Oh, Bobby Kotick. Are you really, as you seem, the King of the Weasels? Or are you simply the most visible weasel in the horde of weasels infesting the industry. I’m having difficulty deciding.

Apparently a generic modern warfare shooter is a ‘platform’ now. Not just a popular, lowest common denominator title. A platform. Which apparently they are going to try to wedge down the throats of Blizzard fans. Seriously, that’s kind of an odd matching, to try market shooter games to people who are fans of Blizzard titles. Do they believe there is serious overlap, or is it just Bobby trying to get his shareholders excited with visions of selling CoD games to the enormous WoW player base?

Either way, I’m sad. I’m hoping I’m not watching the kind of thing that happens to all great developers who merge into the Publisher collective, the dissolution of what makes them great as they buckle under attempts to milk their genius for more and more money.

Just a small design update today, since I’m busy coding and don’t have any pretty pictures to show or anything.

Clothing sets in SoW affect how many ‘pockets’ you have, ie slots for small consumable items. This includes items like grenades, caltrops, consumable potions and totems. Essentially, you have 2 quickbars, one for your abilities (which isn’t constrained by pockets, obviously) and a sort of ‘belt’ quickbar for consumable items (you also have 2 weapon sets available via tabbing). The number of slots on this bar is dependent on what gear you are wearing. The intention is for the lighter clothing to offer more pockets, the type of gear you’d see a Rogue or Adventurer type wearing. The heavier armor is, well, heavier, but tends to have fewer pockets for doodads in exchange. Yes, some people could make an argument for that being bullcrap but I think it make for a fun gameplay balance. Lighter, more flexible armor also literally increases the number of options open to you.

My intention with SoW is to make each consumable item feel meaningful. I loved the way potions were done in the Witcher, you didn’t so much spam Health Potions as you strategized on which potion to imbibe for which battle. And the benefits of those potions felt hefty, meaningful. I want SoW consumables to feel the same. When you drop a smoke grenade or throw a poisoned dart it should make a real difference in a fight, so that preparing the right items ahead of time feels like a meaningful part of your strategy, especially for more ‘tricky’ characters, ie those who don’t want to just wade in with a warhammer.

To make this meaningful, of course, we need to restrict Backpack access a bit. While wandering around normally, you can access your backpack instantly. However, in any situation where hostile NPCs are nearby it takes a period of time to open your pack. Basically, you get a progress bar and have to stand still, unmoving, while your Dodge Rating drops to 0. This is to make it hard to do in the heat of battle. Additionally, you can’t change armor at all when hostile foes are around.

Note, I basically poached this idea from Alpha Protocol. I read about it, loved the idea, so I’m incorporating it into SoW.

And that’s all for now folks.

I promised to blog more during my vacation, didn’t I? Seems I’m a filthy liar. Ah well.

I spent the first half of my holiday just completely lazing around, like a lizard in a cave. The second half I started to get back into things, slowly, but I didn’t really feel much like writing interesting blog updates. Especially since the thing I was doing, coding, didn’t really lend itself to being interesting.

But I did make a design change which might interest readers. I’ve decided to do 2 things :

1) Drop Charisma as a stat.
2) Depreciate the Social path.

I’ll explain what point 2 means, exactly, in a moment. For point 1, dropping Charisma, the reason is simple. It’s too much of a dump stat.

If you’re a veteran RPG’er, you have probably experienced the dump stat phenomenon. For any particular archetype, certain stats end up being dump stats, ie it is safe to ‘dump’ them.

I’ve tried to avoid this in SoW by making every stat at least partially useful to every character. But there is a trick here. If all stats are fairly vital you can’t easily specialize your character. But, on the other extreme, if you do what DnD does and make certain archetypes have little or no use for a stat then you create a situation where characters tend to be exceptionally good in half their stats (the ones which affect them) and exceptionally crap in the other half.

The functionally-retarded fighter, the mage who cannot lift more than two books at a time, these are both common archetypes in RPGs, far more so than the more balanced characters. Simply because the benefit from maximizing strength, endurance and agility vastly outweighs the penalties from minimizing intelligence, charisma and wisdom for a fighter type, and vice versa for the mage.

