Signed up for the Independent Games Summit too. Can’t wait for it … GDC is my favorite week of the year.

At the Independent Games Summit at GDC 2007, Gametunnel’s Russell Carol gave an amazing talk on how indie game makers can get off their asses and market their games. I’m no stranger to indie game marketing, but Russell really did an amazing job on showing exactly how to go about doing it. I really think that this is the area that indie game makers (including myself) need the most help in, so it was a real pleasure to see Russell cover it in such depth. It’s a must watch for anyone who wants to make money with their games:

If you’re a close friend of mine, or if you were anywhere close to me at GDC, then you heard my latest game was going to be hitting beta in June 2006 and ya’ll were invited.

Well, please don’t take the fact that you never got an invite as a sign that I uninvited you. The fact of the matter is I’ve slipped my deadline. No one’s playing the beta because the beta has not happened yet. But I am still rolling forward, so hang in there.

I’m worried that DRM phobia is going to have a negative impact on gaming. Specifically indie games and casual games. Because contrary to what a lot of popular consumer-friendly websites want you to believe, not all DRM is bad.

I’m talking about DRM that enables try-before-you-buy, pay-as-you-go, and rental models. Try before you buy is an absolute boon to the user. Things absolutely sucked for games before it. TBYB allows a person to actually play a game (or a tool, or a service) without having to shell out money for it, to see if they like it. Read the rest of this entry

For some contxtext, this is a comment I posted to Chuck’s blog post about Story in games on SpectreCollie.com.

I believe there’s a lot of mix-up between story and storytelling in games. The story is one thing, but how it is told is another. You can have a great story and shoddy storytelling. Think Death of A Salesman dinner theater. I think a lot of gamer’s complaints about story in games is actually about the Storytelling method in games.

I think the cutscene is the least innovative way to convey a story in game. It is the opposite of everything a video game is about. Yes, it gets the point across, and yes it uses a method that is very Hollywood-like, but in the end it’s a non-interactive bit you feel obligated to sit through lest you miss the one line that actually tells you how to solve the next level; paranoid to touch the controller for fear you might abort it.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time had voice-over narration that happened while you were still free to roam and explore the world, and to me that was a really innovative way to further a story without making me antsy for interaction. It’s story AND game at the same time. They were delivering important context without wrestling control away from me. I’m sure that’s been done in other games, but I thought the execution of it in Sands of Time was genius. What makes it great has nothing to do with the story itself, just that they had hit on a great way to pace out the storytelling without bogging down the gameplay.

And I think this stems from the fact that the only thing that video games has over movies as far as storytelling goes is interactivity. It’s about control and freedom. And the cutscene has none of that. It often isn’t even in the same format at the rest of the game.

Just as early cinema developed new ways of communicating story to the viewer outside of sheer exposition, I think video games need to try harder at integrating storytelling into gameplay without the binary switch of “Now you’re playing/now you’re watching”. I think this is actually why the story-in-games debate is as common as it is -- because too many developers lean on the least-interactive ways to deliver their story, as if story and game were not to be mixed. I know LucasArts designers of the 90s tossed them around like footballs.

So, the full mea culpa on this is that the very “Meanwhile…” scene in Monkey Island in which Chuck speaks of was the very moment I got hooked on adventure games and where I discovered how engrossing games could be. SCUMM games were all about those moments for me and I think the cutscene works best in Adventure games.

Random, unfinished notes

• I tried reading Warren Spector’s four part series about storytelling but it couldn’t hold my attention. I will force myself to read it at some point.
  
• Chuck mentioned that he couldn’t think of a game where the story was good but the storytelling was bad. I can’t either. Can anyone?
  
• Regarding the above point, I wonder if that means that good storytelling can make a weak story more palatable?
  
• If I renamed my blog “unfinished thoughts” I’d have about two dozen more blog drafts like this one I could immediately post.

Ever wonder how much a great indie game can make? Josiah from Chronic Logic posted the financial stats to their 2d physics platformer Gish, and it’s quite a fascinating read. Here’s an excerpt:

Sales from chroniclogic.com per year:
2004: 2587
2005: 1335
2006: 449
2007: 140 (through April)
Misc others sales: 10

Total Sales: 4521

Price: $19.95 USD

Quite interesting, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The post discusses how they promoted the game, the awards it won, and what they could have done better. Overall I’m a bit suprised that the sales numbers are as low as they are considering the amount of press it got (great reviews, IGF awards, etc). But bravo to Chronic Logic for releasing their numbers. It’s rare we get this kind of insight about a well-received game like Gish. Check out the full announcement over at the Game Tunnel Indie News forums.
UPDATE:
There is an expanded article about the Gish sales figures over at Gameproducer.net.

