Category: Blog

Game Observations #1 – The Walking Dead

(First in what might potentially turn into a series of posts concerning observations made about games I play.)

When I’m not busy ranting about the good old days, I sometimes like to partake in seasonal rituals known to gamers world-wide as “Steam-sales”.

Yesterday, during the (currently ongoing) Steam Autumn Sale, I bought all five episodes of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, having heard much good about the game, but having never really made the time to actually get hold of it and play it. Today, I feel bad for not having bought the game earlier, preferably at full price directly from Telltale Games. I have played through the first three episodes, and so far the game has been worth its weight in virtual gold. Worth every penny. I mean, cent.

What I mean to say is, this game knocked me flat on my back in one swift punch. It doesn’t hold back, at all. From the beginning of the first episode to the end of the third, the game has taken me on an emotional roller coaster-ride alongside a tribe of diverse characters with depth and soul (backed up by superb voice-acting, I should add!). I went from complacency via shocked silence to outrage and/or relief as events took unexpected turns. My spirits were lifted up to the sky before plummeting back down into the tragic depths of despair, before gradually climbing back up to normalcy and restoring a false sense of security in me, which I’m sure will be exploited to the maximum in the next two episodes.

I submit to the Internet at large that Telltale Games have, with this episodic The Walking Dead series, created a game which contains a perfect blend of Dragon’s Lair, classical point’n-click adventure and the mystical X-factor that turn games into art.

 

Reminiscences of an MMORPG burnout victim

Reminiscing about Ultima Online in the comment-field in a different post made me all nostalgic, like. And I came to realize that no MMORPG (or MMO, if you prefer) I have played since has struck a chord with me to the same extent as it did. Not just because it was my first MMORPG – I recognize that very little compares favorably to one’s “first”, but also because UO awoke in me a desire for virtual worlds. Take note that I used the word “worlds” there and not “games”. I like games. I’ve played games all my life, and will continue to do so for as long as I am able to. Virtual worlds, however – that’s the stuff dreams are made of! Also, the Matrix.

Let’s take it from the beginning

Attending the Court of Truth on Atlantic

On the 31st of December 1997 I started playing Ultima Online. It sounded like a dream come true at the time; to be able to run around in the Ultima-universe alongside other real people living out our alternative lives, dispatching hordes of monsters, living the stories, even baking bread? Hallelujah!

A cousin of mine got the game as a Christmas gift, after I had been drooling over the game for months and he had barely heard of it! O, what cruel fate! Luckily for me, though, his computer did not meet the minimum required system specifications (Pentium 133MHz, 16MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM Drive!) to run the game, so the game ended up being installed on my beast of a P200 MMX instead *rubs hands gleefully together sometime in the distant past*

A couple of months later I got my own copy of the game and from then on there was no looking back (until now).

Continue reading “Reminiscences of an MMORPG burnout victim”

About the Laws of Online World Design – Part IV

This is the fourth installment in a series of posts I’ll be making about Raph Koster‘s The Laws of Online World Design, as explained in this introductory post. I will start at the top of the list, and work my way down until I’ve poked and prodded every law in the list, not skipping any unless I really feel like it, or unless I should happen to be distracted by a pretty butterfly or something. Which is exactly what happened after I wrote Part III of this series in July 2009!

In this long awaited (right?) Part IV of the series, I’ll concentrate on the following law:

  • Macroing, botting, and automation

Continue reading “About the Laws of Online World Design – Part IV”

Ownership is Key

A study (published yesterday) from the University at Buffalo School of Management, which followed 173 players who were part of a large MMORPG community to figure out strategies in which to increase player loyalty/retention, concluded with what everyone who has actively played Ultima Online and/or Star Wars Galaxies (and/or MUDs) have known for (a) decade(s) or longer:

“It [the study] examined whether two different game-playing strategies were successful in producing loyal players.
One strategy found that giving players more control and ownership of their character increased loyalty. The second strategy showed that gamers who played cooperatively and worked with other gamers in “guilds” built loyalty and social identity.

“To build a player’s feeling of ownership towards its character, game makers should provide equal opportunities for any character to win a battle,” says Sanders. “They should also build more selective or elaborate chat rooms and guild features to help players socialize.”

It doesn’t take a brain-surgeon to figure out that this isn’t rocket-science:

  • Ownership is, has been and will continue to be a key ingredient to player retention.