The only game I’ve seen which did this well was Fallout. To build a character who was exceptional in some area required taking on a real, meaningful penalty elsewhere. It made you really agonise over where to put those points instead of just defaulting to maximising the obvious optimal stats for your archetype and dropping everything else. You weren’t [18 18 18 6 6 3 ]

I think I’ve managed, for the most part, to do something similar with SoW. Except for one stat, Charisma. It’s not that hard to design the other stats so that they are all at least somewhat meaningful for the Warrior/Rogue/Mage archetypes. Charisma, not so much.

Also, I don’t want one archetype, the Speech Guy, to have 1 stat which is overwhelmingly the most meaningful, as it is boring if all you do is maximize Charisma, there is no interesting choice there, no variety.

So I decided to dump the dump stat and move Charisma’s responsibilities to other stats.

There are 4 main ‘social’ skills at this point (further adjustments were made to the skill system, I’ll update that in another post, but for now know that Bluff was folded into Persuasion and Sense Motive was folded into Detection ( the renamed Investigation skill ) ). These 4 social skills are Persuasion, Intimidation, Bartering and Seduction. Let me discuss which stats affect them now, and why :

Persuasion. The art of getting people to see things your way or believe that what you say is the truth. Affected by Intellect and Perception. Intellect to come up with cunning arguments and Perception to ‘read’ your target, to see how they react to your words and adjust accordingly. If you think about it for a moment, the traditional DnD model, why does a persuasive person have to have Charisma, aka personal magnetism?

It’s easy to imagine a greasy, fat, little merchant who just happens to have a silver tongue. I don’t know if I’d describe such a person as ‘charismatic’, I probably wouldn’t want to socialize with them, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be persuasive. That type of character’s persuasive abilities come from cunning more than ‘presence’. So I think Intellect + Perception is a good combo there.

Intimidation. Your ability to cow others, to stare them down. The art of projecting an aura of dominance and confidence. Affected by Strength and Willpower. Strength because an obvious display of physical power tends to be intimidating and Willpower to represent that “they locked gazes and his opponent was the first to look away” type of intimidation. Willpower represents mental strength so I think it fits there.

Bartering. The art of the deal. This is actually fairly similar to persuasion, if you think about it. And it’s affected by the same things, Intellect and Perception. For the same reasons.

Seduction. Seduction is a special case skill. It provides a bonus to Persuasion and Barter skills when used against members of the opposite sex and unlocks special seduction speech options in dialogue. This isn’t really intended to be a main skill (seduction is a support skill), but it is supposed to provide an interesting alternative path through certain scenarios.

Seduction, as a skill, provides less of a direct boost to your ability to seduce others than the Persuasion skill affects your ability to persuade (Don’t worry, it is also cheaper). This is because much of a character’s seduction ability comes from certain background traits you can pick at character creation only : ‘Beautiful/Ugly‘. Basically, if you want to play the Temptress/Casanova path, you’d pick the ‘Beautiful‘ background trait and maximise Seduction. If you don’t, your character is kinda average, even if you maximise Seduction you’ll never unlock the highest rank of seduction options. Pick ‘Ugly‘ and…well, people are superficial, good luck with that.

Anyway, the Seduction skill is affected by Strength and Agility (by less than the other skills are affected by their respective stats), representing that people who are fit and graceful tend to be more attractive.

But, as I said, even if you maximise this skill and your strength/agility you still won’t match a character who takes the ‘Beautiful’ background trait. Simply put, good genes trump everything.

Right, so let’s talk point 2 : Depreciating the Social Path. What does that mean?

Originally, my intention was for the game to support 4 main gameplay types : Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Diplomat. By support I mean that I wanted the design to allow those to be 4 distinct paths through the game, that a player could specialise as a thief and be able to avoid combat by taking the thief path, etc. This doesn’t mean that hybrids aren’t supported, SoW is a classless, skill-based system after all. But the intention is that if you focus on one path you can get through without being stuck because you don’t have the others. A character who is a thief should never have a scripted event force them into a room where there is no place to hide and they have to fight a powerful warrior. No changing the playing field like what happened in VtM:B.

