Monthly Archives: May 2008

Being Indie, Being Resourceful

May 30, 2008

Being indie can definitely be tough sometimes. I’ve often said that indie game projects are kind of like fish eggs: thousands are laid but few manage to survive to adulthood. Content for a 2D or 3D game, whether it’s artwork, music, voicework, or animation, can be a real problem for a small team on a shoestring budget. It’s no secret that content, specifically character animation, has been the biggest challenge for Vespers.

Sometimes, it takes a little creative thinking to figure out ways to stretch those limited resources.

A while back, when I was looking for help with voiceover work, one idea I had was to try tapping into some good but inexpensive local talent — theater students at the University of Utah, where I work. The casting call I posted ended up being picked up by a local talent company, which brought in a lot of additional talent, but [More...]

Category labels: Vespers, indie game business, indie games | Leave a comment

A Triumph of Sheer Will and Determination

May 27, 2008

Not terribly related to adventure gaming, I realize, but it’s something I feel needs to be said. I don’t do a lot of game playing these days, preferring to spend my spare time on developing, but recently I had some extra time and I thought I’d spend it trying to catch up on some old, unfinished business. That business, unfortunately for me, was Doom 3.

Okay, all snickering aside — yes, it’s an unabashedly vapid action FPS game, and a relatively aged one at that — I had purchased it some time ago, played it for a few hours, and shelved it, not entirely because I wasn’t enjoying it but because of other games and commitments. And since I have the tendency these days to stop playing games before finishing them, I decided this was one I was actually going to return to, and finish. And finish it I did. [More...]

Category labels: miscellaneous | 2 Comments

Nineteen Years Later, The Record Is Still Skipping

May 23, 2008

Yesterday was a birthday, of sorts; it was the birthday of The Grumpy Gamer, the blog site belonging to Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island fame) for his “often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry.” Four years ago yesterday he posted his first blog, a reprint of an article he wrote in 1989 which, he says, became the foundation for the design of Monkey Island. And at the time of its reprint, in 2004, Gilbert made the proclamation that “Adventure Games are officially dead.”

What I find fascinating is that the article, titled “Why Adventure Games Suck (And What We Can Do About It)”, discusses so many of the ongoing issues surrounding storytelling in games that people like me continue to blather about nearly two decades later. This is going all the way back to 1989. Infocom still (barely) existed, and Interplay’s Neuromancer was the adventure game [More...]

Category labels: Vespers, adventure games, story in games | 2 Comments

First Fresco Finished

May 20, 2008

One of the things that I thought Jason did really well when he created Vespers was the creation of a very vivid image of the monastery church, an image which rots and decays over the course of the game as the abbot and monastery descend into darkness. One of the real challenges for us as we adapt the game to a 3D environment is the visual representation of this decay.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in this regard is one of the game’s best depictions of this fall from grace: the frescoes on the ceiling of the church. The frescoes are extremely difficult for a number of reasons –

- the frescoes are on the ceiling of the church, which is supposed to be high above the player. And as the church is modeled now, the ceiling really is pretty high up — high enough that the player would have a [More...]

Category labels: Vespers | 2 Comments

Wii Virgin No More

May 15, 2008

Okay, yeah, this blog is primarily about adventure games, interactive fiction, and indie game development, almost exclusively from a Mac/PC desktop perspective. I’ve never been a console gamer myself, unless you go back to my Atari 2600 days. I already spend too much time in front of my computer, and I’ve always felt that if I bought a console then either (a) I would spend even more time not doing important things, or (b) it would just end up collecting dust in the TV cabinet.

I don’t even know very many people who have consoles (or most haven’t told me). I’ve yet to even see an Xbox or Playstation 2/3 in person. And the only time I’ve ever seen a Wii was at an indie games conference last October, when there was a brief Wii Tennis tournament projected on a screen. All I remember thinking was that it looked [More...]

Category labels: miscellaneous | 2 Comments

Totally Unbelievable Characters

May 8, 2008

While following the recent threads on RAIF (rec.arts.int-fiction) “Defining the Newbie” and “Expanding the IF Audience/Community”, I found myself most interested in these comments, in light of the recent blogs about characters as the focus of games:

Jimmy Maher:
“People love stories, and many will get excited by the idea of getting plunked down into the middle of a good one.”

Jeff Nyman:
“I find new people most often clamor for better and more engaging stories that actually keep them interested in what the heck is going on. Or asking for characters that actually seem like they play a part in the story rather than just being another ‘thing.’”

Blank:
“Stories are about *characters*. The thing that IF does least well is representing characters in the fictional world. Doubtless you’ve already read all the threads about npc characterisation so I won’t recapitulate all that except to say that I believe that

[More...]

Category labels: adventure games, characters in games, interactive fiction | 8 Comments

Stan the Absentminded Kleptomaniac Journalist

May 5, 2008

It was a quiet Saturday evening, and since you had no plans, you decided to spend it with a good book on the sofa and a little classical music on the radio. You had just settled in when you heard a knock on the front door. It was your friend Stan. You hadn’t seen him in a while, so it was nice to have him drop by without notice. You invited him in, and he obliged.

Oddly, Stan started scanning the foyer, taking it all in like he had never seen it before. He seemed to take particular notice of all the things there — the ficus tree, the impressionist painting on the wall, the coat closet. That seemed a little strange to you, but the feeling soon passed. You invited him into the kitchen for something to drink.

When you reached the kitchen, you noticed Stan had not followed. [More...]

Category labels: characters in games, story in games | 9 Comments

Diamonds in The Rough

May 4, 2008

Diamonds in the Rough: This month’s Blogs of the Round Table invites you to discuss character flaws, or the lack thereof, in video game characters.

I particularly like this month’s round table discussion, as some of my recent blogs have been about how games really need to start focusing more on characters and character interactions. In order for that approach to be successful, the characters in games need to have some depth to them, and flaws are an excellent way of adding depth and humanity to characters. My initial reaction to the round table topic is that I can’t think of many games off the top of my head that include characters with notable flaws that are somehow significant to the narrative, but I’m guessing that’s for two reasons: first, I really haven’t played that many games, so perhaps I’ve just missed them, and second (and more likely), it’s [More...]

Category labels: characters in games, story in games | 7 Comments