Yearly Archives: 2009

Umberto or Geraldine?

By Rubes | Published: December 30, 2009

One of the interesting things about working on Vespers is that I’ve become so intimate with the original text and code that I probably know more about the game at this point than even the author, Jason Devlin. Often, I’ll come across an issue or question about the text game, and I’ll pop off an e-mail to Jason to see what he thinks we should do. The irony is that I’ve been so engrossed in every detail of the story for so long that I’m probably better able to address these things than Jason, who likely hasn’t even thought about the game in 3 or 4 years. (Mental note: really have to finish game soon.)

Throughout development, but particularly when Jason released the text game (and also when we started production), there have been many people drawing close comparisons between Vespers and Umberto Eco’s famous novel, The Name of [More...]

Posted in Vespers, story in games | Leave a comment

“Get Lamp” Discount Deadline Approaches

By Rubes | Published: December 29, 2009

A gentle reminder for those interested enough in text adventures to be eagerly awaiting the arrival of Jason Scott’s sure-to-be-singular documentary on the matter, GET LAMP: the pre-order discount ends on January 1st.

According to Scott, the documentary will be priced at $40 for a 2-DVD set that will reportedly include additonal “wrap-ins” in the package, although no word yet as to what those are. It’s set to be released in March 2010, around the same time as the PAX East convention, where the movie will be premiered alongside (hopefully) a host of other interactive fiction-related panels and presentations, which is pretty neat.

But if you know you’re going to buy the documentary, you can pre-order it now for 25% off, or $30 (plus shipping).

Ordering now is helpful for Scott because, as he says, it “helps build up the money to do a [More...]

Posted in adventure games, interactive fiction, text in games | Leave a comment

2009: A Shecky Greene Kind of Year

By Rubes | Published: December 22, 2009

For Vespers, I’d say 2009 was a mixed bag. We started out with some nice momentum, on many fronts, and it lasted about half the year. N.R., as usual, was a model of consistency, churning out an impressive amount of material. He completed all of the models and textures for Act I, which was a nice accomplishment, in addition to all of our GUI and logo work. He’s already started chipping away at the additional models needed for Act II and beyond, with much of the work already done. We also got our web site up and running, and although it needs additional content, it’s good to have most of the structure already in place, with the connection to this blog. The forums are also ready to go, for the most part, but I’ll wait on opening those up until we start the alpha testing sometime early in [More...]

Posted in 3D/if, Vespers | 1 Comment

Touché, aaronius

By Rubes | Published: November 23, 2009

Occasionally I surf around the IFDB looking for goodies. I really like the way it is set up, as it takes a number of cues from other community sites that encourage engagement and social interaction. Often I’ll find myself weaving my way through games, reviews, and lists before realizing how much time has passed, and typically I’ll come out with a couple of new games to add to the play list. I also absolutely love how it is so smoothly integrated with Zoom (and others, like iPhone Frotz), which so effectively feeds the immediate gratification beast. Anyway, I digress.

I was flipping through some IFDB pages the other day, looking for some choice information on this year’s IFComp winner, Rover’s Day Out, when I noticed that it had already made someone’s online IFDB poll:

“Games with Impossible-to-film moments”, by aaronius.

Okay, I [More...]

Posted in 3D/if, Vespers, game design, interactive fiction | 2 Comments

Congratulations, You’ve Been Kickstarted

By Rubes | Published: November 21, 2009

In what will amount to essentially a formality, the Jason Scott Sabbatical is set to be officially Kickstarted in just a few hours.

Scott, the digital historian, archivist, and documentarian (not to mention unusually entertaining writer and speaker) responsible for such intense goodness as Textfiles.com, archiving Geocities, the highly recommended BBS Documentary, and the soon-to-be-almost-certainly-highly-recommended text adventure documentary GET LAMP, is going on paid sabbatical. Scott recently lost his day job, and since he was doing all of this wonderous stuff on the side in his spare time, not having a steady income seriously jeopardized future progress on these projects. So he took matters into his own hands and, thanks to Kickstarter, a whole mess of supporters stepped up to the plate for him. A few hundred, actually.