The diplomat path is, however, problematic. Let me explain some of the issues :

1) The binary nature of Speech checks. The problem with speech checks is you generally either succeed or fail. So, what happens if you fail? You’re boned.

With combat or stealth it isn’t like this. The mechanics generate a range of successes and failures per action which, over time, result in overall success of failure. Think about combat. You hit, you miss, generally the battle isn’t decided by whether you fail a single roll unless you’re taking on an exceptionally deadly opponent. Likewise for stealth, NPCs have varying levels of alertness, you can run away or take actions to distract if guards are alerted, etc.

But lets say the design allows a diplomatic character to talk his way out of a combat encounter, lets say a bandit ambush. Fail a roll and what happens? The bandits attack and you die?

So, I hear you saying, add more checks! Well, there is a problem here. A particular dialogue scenario isn’t the output of underlying mechanics interacting, like stealth and combat are. Each line is written by me. So lets say you fail a check. Now I have to add a branch to give you a second/alternative chance. But two missteps is still an incredibly tight margin. It will also get silly, with me writing tense, dangerous dialogue situations where the NPC keeps giving you another chance to convince them after you fail any particular skill check. Not to mention more complicated.

Short of making the dialogue loop and giving the player the option to come back and run through the exact same dialogue they just failed when they have increased their skills (ugh), it’s a thorny problem. In real life, dialogue is dynamic and generated on the fly. But because computer dialogue is limited by how much writing I can do it suffers from this particular issue.

2) Gameplay length. Let’s say I create a cool mansion zone where you have to get into the inner sanctum and acquire some item. I carefully setup the zone and provide different paths for different characters. Rogues stealth around, avoiding patrols, finding sneaky ways in. Warriors may simply attempt to force their way through. And mages use magic tricks to do the same thing. Overall, lets say the level takes 2 hours to play.

Now let’s imagine the diplomatic path. Do you think it would be 2 hours? In all likelihood it will be a couple of dialogues with a couple of checks here and there. Even if I send you around to different NPCs for chats, the length of time probably comes from travelling to and fro more than the reading of dialogue.

Now imagine the entire game like that. The diplomatic path would be a fraction of the game length of any other path.

3) Talents. In addition to skills that players can increase, characters in SoW get Talent points to spend at each level on customising their character (note, you don’t get any other benefit from leveling up and your level is simply based on how many skill points you’ve acquired, once you pass a certain threshold you’re considered ‘level 2′ and get a Talent point or three to spend.)

Let me give you some examples of Talents :

Hungry For the Kill
Ranks : 1-3
Every time you score a critical hit, you are restored 10/20/30% of your maximum Stamina.

———-

Desperate Offence
Ranks : 1-3
When your hit points drop to below 20%, your Attack Rating, Attack Speed and Damage are increased by 20/40/60%.

———-

Sniper
Ranks : 1-3
Increases chance of critical hit when using a Focused Shot by 10/20/30%.

———-

Time to Scarper
Ranks : 1-2
When hit critically, you gain +15/30% Dodge Rating and Movement Speed for 10 seconds.

———-

Metamagic Mastery
Ranks :1-5
Each level of this skill decreases the cost of using metamagic techniques by 5% while increasing the benefit by 5%.

———-

Ok, so it isn’t hard to come up with a range of interesting Talents for combat, stealth and magic. But not so much with Social skills. The problem is thinking of Talents that grant new functionality or modify existing functionality instead of just making you better at the same things the social skills do. I do have a few talents, but fewer than for combat, stealth and magic. The mechanics behind dialogue checks are simply less complex than the other realms so they have less place for interesting quirks, mechanically.

Some examples :

Poker Face
Ranks : 1
Gain +2 to Persuasion checks when lying or hiding the truth.

———-

Intimidating Presence
Ranks : 1-3
Increases Dodge Rating by 100/200/300% of your Intimidate Skill level.

———-

Antiques Dealer
Ranks : 1-3
When selling Rare, Exotic or Antique items, you get a 20/40/60% boost to the base value of the object for purposes of sales checks, as you convince your target that the item is worth more than it is.

