In case you hadn't heard...

The official announcement of CryEngine Indie. So I guess now it's CryEngine vs. UDK, battling for high-end standalone indie PC market -- which is growing a lot, with skilled professionals getting laid-off or leaving their jobs to go independent.

Valve is losing their "developer share" of hobbyists / indies with every passing day. I mean, why do they approve mediocre shovelware like Dino D-Day for Steam, but then reject Gemini Rue? Because Dino D-Day was a Source licensee? Hopefully the upcoming Dear Esther retail will restore some prestige to the Source indie brand.

... Oh, right. CryIndie press release goes like this:

"We'll be giving you access to the latest, greatest version of CryENGINE 3 - the same engine we use internally, the same engine we give to our licensees, the same engine that powers Crysis 2.

This will be a complete version of our engine, including C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC."

Death of the Mod?

Kneejerk commentators from RPS: I'm not saying people don't make mods anymore. Of course people still make mods, but these are very different mods from traditional ideas of the blockbuster TC mod.

This was the subject of a roundtable podcast I did with other modders (moderated by the fresh-smelling Phillip Marlowe) but I thought I'd write some stuff I couldn't articulate when barely awake at unearthly hours of the morning. In this post I also speak generally of modding in the contexts I know it (Starcraft, Half-Life 1, Source Engine) instead of just limiting it to Source modding.

Okay, so: Before, there wasn't really anything. So, we modded.

Then there were just a few random 3D engines (Ogre3D, Cube, etc.) but no widespread adoption because they were difficult to use. Want a level editor? Code it yourself!... So, we modded. Besides, only mods got publicity on fan sites anyway; our work was worthless, inferior to the professionals. Who would ever pay for it? Unmarketable. We were just fans and amateurs, working with the permission of the big boys.

There was no indie RTS, no indie FPS. So we just modded Starcraft. We made tower defense maps or Aeon of Strife maps (the 1999 precursor to DOTA). We also modded Half-Life and made this little thing called Counter-Strike. Modding has changed the face of the game industry, but we only know that in hindsight.

Now, everything has changed.

There are new, powerful standalone 3D game creation packages (Unity, UDK) with integrated engines and toolsets that have physics, IK solvers, heightmap terrain editors, etc. Our "amateur" work can be sold on Steam, the App Store, the Android Market, or even by ourselves. Popular blogs readily publicize / discuss these "indie" efforts. In general, it seems amateurs are just more disciplined and more skilled with the practice of game development.

There's now an indie RTS genre, it's called tower defense. There's an indie FPS, it's called Minecraft and has been a huge paradigm shift in itself. A huge, "indie" culture has reconfigured how we see video games: masocore, QWOP, Spelunky, the cult of personality behind Cactus, the Copenhagen Games Collective, anything touched by Stephen Lavelle, Tale of Tales, and so much more. These are great reconfigurers.

Meanwhile, the only recent, equivalent, reconfiguring event in the mod community that comes to my mind is Dear Esther.

In this sense, "modding," as we know it, is dead... Because we aren't merely fans or amateurs anymore. We're now "indie," we're somewhat independent of the commercial game industry that spawned modding: we now have a shared culture, publicity engine and distribution mechanisms that happily exists outside of them. Which is great.

There will still be many mods, of course, but they are definitely no longer the center of innovative design practice by non-professionals. Black Mesa Source will likely be the last "total conversion" mod ever completed, in the face of the rising (time) cost of development and the accessibility of good standalone options. Great games like "The Dark Mod" will no longer be constrained by an audience that doesn't have Doom 3.

As for the future, here are my predictions:

Unity is going to get bigger. Once they release their Flash deployment, assuming it's for free, they'll finally surmount that last "download the plug-in" hurdle and millions of bored office workers will flock to the platform. Flashbang Studios' "Blurst" initiative stimulated one era of Unity; the Flash tech will stimulate another.

Much like "gamer," the term "indie" will apply to so many people that it loses meaning. I'm on Anna Anthropy's boat in pushing a populist approach to game development: tools will get easier, distribution more robust, and one day everyone will just make games for everyone.

Also: start looking around. DotA and tower defense started in 1999, and now ten years later they're distinct, billion dollar genres. What's lingering in the shadows right now?

What grows from the charred corpse of modding? A forest.

Comatose

"Comatose" is a single player HL2 mod by Aspik where you're bleeding uncontrollably, so you have to take all these pills (clotting agents?) as you try to escape a building in some sickly yellow apocalyptic city -- a great summation of my daily life in New York City.

