaic Egypt, a land chock full of happily glowing icons that will give you cookies. As you visit various cities and villages along the Nile, every single NPC will offer you a handshake and a warm hug. And, ok, this example is actually real: if you swim longer for 15 seconds in the water, the game impatiently spawns a helpful man with a boat in front of you, so that you don't have to keep swimming.

A week or two ago, I left sunny Egypt for the cold Canadian wilderness of The Long Dark, a popular first person indie survival sim. There are approximately zero cookies in this game -- or if there are, they're probably moldy cookies scavenged from a 15 year old military ration... uh, don't eat them.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Behold the bildungsspiel: the coming-of-age game


NOTE: There are somewhat vague spoilers about the general plot for several games in this post.

US high school students are generally required to read novels like The Catcher In The Rye -- stories about growing up and finding a place in society. Many of these students also learn about the technical literary criticism term for these narratives, the German term bildungsroman. (Bildungs means "educational" and roman means "novel", and so we usually translate this as "coming-of-age novel")

While there are many well-recognized coming-of-age films, I'd like to figure out the equivalent bildungsspiel -- the coming-of-age game. This also seems like an especially urgent genre for game criticism to consider, since there are so many children and young people who plays games, and form their identities partly around these games. (Meanwhile: something like opera has a much weaker association with youth culture.)

One small obstacle to this critical project is that "bildungsspiel" already means something. Based on my cursory Google searches, it seems to refer to rudimentary educational toys for very young children, to help them develop basic cognitive abilities and motor skills. Curse the German toy industry!...

Well, I'm taking the word back. Let's talk about the bildungsspiel, which isn't for babies, it's for teens!

Friday, August 11, 2017

Go West young Slime Rancher, and grow up with the country

This post spoils some mechanics and game systems in Slime Rancher.

One in-game day in Slime Rancher, I found a rare "quantum slime", a creature that pooped out "quantum plorts" that I could sell for a lot of in-game money. To make a huge profit, I intended to raise a few on my ranch in captivity, and then collect their precious poop to sell in the market.

To maximize your slime poop plort yields, you're supposed to feed your slimes as often as possible. Every slime has a certain diet (vegetables, fruits, or meat) and a specific favorite item. Quantum slimes eat only fruit, but prefer a special fruit called a "phase lemon". To get phase lemons, you have to bring back a phase lemon from the wild, plant a phase lemon tree, wait for the fruit to mature, and then shoot a different fruit at it (like a cuberry, or a mint mango) to pop the phase lemon into existence. Compared to other crops, it's unusually labor intensive to cultivate and harvest phase lemons.

This is where Slime Rancher's other big system comes in, a cross-breeding mechanic that allows you to merge two slime types together. If you feed a slime with the poop from another slime, it will become a hybrid "largo" slime that inherits both types' diets and other properties, and it will poop out both types of plorts at once when it eats something. Two poops for the price of one! When you do this on purpose in Slime Rancher, you feel like a genius.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Identity, camerawork, and time in games; on "Into" by Audrey Moon


This post spoils Into, which is about 5-10 minutes to play. You should probably play it first, if you care about spoilers and such.

Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966) is about two people who kind of merge into each other. Maybe this happens because you share a lot of interests or temperaments, or you're in love, or you're family, or whatever. In Persona, this merging process is often difficult, confusing, awkward, and/or painful. It inevitably takes on sexual overtones, but this sex feels violent.

Into (2016), by Audrey Moon (Animal Phase), pushes the opposite tone. It is a short "interactive" about two people who are kind of joining into one another, but the joining is not particularly unsettling. There's a risk to it, but it also feels right to take that risk. Why does it feel more right than wrong?

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Sex Games, part 0: the sex games awaken

This post is part of a series adapted from my talk at GaymerX. No, I don't know when the video recording will be uploaded, sorry.

So, let's talk sex games. As a possible "GAYmer" at GaymerX, maybe you're thinking of games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, or hot Ryu, or Mario and Luigi, or maybe even some games like Fallout which have specific game systems that support gay roleplaying.

These are OK, I guess, but none of these games are primarily about sex. In fact, they are mostly about jumping around and killing shit... which isn't bad, but it's not gay sex. Now, where am I going with this?...

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

We are drugs; speculative dev tools and psychedelic hologram futures.

This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Indiecade East 2015, where the theater was way too small for the crowd, so not many people got to see the talk... sorry / oh well. Here's basically what I said:

Our story begins on October 8th, 2014, on a very special episode of the Late Show with David Letterman. He was ending that episode with a musical guest from Japan -- a holographic vocaloid named Hatsune Miku. Pay attention to Letterman's barely-veiled incredulity as he introduces her. He can't believe the words coming out of his mouth:



But what really makes this moment is the ending, after the performance. Letterman doesn't even know what to say, and he knows he doesn't know what to say. The experience was completely overwhelming, so Letterman has to somehow pivot back to interpret it for his audience (mostly moms and dads from Milwaukee) and all he can muster is a facile comparison to "being on Willie Nelson's bus." (Willie Nelson, if you're not familiar, is a celebrity notorious for his drug use, among other things.)

The meaning is both clear and agreeable: Hatsune Miku is drugs.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

On "On cliques."

Mike Bithell wrote a post, "On cliques," about his perspective on exclusivity in the indie game scene. I think the example he gives, of going to a party while not really knowing anyone and then getting upset when no one is dying to talk to him and then feeling foolish for getting upset, is understandable and human. I'm sure everyone's felt that way at some point. It sucks to feel like you don't belong.

At the end, he says everyone should talk more, and try to be more understanding of each other, and I think that's good. Let's all do more.

However, I've seen some other peoples' responses and takeaways that strike me as, uh, callous, or even poisonous.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Indiecade 2013 postpartum

So Indiecade 2013 came and went. I had a pretty great time and I still think it's a pretty good games event. I also think untempered compliments are the least useful form of feedback, so here are some notes, observations, and thoughts:

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Nostrum and clouds.


Hey! I made "Nostrum," a short flight sim game for the Oculus Rift VR Jam thing, and I placed 2nd. I won a bunch of money and a t-shirt, so I'm pretty happy with that.

For the first week of the three week jam, I was actually prototyping a lion simulator game. Then I watched Porco Rosso and thought, "wow, that'd be a fantastic game." So I stashed away all that previous work and started something new.