———-

4) Equipment. Let’s face it : acquiring new gear is fun. Like talents, there are a vast array of cool items you can design to support warriors, rogues and mages. Social types? Um, costumes, maybe? Fashionable gear? Which doesn’t do much more than give you a boost to your social skills, resulting in a less-than-fun game of ‘change outfit before every dialogue to match the social group’.

Perhaps I lack imagination but I just think that social equipment is hard to make interesting without a lot more context and mechanical subtlety than is standard in RPG social interactions. I never claimed SoW would revolutionise dialogue. It’s got traditional dialogue trees and checks, that’s it.

Ok, so those are the issues. So what do I mean, “depreciating the social path”? I mean it is no longer a stand-alone game path. Instead, I’ve folded the Rogue and Social skills into one group called ‘Agent’ skills. ‘Agent’ because it is more of a neutral term than ‘Rogue’.

The way I figure it, while Warrior archetypes tend to confront challenges head on, to match raw strength against raw strength, Agents are characters who use their skills to circumvent problems or find ways to give themselves an advantage. They sneak around guards, they pick the lock on the back door, they lure foes into traps, they use their quick tongues to get themselves out of problems or to circumvent the ‘human barriers’ of others. They exploit the loopholes in the system, find the weak points. Agents are spies, assassins, scouts, thieves and diplomats.

I’m not getting rid of speech options, far from it. I’m simply saying that speech options are one of the tools of the Agent’s trade, not a completely independent path through SoW. If you fail a Persuasion skill check, your fallback may be needing to sneak in, or picking a lock, not necessarily another dialogue. Or, should you be a hybrid character, thwacking things with a sword.

So apparently there is this thing going on with Roger Ebert right now. I dunno, he’s some famous American movie reviewer or something? I’ve heard the name before, even if I’ve never actually seen or read any of the man’s reviews. One of the joys of living outside the US, you kinda have this half-sense of American culture thanks to TV.

It’s like the way that you can run across a forum discussion of American politics and have just as good an idea of what is being discussed as if it was your home nation’s politics. Of course, any other country on Earth and you’re probably pretty clueless about their politics/leaders unless they’re worrisome or newsworthy, like North Korea. It’s a funny thing, this injection of Americanism into all your cultural reference points…

Anyway, I’ve gotten side-tracked. So there was this thing with Ebert. Kellee Santiago gave a TED talk about games being art, Ebert publicly disagreed, and now people are talking about that. Well, they’re sharpening their pitchforks. Talking is a bit of a strong word here.

I’d like to take this opportunity to weigh in with what I think is a fairly novel perspective on the debate :

Who cares?

No seriously. Who cares? Is it gamers? Do gamers actually think about this issue, or is the internet response really just people rallying to defend their favourite hobby from the vile aggressor?

I think it is more the devs who actually care. Devs care about whether games are classified as art or not because adult humans would prefer to think of themselves as ‘artists’ rather than ‘toymakers’. Its got a better ring to it, a bit more validity amongst peer groups. You can hold your head up high at those cocktail parties when someone else introduces their boyfriend, the lawyer. You’re an artist and artists are awesome! You aren’t producing toys to suck the money from teenagers and young adults, you’re producing works of cultural significance!

Kelee responded to Ebert, it hints at this issue :

Similarly, it’s time to move on from any need to be validated by old media enthusiasts. It’s good for dinner-party discussion and entertaining as an intellectual exercise, but it’s just not a serious debate anymore.

Was it a serious debate, at some point? Hell, I hope not. What a waste of time.

So I’d like to appeal to my fellow devs : Stop being defensive, stop seeking validation from snooty art-nerds, it’s not like anyone but other art-nerds really care what they think. If you love your job and make a good living from it, what more do you need?

…

Ok, I suppose I can’t resist the opportunity to weigh in on the actual question. Are games art?

Of course. Art is simply some expression of creativity. The fact that it may be expressed in the form of something whose primary function is utility does not make it less valid. The Sistine Chapel was, first and foremost, a chapel. They just payed Michaelangelo to pretty it up, and we get to enjoy the result of Mike expressing himself within the constrains of his commission. (He couldn’t paint some scene from Greek mythology, obviously.) Likewise, we can look at vintage cars as works of art, while they were primarily designed as transport they possess an aesthetic that was a direct expression of someone’s creativity.