 Warning! Mechanics spoilers / design analysis after the jump...

Resources for Source Modders (Update #4)

(This is an ongoing post that'll get updated periodically with links to tools, texture packs, prop model packs, etc. for Source modders, along with a few remarks on what they're useful for.)
(UPDATE #4, 4 January 2011 -- added Twister and FontForge, check the "Special Teams" section... and a note about using D3 / Q4 textures)

Attempt to Survive?!

Anyone play Attempt to Survive?

"No weapons. No enemies. Flashlight. Thoughts."

I had never heard of it until I followed a referral back to a French blog about FPS mods. Here's a hasty English translation with my limited French skills:

"In Attempt to Survive, you play a pacifist, a protagonist who speaks and moves but doesn't do anything else. Here, it's about exploring a countryside devastated by a nuclear bomb, to trace back your roots -- in this case, your parents' house. The voice over is in Russian (fortunately with English subtitles). The environments, resembling the Eastern Europe of Half-Life 2, are very ugly and the whole thing lasts barely half an hour and your character isn't always as talkative as in the trailer... Which is really boring and honestly the whole thing lacks professionalism; they didn't even remove the HUD and crosshairs. It kind of reminded me of Post Script, except it's less awful. [ouch! -R] But we should be generous and give these developers a second chance in the form of Horizon."

You can always count on the French to be Frank with you... or maybe they simply don't understand art. Anyway, I'm going to try it in the coming week and report back. (Or you can do it for me and leave warnings in the comments!)

"tedium" by Eddie Cameron

Eddie Cameron's "art mod" is out. Didn't everyone get the memo? We're calling them alt mods now! Anyway, don't let the (self-deprecating?) name dissuade you -- it's actually quite interesting. Download it @ ModDB (reg. req.) or Filefront (which sadly no one's used, in favor of ModDB. I think it's sad and lonely. No reg req.)

My (mostly) spoiler-free opinion is after the jump...

Mod Auteurs: Brendon "Blender81" Chung (part 3, The Puppy Years)

"The Puppy Years" was Brendon Chung's last single player mod for Half-Life 1, released in August 2004. (Previously: Part 1 and Part 2 and the lost but found Droptank Oscar)

(Critical bug in current release: the "slow motion" effect is broken; I imagine he used a version of the host_timescale hack by using mp_timelimit as a toggleable variable. However, the mp_timelimit value does not properly transfer into host_timescale. Every time you will want to use slow motion, you will have to go into the console and type something like host_timescale 0.0001 -- or, alternatively, bind it to a key via bind y "host_timescale 0.0001" or something like that.)

In some ways, it's the most disappointing. It has a great premise (a super-charged stealth spy baby that can climb walls / slow time) and has a great feel to it and Brendon is resourceful as ever with the hacks he uses... but unlike "Bugstompers," the narrative is really lacking here.

(spoiler alert is in effect!)

In fact, there's not much plot at all: you spawn. You do a fun tutorial. You get sent on a mission. Then you come back and everything goes to shit. (In some ways, this is a precursor to Gravity Bone in terms of playing with FPS single player structure; you expect a second mission, you expect the game to go one way -- but then it doesn't.)

Compare this against Bugstompers, which has a really great narrative / character moment in the middle. In the Puppy Years, there aren't any well-defined characters other than the player character. Which gets a little boring. Who's my enemy? What, exactly, is happening? You never really know.

But still, there's a genuine innovation here...

Mod Auteurs: Brendon "Blender81" Chung (part 2, "Bugstompers")

(Part 1 is here.) (Spoiler alert is in effect!)

As part of the latter half of Brendon Chung's work in Half-Life 1, Bugstompers is an experiment mainly in (1) a camera gun and (2) narrative and conversation in the FPS. I think this is where he really hits his stride and you start to see shades of thinking that led to the stunning Gravity Bone.

Though there's lots of other cool stuff; a long-term AI companion who never leaves your side, a cool animated caustics effect, a clever dynamic light effect at the end, etc. But the gun and the narrative are what I get out of it:

The First Person Ruin and the Death of the Level Designer

You should read Triple Canopy if you aren't already, or at least this one article that has special relevance to video games: "The Anatomy of Ruins," analyzing our relationship to ruins and what that means.

In video games, that usually means romanticizing them in some way, making them oddly beautiful or otherwise visually arresting. It makes sense, after all, seeing as the vast majority of FPS games are about destruction and the spectacle of the remains. And, well, guns and explosions and things that go boom.