I’m trying hard to enjoy Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, but I’m having a hard time. Here’s why:

The camera is annoying. Not being able to control the camera is a serious flaw of the single stick control (nunchuck) system that the Wii has. I am constantly fighting Link to get the proper view. I am pressing the C button constantly to re-center my view, but it simply is not enough. It makes jumping puzzles where you need to align Link with the platform needlessly difficult. For the mini-bosses they should have taken a tip from Psychonauts and had the camera lock on the boss, even when you’re not targeting.

The game is super-linear. So far, anyway. I do enjoy linear games, but Twilight Princess is frustratingly so. Several times it makes you retread old ground while at the same time arbitrarily locking you out of new locations, and special-case closed locations and cutscene triggers that interrupt gameplay and move you to a new location are heavily relied upon to tell us the story. For a world that is as big as it is, TP ends up feeling incredibly small and closed.

Rookie UI mistakes So they have this new pointing device that’s relatively new, and pretty sensitive. Why oh why, when you die, do they stick small “Yes” and “No” buttons up in the upper right corner of the screen, with perhaps a 5 pixel gap between them? I just ended up quitting instead of restarting because my Wii aim is not quite up to par.

No save-anywhere. Actually, you can save anywhere, you just actually won’t be there when you reload your game, and you’ll have to work your way back through a location re-solving the puzzles you already solved just to pick up from where you left off. Come on Nintendo, this is 2007! Why the $@! can I not save where I want to and be able to be there again when I return?!

I sure hope the Phantom Hourglass is better. It looking like it’s got ten times the charm and style of the Twilight Princess.

... do what they’re telling you. This came up at GDC when talking to the Mawsoft guys so I thought I’d blog about it here.

Community is big these days. You’ll hear lots of designers tell you that it’s important to build a strong community and listen to them, because they are your core users. And I agree with that.

But in UI design it’s important to understand that what a user says and what a user is telling you can be two different things. It is rare that a user outright lies for no reason. There is almost always a root cause for what your users are saying. The trick is to find that root issue to truly get what the user is telling you. And it is often a bit different than what their words are saying. Read the rest of this entry

Game designer Justin Chin is posting art from his work-in-progress story Fuel and Fire -- at least one pic a day for the entire month of April. The stuff is very cool, modeled in SketchUp and tweaked in Maya. He often sites how the art came together, what tools he used, and behind the scenes bits. I’m anxiously looking forward to the days ahead, as he’s got a really great vision for the look of his comic. Check it out!

UPDATE: The issues I describe below clearly were specific to my laptop, as I was able to install the game on my desktop machine with no problems. Check the game out, it has great just one more time addictiveness!

I’m writing this post from IE because Bang!Howdy has locked up Firefox.

I decided to try Bang!Howdy today. So far it is not going well. As GDC Daniel from Three Rings mentioned that 90% of the people who visit Puzzle Pirates end up not even trying the game. If Puzzle Pirates is anything like Bang!Howdy, I can understand.

A few problems:

1. When downloading, Bang!Howdy had the dreaded resetting-progress-bar which tricks you into thinking the download is done, only to discover the progress bar has hopped back to 0% to for another step in the process. Multiple times. This wouldn’t be so bad except the each progress bar took several minutes to get to 100%.

2. During the download, I could not access any tab or window. Firefox had not crashed, but it wasn’t letting me have any access to the tabs. So I was stuck waiting.

3. Once the game was downloaded and running, it asked me to log in or create a new account. When I clicked “create”, it told me to check my web browser to create a new account. Except my web browser was still not accepting new windows. At this point I had the option of closing the game and hoping Firefox recovered, then create an account, then reload Bang!Howdy again (another 3 or 5 minute wait). Or to use IE to create an account.

I fired up IE and created an account. Once I was logged in I got Another progress bar. I think.

When the game started running I noticed it was too big for my screen. the bottommost part of the game UI was covered by my windows task bar. I couldn’t see the score or the “cards” you’re awarded in the tutorial.

Once getting through all that I really enjoyed playing the game. I just played the tutorial’s “Claim Jumping” scenarios for several hours, ignoring the bottom portion where I couldn’t see. But I can see how attracting new players may be a bit difficult with such a daunting start up process.

I am not sure if Daniel was trying to hint at something during his GDC speeches; I do remember him saying that their next game will be in Flash and not Java. It seems like there’s a big barrier to just getting Bang!Howdy to run. It may just be that it’s not optimized for Firefox, I’m not sure.

Anyway, to Three Rings, if you’re reading this … very clever game! I really enjoyed it, despite the troubles I had getting it to run. I really would have given up (as I have with Puzzle Pirates) but I really wanted to try it out. I’m glad I did. To everyone else: go check it out!