So when a game is designed primarily to entertain, as a digital toy with rules and mechanics, and when the creators of said toy have a design concept constraining them like ‘make a game about some angry bald dude killing everything from Greek mythology’, that in no way prevents them from pouring a bucket of art and expression into that game, transforming it as a whole into a piece of art, just as the Sistine Chapel is both adorned in artwork and itself a piece of art thanks to that adornment.

It’s worth noting that just because something is art, that doesn’t make it good art. Your child’s finger paintings may hold a special place in your heart but that doesn’t make them any less crap And likewise, by this definition, toothpaste boxes and furniture are also art, they are designed and have graphics, patterns and logos and suchlike. Just about everything these days is covered in art, we exist in a space so saturated by artwork that we don’t even notice it anymore, only the exceptional artwork stands out. When Ebert states that some films are art but others aren’t, well, he’s being silly. The reality is that those other films are art, they just aren’t good art. In the same way that a child’s finger paintings, while crappy, are still definitely works of art, of personal creativity. They’ve simply got to hone their techniques to compare to the skill and nuance of the masters.

Personally though, I’d prefer the industry doesn’t concentrate too much on ‘being art’. Whenever I see people having these kinds of discussions my ‘pompous asshole’ alarm starts ringing. It causes people to forget their primary purpose. A car can be a work of art, but it must first and foremost be an efficient means of transport. Games are art, but they must be good games first. I read about Flower a while back and couldn’t actually see what, if anything, the gameplay was. Watching a pretty screensaver with some minor quick time events?

Let’s round up all the game developers who start wearing berets and turtlenecks and go around talking about ‘Art’ like they can pronounce the capital letter, and push them out the airlock. Along with Ebert.

Amusing myself, amusing myself with mah test dataz…

Tell me a Zapp Brannigan RPG wouldn’t be completely awesome? You could fly around space, banging hot alien babes and…oh wait, Bioware already did that one. Nuts.

What what? Another comic? Yes! The 4th, in fact. I might even make this a habit. Maybe I’ll even settle on a style! Maybe. I need to work on the panel layout, I do each panel separately and I’m wasting too much space.

Hmmm, I don’t like the way the small preview is squashing it. So click the link to see the comic please.

Madcap Adventures #4

…is that many of them are bloody stupid. Or weasels. Or bloody stupid weasels.

Take this fellow, Cevat Yerli, the CEO of Crytek. His company makes an incredibly sophisticated 3D engine. Here he is, explaining why free demos are a thing of the past, and EA’s new ‘pay $15 for a demo’ model is awesome.

Let’s concentrate on one line :

He said: “A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don’t have in other industries such as film.

Film doesn’t have that concept eh Cevat? Nothing comes to mind when you think ‘free, short sample of the experience’…nothing at all…nothing starting with a ‘t’, perhaps?

Seriously, either he is just a bit slow and this is a case of ‘open mouth, insert foot’, or EA has their hands so far up his backside they simply need to wiggle a finger and he does a little weaselly dance.

Is this the same Crytek guy who blamed piracy for the poor PC sales of his generic, resource-hogging FPS’s failure to achieve great sales numbers? I can’t be bothered to google so I’m going to say ‘probably’.

Good luck to Crytek in the future, they’re going to need it with that kind of guy at the helm. I’d advise iceberg insurance.

Hah! My project at work is done (the lack of activity on this blog the last few weeks has been due to trying to get that pushed out the door). And, more importantly, I’m on holiday for the next week and a half. Huzzah!

Man, but I miss my varsity days when month long holidays were taken for granted. These days 2 weeks to myself seems an impossible luxury.

I’m planning to put a solid chunk of time into SoW. I’m also still investigating those 3rd party art leads, some are looking promising. So things are looking up all around!

Anyway, I’ll be blogging a bit more solidly over the coming week but I wanted to take the time to answer this question Kris posted. It’s worth posting since it is a fairly common issue in indie development.

