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!

In a GDC presentation on Spore’s editors (called Spore’s Magic Crayons), there were some interesting bits mentioned:

• Everything that people make will automatically be uploaded to the Spore servers.
  
• Stuff on the Spore servers will be automatically downloaded to Spore players and will populate the gamer’s universe.
  
• The editors are designed to create great looking things quickly, and without needing artistic talent.
  
• The editors are powerful enough to make realistic looking Navy battleships and the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.

The battleship and Enterprise were shown during the presentation of examples of things that could be built with the editor. All those points kind of have me worried. I love the idea that I can go to other planets and interact with stuff that other people have built, but if I run into the Starship Enterprise I know I am going to be sucked out of the game and won’t want to play it. Read the rest of this entry

Another GDC is over and done with. Here’s some highlights:

• Running into Jedi Knight Alumni Justin Chin, Ray Gresko, and Chris Ross.
  
• Day 3: Seeing Richard Garriott (Ultima), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Shigeru Miyamoto (Donkey Kong/Super Mario Bros/Legend of Zelda) all in 1 hour time period at the IGF/Gamer’s Choice awards.
  
• Just about every session at the Indie Game Summit but especially Russell Carroll’s insightful session on indie marketing, which I believe was the most valuable discussion there.
  
• Meeting Gene Endrody (Sherwood Dungeon ), Jim Greer (kongregate), Derek Yu (Tigsource.com) and Dave Grossman (Sam & Max) face-to-face after only emailing them for so long …
  
• Raph Koster’s talk on “Where Game Meets the Web”. Nothing too insightful for me, but it was interesting to hear his assertion that the Game Industry more or less is (again, sigh) not paying attention to how the web innovates and evolves.
  
• Discussing the finer points of game design, UI, and “high-art” with the MawSoft crew.
  

The week provides me with more than enough creative energy to get me through another 360 days until the next one. Thanks to everyone mentioned here, and also those I didn’t mention.

While I’m going to be at GDC all next week to soak up as much as I can, I’ll actually be regurgitating exaggerations humbly discussing my misadventures in game development in a panel session about the challenges indie game developers face (although, most of the time I’ll be sitting there silent). It’s titled Challenges for New Game Developers and is a panel discussion including the following superstars of the indie game scene:

• Kalle Wik—President and CTO, Skunk Studios
  
• Patrick Wylie—Vice President, Big Fish Studios
  
• Peter Glover—VP, New Business and Technology, Atom Entertainment
  
• Ritesh Banglani—Product Manager, Director and Shockwave, Adobe Systems

Plus me. It’s on Thursday March 8, from 4:00pm — 5:00pm in room 3004, West Hall

Hope to see you there.

Wired News contributor Clive Thompson has an article on some top Indie Games of 2007, although I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be “so far in 2007” or if the games are actually from 2006. He ranking based on ‘IGF worthy’ gameplay, meaning more of a focus on innovation and risk taking rather than overall polish -- you won’t find Quake clones or casual games here. Most of the games I had not heard of, so I thought I’d link to the article. Here’s a snip:

The good news? The world of indie games is booming -- supercharged by a growing number of schools that teach game design, cheaper game-design tools and the emergence of festivals devoted to indie gaming. Last year, I wrote a column describing some of my favorite right-brained games that were freely available online. I’ve decided to make this an annual tradition, so here’s round two: This year’s sampling, by no means comprehensive, of the latest oddball gameplay.

None of them are perfect, but all of them do at least one thing amazingly well in a new way.

He’s got some interesting game articles, including the myth of the 40-hour gamer (which mirrors some of the thoughts Will Wright was expounding on in the Spore article) and a great piece on episodic gaming.

Check out his top Indie Games article and try the games he links to.

Creating Casual Games For Profit and Fun is a new book by Allen Partridge. Looks like a cool book, Allen contributes to the various Director mailing lists, has programmed a bunch of games, and for the book he interviewed lots of casual game developers. Here’s the description, from Amazon.com:

Thousands of game enthusiasts and would-be developers are searching habitually for an opportunity to expand their knowledge of games. Whether they’re clicking through Amazon or browsing Barnes and Noble, they are all looking for a path to their dream, a secret door into the games industry. The Casual Games Market is that secret passage. The industry, featuring online downloadable games generally delivered through distributors like Real-One Arcade, Shockwave.com and Oberon Media (via MSN Games and Pogo) has exploded over the past five years into a multi-billion dollar annual marketplace. Independent developers have rapidly discovered the field as one of the last remaining venues to break into the public eye. It is now the single most attractive opportunity available to anyone who wants to become a game developer. Casual Games for Profit and Fun introduces and defines casual games, explains the current state and scope of the industry, and describes the various genres, formats, conventions, and business models that define the industry today. It also teaches the basic casual game development techniques in Flash for the web, PC, and PDA’s and cell phones. Throughout the book users will learn how to create a variety of games that they can use for their own fun or sell commercially.

About the Author
Dr. Allen Partridge is Director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Partridge owns Insight Interactive games and has developed a myriad of interactive 3D games. Partridge’s games are featured on Reflexive Arcade and in international publications. He has written several articles and a book on Shockwave 3D games and was the technical editor for Paul Catanese’s Director’s Third Dimension. Partridge is the host of the popular dirGames-l and dir3d-l mailing lists. See attached resume for more information.

Check it out on Amazon.com

Popsci.com has an eight page interview with Will Wright, designer of simCity, the Sims, and many other games with “sim” in their title. In it he talks (and talks and talks) about Spore, which I’m really looking forward to. It’s a great article.

Here’s a morsel:

Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. so there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play.

link (via Kotaku)

Recently I wrote about how Kongregate is an indie game publisher that is doing some really great things with developer relations. Another publisher, Manifesto Games -- is also doing some things right. They claim that developers get a majority of the profit, and that they want to focus on innovation and not clones. This is great to see more publishers being dev-friendly. I’d like to know a bit about whether or not they let the developers have access to their end customers.

Their Information for Developers page allows for blog-style comments on the bottom. It’s a bit curious, since it’s more of a permanent informational page rather than a blog-style post page or a Q&A forum. But I decided to post a comment to it with a question:

Cool page. One question, when a game is published through Manifesto, do you allow the game developer to retain no-manifesto URLs, company names, websites, and promotion of other games, or does all that need to get stripped out before publishing?

But here is it five days later and Manifesto, nor anyone, has managed to post a reply. In fact there’s another comment on the page from over a month ago that has no public answer. Frankly, that doesn’t look very good. If they’re not going to be able to answer comments posted to that page, they should just disable it. It’s not like comments are expected on a page like that. I think Manifesto shows some promise, but it looks like they need to improve their communications.

You can see the comments I’m talking about at the bottom of their Developer’s page.

UPDATE: A couple weeks after I posted the question, a rep from Manifesto answered my questions, and some others. Check it out.

If there’s two things I learned in 2006, I’d sum it up by saying:

• Santa and laser whips don’t mix
• If a video game has a location called Smuggler’s Cove, there better be more than 30 gold coins there

I’m talking about Oblivion (not regarding the laser whip, that was in The Polar Express). I really enjoyed Oblivion, and I’m actually still in the process of enjoying it. But the first cracks I ever saw in it’s otherwise perfect armor was when I finally jimmied the five-pin (hard) lock on the entrance to Smuggler’s Cove. Now that Bethesda has announced the Shivering Isles expansion pack for it, I’ll take some time to talk about the minor complaints I hope the fix, and why it was a problem.

Read the rest of this entry