Some games (World War II-themed games, Fallout 3) are content to use ruins to demonstrate some mundane truism like, "look at all the destruction that war has wrought -- look at all these empty houses! Man, war sucks and displaces innocent civilians, even if you do believe in a theory of just war!" Indeed, war can be pretty bad.

The Halo series and the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion treats the ruin as a mysterious "other," the result of an alien civilization that had strange uses for these ruins, uses that we struggle to comprehend.

Other games celebrate the ruin as a reflection of player agency: the Red Faction series and the Battlefield: Bad Company series come to mind. In it, the player actively creates the ruins. Red Faction celebrates it as revolution, Bad Company treats it like good ol' fun.

Half-Life 2 manages the feat of accomplishing both... sort of: you begin in the derelict remnants of an Eastern European city. The structures are intact, but the social fabric of civilization is in ruins and disrepair. Then, when you return later and the city is in ruins -- specifically a setpiece where fellow rebels tear down a Combine screen in the plaza amid cheers and applause -- it is both liberation from the old world / the oppressive new world order.

Droptank Oscar, re-release (beta 2)

In the process of writing about Brendon Chung's work, I've been playing through a bunch of his old Half-Life 1 mods that inspired me so greatly, six years ago... And one in particular stuck out in my mind, and it proved extremely difficult to find. But I found it.

Droptank Oscar, a mechwarrior-styled Half-Life 1 mod with multiplayer co-op support, originally released by Brendon Chung in December 2003.

Through clever map scaling tricks, you're now a 9-story tall walking behemoth armed with gauss cannons, missile launchers and jump jets. (i.e. you walk extra slow, you have the Gauss Gun and a weird hacked RPG launcher permanently selected, and you can jump extra high -- nothing especially new, but strapped together with duct tape through sheer force of will? A transcendent example of how to hack things together as a modder and avoid trapping yourself.)

Mod Auteurs: Brendon "Blender81" Chung (part 1)

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources," said... someone... supposedly. That's how I feel about Brendon Chung -- I've stolen so much from him and I've worked hard to conceal it's from him.

Or didn't Picasso say something about how "good artists copy, great artists steal" or something to that effect? It's like Johnny Cash stealing "Hurt" from Nine Inch Nails or Jimi Hendrix stealing "All Along the Watchtower" from Bob Dylan. I'm going to make these methods mine.

My midnight pillages have focused on his sense of humor and techniques in creating setting and back story, all while not being terribly serious about it. Yes, Adam Foster creates a sense of place through his level layouts, but Brendon creates a sense of place with his wit.

First, like Adam, he had a pre-Half-Life 1 career making some Quake 2 levels or something. Whatever.

... Anyway, his first effort with HL1 was the obscure "1986," which Brendon doesn't even link to on his website. I almost forgot it ever existed, but I realize now it's pretty important to me for one crucial setpiece: (spoiler alert)

Inception

1) Fantastic movie.

2) I'm scared because it's going to dominate popular discourse on "levels" as psychological architecture. Before, it was an idea relatively unique to video games -- specifically, the awesomeness that was Psychonauts, complete with subconscious censors that try to kick you out, etc. -- but now? Psychonauts will be ripping off Inception. Radiator will be ripping off Inception. We are all now in its shadow.

And that scares me because, quite frankly, I don't think I can craft an experience as satisfying as that film.

Hell, now I feel like I'm ripping off Inception. I wonder why. Did it plant something in my brain?...

Dragon Age: Origins is the First Game About Gay Marriage + The Power of Mods

(I was waiting to see if the Escapist cared for an article pitch based on this blog post, but they didn't, so now I'm just going to ahead and post it.)

Dragon Age is the world's first commercial video game about gay marriage.

... and now with that incredibly misleading and generalizing hook, let me explain:

So I tricked Dragon Age: Origins into temporarily thinking my dude mage was female to trigger a gay romance with the dashing knight Alistair (and for anyone wanting to do the same, it works pretty seamlessly, just get the mod at Dragon Age Nexus) -- and the result was an oddly tragic playthrough with inadvertent commentary on gay marriage. (Inadvertent because I had to use a mod to get this reading of it.)

I mean, Dragon Age has plenty of other gay shit in it: lesbian dwarves, a threesome, two bisexual romance options, etc. And this is all the intentionally designed LGBT content that BioWare saw fit to implement, which isn't a complaint because this is probably as "progressive" a major commercial Western RPG has ever been. So kudos, BioWare.