Kris said :

Admittedly, I know nothing about the subject, but still don’t understand why someone wouldn’t be willing to work (under contract) for a piece of the final pie.

Ok. Why isn’t this generally workable? The answer is : Because any job is still a job, and all the normal rules of behavior apply. How many of you would do your job 8 hours a day if you weren’t being paid for it? People with real skills generally want payment unless they are personally invested in your project, and “personal investment” is fickle. People who are enthusiastic about gaming generally forget this, mainly because they are so passionate on the subject that they don’t feel it is a job. This opinion is generally rooted in never actually having to do the work themselves.

Sadly, the reality isn’t that. Game development, like trying to start a band, is work. Lots of it. There is a reason that such a large number of teenage boys learn guitar and start bands and why so few of those bands actually get anywhere. And why so many people start writing their novels and never finish. And there is a reason why so few indie games ever see the light of day. It’s hard.

How many builders will work for free? Plumbers? Lawyers? Ok, maybe you have a brother who knows how to fix pipes, or a friend who is a lawyer and can help you out with some contractual dispute. That’s cool. But what if the thing you want from them will involves years of work? From anyone but the closest family or friends, that is a lot to ask. Even if they agree, the odds are good their enthusiasm will evaporate over time. Hell, how many people can even work up the willpower to invest in themselves over the long term, never mind others? If you struggle to keep up an exercise routine you’re probably not going to be able to maintain the sustained effort this kind of project requires.

So, there are a couple of types of people you can find to work in your team :

1) Enthusiastic Amateurs: Overwhelmingly the most common type on indie projects. They have no idea how much work is ahead of them, they are just really excited about the great idea for this game! It’s gonna rock and surely anyone can see that and so they promise to work to achieve it for a percentage of the (guaranteed) profits.

These people tend to drop like flies from a project, they are the reason so many indie groups have massive member turn-over rates. Generally, the enthusiastic amateur who came up with the idea originally will be the one who sticks it out the longest. The constant changing of human resources and the shuffling of tasks this necessitates costs the project huge amounts of time as people come in, learn the ropes, have others invest in teaching them and then bugger off, taking your time investment with them. If you’re not careful, this type can drain even more resources than they contribute.

2) Professionals: These people don’t actually have to be in the industry per se, but they are experienced enough to know the realities. Ideas are cheap, and there are millions of them. There is no guarantee of profits, even if you are personally in love with the idea. All that is guaranteed is hard work, and lots of it. And they are good enough that their skills are in demand.

So, if you’re in demand, not personally invested in a project and you make a living from your profession, someone coming up to you and telling you about this cool idea they have which, if you’ll just work on it for free for a few years, will surely bring you fame and fortune, well, that’s met with a bit of cynicism. If you don’t even have a realistic understanding of the realities of your own project then you probably aren’t the best leader. Asking a professional to work for a cut of the profit is as good as asking them to work for nothing, because that is all you can guarantee. Nothing.

Seriously, offering this to pros is actually one of the best ways to get politely ignored, the fact that you suggested it implies that you are one of the first type, the enthusiastic amateurs. They smile indulgently to an enthusiastic child, try not to discourage you too much but they aren’t taking you too seriously. If they have patience left, that is, because they fend off that type of request all the time.

3) Personally-Invested Professional: A rare variation. This is the doctor who does charity work at public hospitals, the lawyer who takes on the poor for reduced rates. This person likes something inherent to the work beyond the payment and as such are willing to work for less. This is the ideal everyone imagines for indie game developers, the pro who works for a pittance because of how awesome the project is.

It does happen. But these people are rare and it’s hard to create personal investment that isn’t there. If someone is really, really enthusiastic about your idea, cool. But if they aren’t, trying to convince them to work for free isn’t going to go down well. So this option is awesome if you can find it, but is difficult to find. It can also be difficult to keep such people. They may be enthusiastic but they have lives to support. Free work generally takes lower priority than work which pays the bills. Since you’re essentially asking for a hand-out, you can’t aggressively claim their time.

4) The Rising Star: This is a professional in the making. They either have the skills or are gaining them quickly. What they don’t have is experience or recognition. So, if you can find one of these it is possible to get them on-board before their star has risen out of your price range.

