Viridian Games

Okay, today I’m going to talk about my two favorite YouTube channels.

First, there’s DeceasedCrab. DC does “Let’s Plays“. The definition of an LP is sort of nebulous; an LP isn’t a speedrun; it’s more of an attempt by a player to present a game in its entirety. For that reason, it doesn’t make much sense to do LPs of games that are popular and easily available, unless you want to go the MST3K route on them.

While DC did not invent the LP, his excellent LP of La-Mulana catapulted him into the spotlight. Since then he has wisely stuck to playing rare, out-of-print, offbeat and indie games.

DC talks while he plays, and he’s basically either commenting on what is happening or free-associating. His fans (including me) love him because he’s constantly dropping anime, manga or gaming references into his LPs. He’s also got a habit of breaking out into song; indeed, more than once his viewers have sent him songs to sing on the air.

DC also has a fantastic ethic about his videos. He rarely swears (indeed, he accidentally dropped the F-bomb in his second video of La-Mulana and then instantly chastised himself) and he posts a video practically every day.

Every time I go to DC’s channel I know I’m going to be treated to something funny and unique.

My other favorite YouTube channel belongs to GarlandTheGreat. Garland is pretty much the exact opposite of DC. He doesn’t do voiceovers. Most of the games he makes videos for are common, popular games. But Garland’s videos are amazing.

He’s done complete 100% runs of Crash Bandicoot 1, 2 and 3 and a Metal Gear Solid run on Extreme difficulty where he takes no damage (until he encounters some absolutely unavoidable hits at the very end).

But his real love is in destroying Square RPGs.

Remember the Midgar Serpent in Final Fantasy VII, which was deliberately made so powerful your party couldn’t beat it, forcing you to tame a chocobo to get past it? Here’s a video of him defeating it with just Tifa at level 5.

He has completed a run through Final Fantasy X where he was not allowed to use the Sphere Grid, not allowed to customize his weapons, not allowed to summon Aeons, and not allowed to use Overdrives. Indeed, that wasn’t challenging enough for him, because he’s now begun another playthrough where he is also not allowed to use items or Riku’s “Trio of 9999″ mix.

The thing that really makes his videos is his patience. He routinely talks about taking hundreds of tries to get a video right. In the intro for his Metal Gear Solid videos he mentions that he has played Metal Gear Solid all the way through 62 times.

He is currently working on his two magnum opii: a tool-assisted 100% speedrun of Final Fantasy VII…and a non-tool-assisted 100% speedrun of Final Fantasy VII.

Whenever I go to Garland’s channel I know I’m going to see something amazing done to a video game I thought I knew everything about.

So two froody dudes, Dan “Gibbage” Marshall and Ben Ward, decide to stop piddling about with their own pathetic projects and team up, creating Zombie Cow Studios in the process.

And to celebrate, they decided to give away a game for free - an adventure game called Ben There, Dan That!, which stars…um, them. That’s right, you control Ben and Dan as they bumble through a loving homage to the classic Lucasarts Adventure games, doing things like smacking priests with bibles, visiting alternate dimensions, and…um…climbing out of a cow’s rear end. Hey, they’re British.

Now, even given the fact that they used Adventure Game Studio to create the game, that’s a heck of a lot of work to just give away. But I heartily, heartily approve of the process, and not just because I’m cheap. I think it’s the right thing to do because it helps them grow their community, and I believe that community is the solution to all of gaming’s problems.

Does your game stink? Get people interested in the potential your game might have and they can help you fix it. And you don’t have to do it all before you ship. Feedback after you ship is just as vital - but those lines of communication must be open.

Are you having trouble marketing your game? Again, community can help. Bungie’s testers sang the praises of Myth: The Fallen Lords to all their friends once their NDAs were lifted, which helped Bungie as they took their first steps into the PC market.