Kickstarter is a pretty [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 1 Comment

IFComp, I Hardly Knew Ye

By Rubes | Published: November 19, 2009

Rovers Day OutAnd, there we go. Another IFComp come and gone, with the winners announced this past week. It sounds like the 15th Annual was on par with most, although there appeared to be significantly fewer games overall than in the past (24, compared with 35 last year, 43 in 2006, and 36 in 2005). An ominous sign? Not the way I see it. As others have pointed out elsewhere, this year could be considered an excellent year for IF — in particular, non-comp pieces. We saw quality, ambitious works such as Aaron Reed’s “Blue Lacuna” and Jimmy Maher’s “The King of Shreds and Patches”, not to mention Textfyre’s release of their first two commercial pieces, “Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter”, and the acclaimed “The Shadow in the Cathedral”. So there was certainly no shortage of good IF this year.

This year’s Comp had one relatively clear-cut [More...]

Posted in adventure games, interactive fiction | Leave a comment

Long Live the Animator

By Rubes | Published: November 11, 2009

You may have noticed (if you’ll allow me the fantasy that anyone is paying attention) that it has been a while since the last Vespers update. This is for many reasons, of course. It might just be easiest to say that it’s because there hasn’t been a whole lot to report. I wish that wasn’t the case, but so it goes.

Most of it, as usual, originates from the animation side of things. What began as a promising venture with three local animation students eventually fizzled out. One of them made a little bit of progress over a long period of time, but couldn’t get much further due to classes and other obligations. Another never really got off the ground. The third did actually get a lot of quality work done in the time we worked together, but life issues with women and career eventually derailed that train, and he [More...]

Posted in Vespers | 4 Comments

Indie, Part-Time

By Rubes | Published: October 9, 2009

As I was cruising around GDC Austin from one session to the next, I began to gain a greater appreciation of how much of the conference was geared toward the business side of game development. This isn’t surprising, of course, given that game development is an entertainment business, and GDC is all about how developers can do all parts of their jobs better. But whether it’s because of the tough economic times, or the rapid saturation of the iPhone game market, or the wide proliferation of MMOs and social games, or the plummeting price point for online and mobile games, it just seemed like there was a greater emphasis on economics than I experienced last year, unless I’m just forgetting.

There were many sessions at the conference on how to maximize things like productivity, exposure, earning potential, sales, and so on. How to pitch your game to publishers. How to [More...]

Posted in game design, indie game business, indie games | 2 Comments

Austin GDC Slides

By Rubes | Published: October 2, 2009

I know a couple of people were interested in seeing the slides I presented at the Austin GDC, so I’ve (finally) made them available for download.

There are two versions available. The slides are available in their native PowerPoint (.ppt) format, as well as in PDF format for those who don’t have access to PowerPoint. The PPT version is preferable, since it contains some of my notes for each slide. I sometimes include slides without much descriptive text on them, so having the notes available will help others to know what I was trying to communicate. For some reason there’s something a little denuding about putting my notes out there with the slides, but so be it.

The PDF file does not contain the notes, since I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do that. But there is this option available for those who cannot open PPT files. (Of [More...]

Posted in interactive fiction | 4 Comments

Anticipation II

By Rubes | Published: October 2, 2009

Back in February of this year, I wrote about an indie game that I was really looking forward to: The Path. The game has since been released, of course, and I would say it was well worth the wait. Not necessarily because it was a great game—as with their earlier piece, The Graveyard, it was less a game than an interactive narrative experience—but because it was a well-crafted work that encouraged and successfully produced a good deal of dialogue about its subject matter and about interactive narrative in general.

Another piece that has been on my radar for some time is Amanita Design’s Machinarium. They’ve been making the rounds for some time now with occasional blog pieces, early pre-order specials, and rare teaser trailers. They even provided those who pre-ordered the game with a special “pre-order pack” consisting of hi-res screenshots and soundtrack previews. So they’ve done a [More...]

Posted in adventure games, indie games | 1 Comment