Sources: The Escapist, University at Buffalo

Summit ends, leaves me with plenty to digest

MIGS logoWell, MIGS is over for this year. It was the first game-development conference I have attended, and for the most part I enjoyed it greatly. Interesting stuff being exhibited at booths/demo-stations, both from small-time indie-developers promoting their games (like for instance gamesbymo’s A.N.N.E. – one to watch!) and from big-time guys like Wacom, Autodesk, Granny, Epic and more showing off both hardware and software related to game-development. There were also other miscellaneous stuff going on, like a “sketch duel” competition, job fair for those looking for new (or their first – lots of students there too) gigs, and more.

Unfortunately I missed a good part of Tim Sweeney’s opening keynote since Google maps directed me to the wrong metro-station (NOT the one right next to the Hilton Montreal Bonaventure, where the event in question was being hosted), but hopefully I’ll be able to scrounge up a summary of it from somewhere.  The other conference-sessions I attended were of mixed quality (name/link-dropping to follow).
Continue reading “Summit ends, leaves me with plenty to digest”

Interesting times ahead – at MTL DGTL 2012

The next two days should be interesting! I am, along with a bunch of other people from work, attending the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) – which (surprisingly enough) is taking place right here in Montreal during the Montreal Digital Festival (MTL DGTL for short).

My schedule is filled to the brim with what will hopefully turn out to be great sessions on everything game-development related, hosted by a diverse bunch of folks including (but not limited to) such personalities as Tim Sweeney and Peter Molyneux. For those interested, the complete schedule (and information about the sessions) can be found on the Montreal Digital Festival homepage.

This will be my first time attending such an event, so I’m looking forward to it with great interest! I shall try my best not to ambush any Peter Molyneux’es I come across, but I make no definitive promises…

Incoherent ramblings – November Edition

As observant readers might have observed, I am not very good at updating this blog regularly.

Instead of following up a thought like “Hmm… maybe I should update my blog?” by actually updating said blog, my mind immediately leaps off in a random direction, hurling distractions my way one after the other, until the original notion of updating the blog is so deeply buried under layers of “I just have to X first…” that I never get around to it. Nevertheless, from time to time the thought floats back up to the surface, and makes a nuisance of itself until I oblige it by writing another blog-post. Sometimes I get away with only writing drafts, and never actually publishing those posts, but that does not always work.

I figure that this is partly due to my tendency to spend ages writing each post, previewing, rewriting and carefully over-thinking every word in every sentence.  As such, I am contemplating to try posting shorter posts, more often, while forcing myself not to over-think everything. Which is not easy for me; I have read and re-written even these few paragraphs of text multiple times, and often my mind runs itself off course and I have to forcefully steer it back on track before it derails completely. Even now, I have to fight the distractions looming in the back of my mind to keep writing, so I should probably try to wrap this post up before this ends up as yet another unpublished draft.

To give this post slightly more (or less – maybe I’m actually watering the post down by…wait! I’m over-thinking this again, gah!) substance, here’s my TO-DO list of random activities that I have planned for this weekend:

  • Update my blog
  • Continue to further educate myself on C++ programming through LearnCpp.com
  • Hack in more fixes and updates to UOX3
  • Watch more video-lectures from Brandon Sanderson’s class on Creative Writing
  • Start writing a novel for NaNoWriMo (I’m already ten days late, and my previous attempt at this was all the way back in 2008!)
  • Finish Torchlight II
  • Finish Skyrim
  • Try to catch up on the TV-show Fringe (4 seasons behind)
  • Try to catch up on the TV-show Leverage (1 season behind)
  • Find out what’s inside Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity cube
  • Update my blog again? Maybe? Maybe.

Hello blog – been a while

Hello blog, old friend. It has been a while; fourteen months, to be exact. I planned to write – no really, I did! I even almost finished writing the drafts for several interesting and exciting posts I was going to send your way, only to scrap them when I realized they weren’t really all that interesting and exciting. You didn’t miss much.

Hm. I guess I should give you a status update, since it’s been so long since I last communicated with you. Let’s see; I just returned to Canada yesterday after having spent two and a half weeks celebrating Xmas and New Year with friends and family back in Norway. Saw a movie about Sherlock Holmes. Good times.