Are you having trouble keeping people interested in your game? Once again, community to the rescue. The most popular online first-person shooter in the world is still Counter-Strike, which kept copies of the original Half-Life on store shelves for years. The incredible response of the Korean community means that you can still walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a copy of StarCraft - a game that was released in 1998! Caravel Games goes even farther with their Deadly Rooms of Death series. The DRoD games consist of a layout of rooms, each containing a puzzle. The DRoD website gives you an overall map of the game - and clicking any room on the map takes you to a forum thread discussing that room. It’s an excellent way to provide player-based support, in addition to player-created content.

Are you having trouble funding your game? Yes, this is the iffiest one, but it’s been done. Lots of people have started by creating a small, well-supported game and then rolling the profits from that into something much larger. I think my favorite story of this nature is that of Jeff Minter, who was saved from having to get a real job by the incredible response to Llamatron, which Minter released for free along with a README.TXT file that included this paragraph:

Here’s the deal. You play Llamatron and check out the hook. If it gets you (and I reckon it will if you like mayhem), then send us a fiver and, as a reward for being so honest, we will send you an ace poster of our gun-toting llama, a newsletter, and a complete copy of Andes Attack, originally released in 1988 to considerable critical acclaim. Two games for a fiver - can’t be bad. And if the response is good, there will be more Shareware. And better.

And of course there’s also the aforementioned Dan Marshall, who is currently in the process of giving away two hundred pounds to an indie developer chosen by his readers.

This is the kind of thing Jeff Vogel is talking about when he says, “Shareware is a force for good.”

And finally, the big one.

Are you having trouble with people pirating your game?

Well, of course you are. People pirate stuff. They’re going to do it. You can’t do much about it.

If you want to come to terms with piracy, you need to come to understand that you’re not trying to eliminate it. You’re trying to reduce its impact to the point where you can still make the money you need to make on your game to stay in business. I wish I could tell you to just ignore piracy but I can’t - you should be going onto those download sites and demanding that they remove your game, because you do want pirating your game to be more complicated than just doing a Google search.

How can community help here?

Well, it’s harder to steal from somebody when you feel like you know them personally. It’s also harder to steal from somebody when they are trying to be the good guys.

The seminal example of using community to beat piracy is Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 2. Absolutely no anti-piracy stuff on the disc. No CD key. No CD check. No phoning home. No refusing to run if there’s a compiler on the same system. No installing low-level drivers that monitor all data traffic without the user’s knowledge. Nothing. The only thing it uses is a unique account key that allows you to create a support account on Stardock’s digital distribution network, so that you can redownload the game if you lose your discs.

And yet it sold a bazillion copies and was a huge moneymaker for Stardock. And as I’ve mentioned before, one of those copies was sold to me. Even though I’ll never have time to play such an involved game. Why did I buy it? Because they were doing it right.

I have said that game design is a conversation between the developer and the player. But now I’ve come to realize that the metagame of game development is the same thing.

If you want to succeed in game development, don’t just make games. Help people have fun. And that means getting personally involved, with all the risks that carries.

Tim Schafer cannot catch a break in this goddamn industry.

Move on, Tim. Go work for Pixar. Write an animated movie for them and make a hojillion dollars. I know you loving Gaming, but Gaming is currently controlled by her chain-smoking crack-addicted abusive alcoholic mother Corporate Game Development and until Gaming finds the courage to sneak out of her mother’s house and jump into your convertible so you can spirit her away, you two are obviously never going to be together.

Edit: I jumped the gun just a bit on this (though reading that headline, can you blame me?) I had actually gone to the Double Fine Action News Site to find out if Brutal Legend was going to be okay. I did not think to mouseover the picture of the weevil, but that’s Schafer for you.

Edit 2: Turns out that Activision did drop Brutal Legend - fortunately, Double Fine owns the IP. So things aren’t quite as rosy as Tim made them out to be. Yes, in theory, with Guitar Hero and Rock Band making squillions of dollars finding a new publisher for Brutal Legend should be a no-brainer, but please see the “chain-smoking crack-addicted abusive alcoholic mother” comment I made above.

Yes, it’s another “while you are waiting” post. Deal.