They suffer from a similar problem to the personally-invested professional though. They need to live. Sure, they’re trying to make a name for themselves so probably don’t need as much. But, like I said, game development takes years. People starve to death in periods of time significantly less than years. So you run the risk of such people needing to find themselves real jobs or having to time-share them with their day job. Never-the-less, such people are great to have IF you can find them. They are, again, rare.

So this is the situation I and most indies find themselves in. Type 3&4 are very rare and impossible to predict, you may luck out or you may not, though it’s worth noting that the further along your project gets the more ‘luck’ you seem to get, success draws success and inspires confidence in people that their contribution will actually matter. Visible signs of progress show that you yourself aren’t just an enthusiastic amateur. Type 1 is often as much a hindrance as a help, they mean well but the reality of the long, hard road is too much for them. Type 2, the profession, is the most reliable type. They exist, they are easy enough to find and you can pretty much bank on them getting the work done. BUT they require pay, and the amount of work that needs doing on most game development projects means it is difficult to get everything you need from them without having a good capital investment to start with.

So what’s an indie to do? Simply, you try to find those rare gems (type 3&4) and in the mean time you buy the services of type 2 where you can afford it and learn to do the rest yourself. It’s a hard life, but someone has to do it hey.

Weekly update time! A little late but there is a reason. I’ve been pondering. And pondering. And pondering some more. Also, I’ve been researching some stuff, but we’ll get to that.

I’d written an update on Sunday but my pondering got in the way. I didn’t want to make any statements while I was still wrestling with some ideas.

But I’ve decided enough now, time to update regardless.

What was I pondering? I was pondering on the status of my project. How far along it is, how much further it still needs to go and what’s needed to get there. The answers to those questions are…troubling.

I want to be at a stage where I am in alpha early next year. Or at least have a large chunk of the game content (60%) playable and be in the polish/iterate gameplay stage.

That isn’t going to happen at my current velocity. It’s the artwork. There is just so much of it that an expansive RPG needs, and it takes so long to do myself. One or a couple of models a week isn’t enough, at 52 weeks in a year I won’t have generated all the art by the end of the year. AND we’re already a quarter of the way through the year AND life occasionally throws things in my way like overtime which stall progress AND doing the art leaves me no time to code/script/write/tweak/balance/polish. A game with art but no gameplay is useless.

So. This is a problem. I consider myself capable of filling many roles in game development but I’m stretched too thin and I need to accept that. Optimism is great and all but I need to step back and view this dispassionately as a project to complete, to weigh things and make decisions that fit with the metrics I’m seeing instead of just ignoring them because they aren’t what I’d like. I’ve been a really bad project manager and I can’t afford to be anymore.

There was a good point made in “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. I found the book a bit airy-fairy, overall, but one part really hit home. The difference between how an amateur and a professional approaches a task. How amateurs are fuelled by passion and that tends to be their undoing. Not only is passion a fickle fuel to rely on (it burns out when you have ‘bad days’ or when the project drags), it causes you to make bad decisions because your ego is too heavily invested in the task. It’s harder to make the tough decisions when you’re obsessed with your perfect vision, decisions like cutting scope to meet timelines…

So. Problem identified, solutions needed.

The first potential solution is obvious. Find an outside source for art. If I can get someone else to do it then I don’t need to, freeing me up for the other tasks. An obvious answer, but also a tricky one. Finding a good artist who can produce the massive amount of content I need while working within my budget (ie dirt cheap) and who can commit to working hard over the long term…well, let’s just say they don’t grow on trees.

I’ve an advert up on ITS, and I will be searching around, but that is an unknown variable. I may find someone, or multiple someones, but I may not. And I may or may not be able to afford to pay them for enough content to fill my needs and they may or may not drift off to other life commitments. So, can’t rely on that.