I still work for FC, and I am now in fact just three months shy of having spent four years working for these guys, during which I have no doubt become more experienced as a data-entry monkey, exporter of GFX-assets, amateur 3D animator and/or fixer of minor skinning/3D modeling issues, particle-effects designer and jack-of-a-thousand-more-trades. In fact, when people ask me what my job is, I just shrug and try to change the topic, because it is not easily explained in less than four paragraphs worth of words. Oh well, at least it will fill out my otherwise meager CV until I can land a proper game design gig. I never wanted to be an animation/particle-effects guru. I always wanted… to be a lumberjackgame designer! *fingers crossed*

Other than that, I guess I’ve been playing the same games everyone else have been playing recently. Skyrim, SWTOR, Jungle Hunt on C64, etc. I’m sure you’ve been flooded with enough thoughts and opinions about these games to last you a lifetime, so I won’t say more than this: I’m enjoying Skyrim immensely for its immersion, open-world and non-linear gameplay. I’m enjoying SWTOR despite the whole “single-player in a multi-player environment”-thing it’s going for. Dialogue system, companions and group-conversations rock, other parts not so much. Jungle Hunt I think speaks for itself.

Well, I guess that’s it for now, I’ll let you get back to fending off spam-bots. I noticed they had clogged up the tubes to the comment-section since I last visited (thankfully your filter seems to be still intact), so I cleared them out for you. Don’t mention it. Anyway, I’m off. See you around, blog!

My new addiction – Minecraft

It’s a oft repeated mantra that the days are gone when single-person development teams could succeed in the game development market. These days you’re not going to get anywhere unless you have a budget that numbers in the millions, and enough manpower to build a life-sized replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, with some additional manpower to manage your workforce and prioritize which stones should be put where in the pyramid, and in which order they should be put in (and which stones should be cut altogether, for budget reasons). That is not always the case, though.

Markus Persson has since May 2009 worked on Minecraft all by himself, and the game has almost half a million registered users, with nearly 30 000 players playing at any given time. What is more impressive though, is that the game – which is still an Alpha-version  – has actually sold almost a hundred thousand copies (99147 as I type this). Let me repeat that: The Alpha-version of his game has sold almost 100 000 copies.

I can understand why, since I’ve been playing it almost non-stop since I purchased a copy a couple of days ago. It’s dangerously addictive, there’s always another block of stone to mine (the game-world is basically of infinite size, since it generates more world-data on the fly as you move towards the edges of the map), always another tree to chop, always another fantastic structure to build, always another mine-shaft to light up with torches. Maybe there’s a rich vein of iron ore just behind the next block of stone. Must. Keep. Mining…

(Check out my Minecraft-progress in the screenshots below)

The game’s success even while still in early development goes to show that if you have a good idea for a game and possess the necessary skill-sets to implement said idea, only the sky is the limit.

Cthulhu Calls!

I’ve been playing role-playing games on computers all my life, but I have never before played an actual tabletop role-playing game – aka pen-and-paper. That is, I did make a feeble attempt some 10+ years ago to form a small group to play either Ars Magica or Warhammer Fantasy (both of which I had actually bought rulebooks for), but that plan went nowhere fast and ever since I’ve kept a careful distance to the entire concept for reasons unbeknownst to me .

Yesterday however, I finally bit the bullet and joined a Call of Cthulhu-campaign consisting of three complete and utter newbies (myself included) and two veterans – all of us Funcommies. Our first session naturally consisted of having the basic system and rules explained to us newbies by the veterans, while we methodically hand-crafted a group of characters that roughly seemed to fit the time-period and setting we decided on (London sometime in the 1920s).

Our characters were, for what I presume were background/plot reasons, supposed to be connected to each other, whether by blood or through professional relations. In the end we wound up with a group consisting of a huge, old lady running an antique shop, her nephew the dashing lawyer/accountant (my character!), a brute of a dockworker/mechanic who sometimes does the odd job for the old lady, and finally a collector of ancient coins/expert of ancient languages who incidentally was also the friend of the old lady’s husband (missing, presumably dead) and the client of my character the lawyer.

Call of Cthulu dice
Call of Cthulu-specific dice from q-workshop.com

While we didn’t get any further than creating our characters (and thus our group) during that first session, I think we’re all (including the GM) exited about the possibilities that our seemingly unconventional group of characters present us with for our next session(s), where we’ll hopefully get the chance to put our newborn characters in harms way.

Now, to find out where in Montreal I can buy a decent set of dice… and a rubber sword-in-a-cane! And a white wig!