I’ve got a couple friends here at work whose websites are definitely worth checking out.

First, Patrick Rogers. He’s an avid Go player who recently hit traffic gold on his site by being the first person to post the complete lyrics to all three episodes of Dr. Horrible.

Second, Brandon “Rusty” Parks. Rusty’s a real character, as you’ll be able to tell when he starts talking about how the universe has a discrete pixel size and a discrete frame rate.

Third, Bobby Thurman…who I actually don’t work with any more and probably should keep in better contact with.

And finally, you know those people who keep coming into game development forums or IRC channels and ask how to program an MMORPG? Yeah, laugh at them. Go ahead. Because everybody knows that nobody can possibly write an indie MMORPG. And oddly enough, it’s being worked on by all three of the gentlemen I detailed above! What are the odds?!

The Spore Creature Creator. Is it awesome? Of course it is. Why?

Well, for starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an easier-to-use piece of software. How easy is it?

My daughter Jewel made that. She’s three years old.

The other thing that struck me is that the creator has all the functionality promised by Will in his original presentation video. While other developers have been cutting features, resulting in software that looks nothing like their original presentations, Will and his team have been working hard to not only implement everything but even add features.

And if you’ve never watched that video, I strongly suggest you set aside an hour and do so. Here, I’ll embed it to make it easier for you!

After four long years, Jari’s final college project passed (kind of a given when it’s a complete logic simulation that has been featured in multiple magazines). He has been given his Bachelor’s of Engineering certificate and booted out the door. Congratulations, Jari! Maybe now you’ll be able to find a real job, instead of the crappy place you work now.

It’s not just me! I’m not alone! The thing I like most about this is that he’s taking a completely different tack. He’s doing as straight a remake as possible, whereas I, in my Yankee arrogance, have decided to actually try to improve on the original game.

I can’t wait to play it.

Jay Barnson, the man who inspired me to write an RPG in 40 hours with this article, has a new RPG of his own out! It’s called Frayed Knights and it combines Wizardry 8-style gameplay with as much snarky humor as you could want.

Get the “pilot episode” here. The price of admission is that you must fill out a short survey about the game so he can make it and later episodes better.

Brad Wardell of Stardock has talked a lot on his blog about the development of Sins of a Solar Empire, and how it brought Stardock and Ironclad Games very close together, to the point where they could almost be considered one company. Stardock is technically the publisher but because they also develop games they could provide all kinds of help to Ironclad to get their game ready to go out the door - and the game certainly seems to have benefited, with a Metacritic score of 88.

Now Stardock is teaming up not just with Ironclad but also with Gas Powered Games to produce their new action/strategy/RPG mashup game Demigod.

In a previous video blog of mine I mentioned how Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games teamed up to the benefit of both, and this appears to be More Of The Same, and I couldn’t be happier.

Frankly, I think the two best game publishers on Earth right now are Stardock and Valve. Funny how both are developers as well as publishers. And funny how both use a combination of digital distribution and retail to sell their games.

I’ve been thinking that it’s about time to start challenging myself again. Yes, yes, Planitia…but there’s something else I’ve been wanting to do.

I’ve mentioned the self-confidence problems that I’ve had in the past and while I’m a lot better (look, Ma! I’m writing in public!) there is one thing I still don’t like to do and that is compete. I shy away from testing my skills against other people, because I’m afraid I’ll discover that I suck. Well, it’s time to meet this thing head-on.

Therefore, I am hereby announcing that I will compete in Ludum Dare Eleven, which will be held from April 18-20.

Now, see, in order for this to really work I’m going to need to make a pretty good showing of it. So for the next month I’m going to be making lots and lots of small games. I’m hoping to do at least four and I don’t want any of them to take longer than a week to do. This will get me better at starting out quickly and sand over any edges in my 2D development skills.

So the bad news is that there won’t be any Planitia news for a while. The good news is that there should be lots more news on all the other games I’m doing leading up to the competition.

I’m also going to have to come up with a few good recipes, since one of the categories you’re graded on is food…