Another source of art is to buy existing art packs or commission them. Plenty of 3D artists out there, after all. Buying is kinda tricky. You have to find art that matches your style, that fits your polygon budget and is consistent in that sense with the other objects in the game, that is in a format your engine can use, not to mention within your price range. It’s worth it, if you can find it, but it’s unlikely you will find everything you need to populate your game with art. Common things like houses and swords are easy enough to find but you will struggle to find art that fits a game-specific concept, like a unique monster or location. Commissioning work is a way to solve that but is extremely expensive. Pro contract artists/art houses tend to charge per hour at a rate that can easily break your bank for even a few models.

So I’m investigating things in those directions, both in looking for help and in trying to find 3rd party art I can use. I’ve actually met some success, I’ve spent a fair amount of time searching the web and evaluating over the last few days (I spent all of last night browsing models, for example).

Let me show you my latest acquisition. Ladies and gents, let me present Tyver Castle, the seat of the royalty in the capital city of Athar. Brought to you courtesy of an artist from TurboSquid. Seen here running in T3D, that’s a 44k polygon model.

Nice eh? Would have taken me weeks to do myself. I still have to spend some time working on models like this because the format conversion process isn’t 100% effective, certain things can get a little messed up. You can see it on the banners there. I also need to optimise the material definitions, there is a lot of unneccessary repetition which will slow down rendering. But overall it’s a massive time saver. And there is plenty more tasty models out there, from that artist, from TurboSquid and from other sites.

At a price, of course. I could QUITE quickly burn my credit card to a cinder. It’s already glowing orange and attempting to burn through my pocket.

So that’s looking promising. I don’t have to do everything on the art side. HOWEVER, there is more to it than just buyinf art. I’m going to have to adapt my designs to work around the assets I have and can buy in the future. I didn’t spec the layout of that model, it just looks a bit like I’d pictured Tyver Castle in my head. Now, when I design that zone I’m going to have to build it around the art I have, instead of designing the art around the zone encounters and layout I’ve planned. It’s a significant difference, if you think about it. But beggars can’t be choosers hey.

There was more to the pondering, and here is where we enter the area where I’m still thinking about ideas and whether I should go in that direction. TAKE NOTHING HERE AS A PROMISE OF INTENT. It’s just a line of thought.

This whole thing got me thinking deeply about my resources. How to most efficiently deploy my resources to achieve my goals. And it got me thinking along the line of text adventures. The ITS crew like text adventures, AoD will use them fairly extensively in certain places, for specific missions. I’d planned to do some myself, instead of cutscenes/scripted encounters. Little story encounters.

But what if I extended that, I thought? What if I don’t make it a side-feature, an exception, but an integral part of the game? What if I shift more of that art content burden into a text/2D content burden?

I’m not the first to think of this, of course. Plenty of older games, working with the hardware and limitations of the time, used 2D to supplement their game environments. For example, in Might and Magic 6, you never saw 3D representations of the inside of buildings. You saw a 2D rendered scene with a character and some dialogue options.

And then there is Darklands. I never really played it but it is an interesting concept. Take a look at this video, it explains it better than anything I could write :

Darklands

Darklands is less a game with an added text adventure mode as a text adventure with added game modes. Now, I’m not talking about going that far but think for a bit about some of those sequences. The bit with the party trying to talk their way into town and failing, then being spotted later by guards. It would require a lot of careful scripting and animation to make that work. Few if any modern RPGs actually have that much depth of choice, simply because of the cost of implementing all those options. By relying on text you may not have quite the “immersion” in terms of 3D visuals and environmental interaction, but you open the way to a different type of immersion, the imagination-powered type.

It’s something I’m thinking about. Such abstraction isn’t the sole domain of old games. Eve Online, for example, abstracts away the space stations. Space combat is the core focus of Eve, not wandering around in a space station and admiring the space pot-plants. So the space station is abstracted, you can access services, contact NPCs and outfit your ship. But that is all done in a 2D gui screen, very little art is needed.

So it’s something I am thinking about, whether I can use 2D or text to help ease the art burden on myself in some ways, without fundamentally changing the game experience.

I’m still pondering, but I’ll let you know when/if I make a decision. For now, my primary drive is finding new art to buy. My hunger is insatiable.

I should have made a spaceship RPG. Some ship models, some particle effects a few asteroids and space stations and a bunch of nebula backdrops. Would have been far easier, sigh. And far cheaper.