But none of that "intentional" gay content compares to how rewarding I found Dragon Age when I hijacked Alistair's sexuality. So, this is how a gay romance with Alistair goes (minor spoilers await -- then you'll get another warning about major spoilers):

Offered without comment.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/pearce-pachuta

Holy shit.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/dear-esther/news/a-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel1

What do you get when you have a professional artist / designer pour a year into building something? Nothing short of "I can't believe that's the Source Engine."

The art and actual level design of Dear Esther was always its weakest attribute. But now... yowza. I can't even figure out how he achieved some of these effects -- the water caustics on the cave walls are probably an animated detail texture, and there's a crap-load of particles going on with the waterfalls -- but how did he get the water running down the rocks like that? It's definitely not a particle system. Is it some kind of refracting overlay, or did he model a prop_static and slap on a refraction shader onto that?

It's really pretty. The craftsmanship is superb. Don't get me wrong.

But it's the same game, more or less, with roughly the same narrative, more or less.

I can't help but wish he instead worked with Pinchbeck on something new.

Interview with Game Developer Magazine

http://gamedeveloper.texterity.com/gamedeveloper/20100607?pg=55#pg55

Where I complain about the Source Engine / defend the Source Engine against its critics / talk about why playing outside is awesome and important for video game designers to do.

The "Family Dinner" game I cite in the interview isn't really fun at all. You can only play it once before everyone gets pretty pissed off about it. The funny thing is that everyone's really excited and happy at first because it sounds fun when you're explaining it. (Also, I wish I could take credit for it, but really it was a stellar final project from the first semester's students.)

I am a frontiersman.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/alt-mod-scene-article

As much as I love / fiendishly crave attention and praise, I still feel weird about being placed in some sort of "movement" or "scene" and having people tell me my work is significant; when I look at my mods, all I see are flaws and weaknesses that I hope people don't notice. I guess that's a good thing?

Part of it is, I think, that I'm afraid people are getting tired of what me and Dan Pinchbeck have to say. (We're almost always paired up in these kinds of features.) Part of me is also afraid that we genuinely don't have much to say, that we're broken records who are already irrelevant and too stupid to see it.

Part of me also doesn't want to put my sexuality on a pedestal -- sometimes I feel like I'm exploiting that as my M.O. or something -- but then it's an important undercurrent in my mods, so I feel compelled to talk about it. As I say in the article, I definitely don't aim to preach, "hey start being nice to gay people" because that's boring and intellectually lazy.

So I've decided that after I finish Radiator Vol. 1... I think Volume 2 will be a hyper-violent trilogy with no mention of sexuality whatsoever. Kill people and then kill more people. Just to show that I can swing with the big boys.

Oh, and start being nice to gay people!!!11

Magnar Jenssen's "Mission Improbable 2"

The ever-so-lovely Mr. Magnar "insta" Jenssen has (quietly?) released the second episode of his Episode 2 mod, "Mission Improbable."

It's a little disconnected from the previous entry -- you escape from part 1 with a car, only to ditch it a minute into part 2 -- and the whole thing is infected with invisible-wall-itis because he was afraid you could turbo the car over the barricades or stack things to go where you can't (but there are so few physics props that aren't item crates, I'm not sure I see the point)... but I digress. It's otherwise really well-designed and entertaining.

If you're in the mood for some classic arcade-style Half-Life 2 adventures, this won't disappoint -- very focused enemy encounters, lots of cool setpieces, really polished visuals, well-tuned difficulty (though maybe a bit easy for some), and lovely cliffhanger for the next episode in what looks like a trilogy. Download it. (Disclaimer: I beta-tested this.)

Byzantine Perspective: on IF, adapting it to the FPS

Text is special. It can do things that voice acting can't; it can do things visuals can't. (How? Well, Kenneth Young explains this really well in a post about dialogue in Dragon Age)

I recently played an piece of interactive fiction that can't possibly be made outside of IF -- "Byzantine Perspective." It has a single really great puzzle in it, which it won an XYZZY award for.

The premise -- you're a burglar trying to steal a valuable chalice in a museum. You begin in the vault room and type "take chalice" -- and your hand passes through it. Something's not quite right.

(SPOILER ALERT! Make sure you've either played it or don't intend to play it before continuing...)

I'm a big fat hypocritical liar.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-05/17/hacked-off-how-pc-game-modders-are-evolving

A little fluffy, talks about two issues (the "art mod" and the mod's relation to the game industry) that should be their own separate articles, developed more -- and I thought he was going to interview other modders instead of turning it into a piece on Desura / mod distribution (which seems to be something else entirely in my mind)

But still, a good piece on connecting today's mods to an inexplicable industry shift away from mods and he's a great guy and YAY press coverage for mods.