Yet Another Hero
Dan Marshall, founder / CEO / only full-time employee of Size Five Games, has stunned everybody by releasing Gun Monkeys, which has guns and monkeys and is online and lets you shoot other players.
Anyone who is familiar with Dan’s previous game Gibbage will see lots of similarities.
It’s currently on Steam for a measly $9.
Yay for getting stuff done!
Satellite Reign
The Kickstarter for Mike Diskett’s spiritual successor to Syndicate Wars, Satellite Reign, is finally up.
By the way, I love that name. It’s got a clever double meaning; first, it’s a takeoff of “Satellite Rain”, one of the most visually impressive weapons from Syndicate Wars. And second, of course, the game is about megacorporations that rule everyone by monitoring them using satellites and drones. It’s a winner.
While I enjoyed the Syndicate first-person shooter (and I know I’m apparently the only one) it will be fantastic to play a “real” Syndicate game again.
Assuming the Kickstarter succeeds. Let’s make that happen, people!
And, just in case you were wondering what Syndicate Wars was all about, here’s the video I did explaining the game.
And I just realized that Mike Diskett himself commented on that video! Squee!
More Heroes!
Wow, I can’t believe I forgot these guys. Mike Hommel and Seth Robinson are two friends of mine who I got to know better during the Indie Conversation.
They have conspired to create a game called Growtopia, which is a collaborative creative MMO on iOS and Android (Seth claims desktop versions are Coming Soon). It is apparently the business and has generated tons of sales for them, which makes me very happy. Seth wrote an excellent postmortem for it, which you can read here.
Andy Moore, who is apparently the only remaining contributor to the Conversation, also had a recent big hit with Monster Loves You. MLY is published by Dejobaan Games, one of my favorite “indie” publishers. (I still want a sequel to A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, guys.) Again, you can read a postmortem of Monster Loves You here on Gamasutra. He also took MLY to Pax and wrote up a great article on how to take your game to Pax if you’re an indie.
So, while I was unemployed and feeling sorry for myself, my friends were out doing great things! I should follow their example.
Heroes
It’s interesting to track my own metamorphosis as a game developer.
Not too long ago, if you asked me who my heroes were when it came to game development, I would mention people like Warren Spector, Richard Garriott (de Cayeux) and Peter Molyneux. These guys all started their work when game development was a very nebulous endeavor – no one knew what would work and what wouldn’t. They hit upon winning formulas, allowing them to become well-known and at least moderately wealthy.
But, as I’ve mentioned before, the “rules” of game development at the upper end are now set in stone – or at least in ballistic-grade gelatin. Add the fact that the cost of game development has skyrocketed and the fact that the industry is so volatile that it’s almost impossible to have a “work for 20 years at the same company and then retire” kind of career, and you’ve got an industry that makes games I like to play, but one I don’t find myself wanting to work in as much.
Which brings me great sorrow, but such is life.
So who are my heroes now? Who is Doing It Right? Who do I want to emulate?
My heroes now are mostly indies – guys and gals doing it hardscrabble fashion, showing lots of talent, doing whatever they want and almost certainly not getting compensated enough for what they do.
For instance…
Jeff Vogel. I’ve talked about him before. Since I wrote that article, he has since found further success on Steam and iOS devices. Again, he’s doing it just the way I’d like to – making the games he wants and making a good living at them.
Christer Kaitila. He’s a huge game jam fan – to the point where he wrote a book about them. He’s a longtime Ludum Dare contributor and composed my favorite LD Keynote ever. His star is currently rising as the creator and maintainer of #1GAM – the One-Game-A-Month project. The response to this has been overwhelming, the site has tons of entries and the new IRC channel is as busy as #Ludumdare usually is.
Jay Barnson. I’ve mentioned him before and I’ll probably mention him again. He’s a longtime friend who is currently working on a sequel to his successful game, Frayed Knights. He, like I, spent many years doing professional game development before going indie.
Sophie Houlden. She’s an absolute master of Unity, doing crazy awesome things in a frighteningly short amount of time. Unfortunately, a lot of her games (Swift*Stitch in particular) appear to be underrated.
Sos Sosowski. Not only did he design his own website, which is awesmoe, he developed the crazy/fantastic McPixel, which was all over YouTube after its release.
Daniel Remar. Yeah, yeah, I talk about Daniel all the time. I can’t help it; I’ve loved everything he’s done. And he somehow manages to make games while holding down a full-time job and then release them for free.
I also read recently about a woman who wrote a dozen books, one a year, while home-schooling her autistic son. I think you can see how a setup would be attractive to me.
I need to rekindle the dream of my own independent game development…and as far as I can tell, there’s only one path open to me. More on that later.
Name That Game 92 – Signature Style
Just like any other sort of artist, a lot of game developers have wells that they like to revisit. Sometimes it becomes possible to know who (or what studio) made a game just by watching some of the gameplay. (Though this can get difficult if a lot of other developers start biting their style.)
But sometimes a developer simply transcends and a mechanic, theme or combination becomes a signature of a particular developer.
Below I list ten styles for you to match with their creators. How many can you name?
1. This company made a game with a signature over-the-top art style featuring all-out war between elves, dwarves, men, and orcs. They then moved on to make a very similar game set in the far future between hulking marines in power armor, inscrutable glowing aliens, and nearly-unstoppable assimiliating alien bugs. They then went on to write an MMO based on the first game series.
2. This developer loves little semi-autonomous people and puts them in practically every game he makes – and he’s been making games for many decades. While he usually designs his games around the concept, he isn’t above shoehorning them into games where they don’t strictly belong.
3. This developer, choosing to work in the oeuvre of the text adventure, created some of the most fun, wacky and memorable game situations that had been seen at the time. His games also tended to be less difficult than other text adventures (even those created by the same company), allowing players to experience more of his games. EDIT: It has been impressed upon me that there is more than one designer who fits this description; I will accept either as an appropriate answer.
4. This developer took a board wargame, programmed it into a computer, then sold it as his own. (Seriously, the designers of the original boardgame should have sued the pants off him.) Since the game dealt with science fiction man-to-man combat and was fairly technical, computerizing the game made it a lot easier to play. He has since spent his entire career updating and remaking that first game in various genres.
5. This developer got his start making games for the Commodore VIC-20 when all of his friends were working on the ZX Spectrum. He pounded out lots of little fast-action games, some of which were krep but at least one of which is considered a classic. His trademarks are synesthesia and…uh, yaks.
6. This developer got his start by taking top-down, tile-based roleplaying games like Rogue, setting them outside and using tiled graphics to represent terrain, monsters and characters instead of numbers and letters. As his skill grew, he began to focus on the world simulation of the games he was making. Each one grew more and more detailed, with NPCs that had branching dialog trees, much more detailed (though still top-down and tiled) graphics and game worlds, and, ultimately, more thought-provoking plots than competing games.
7. This developer has worked on graphic adventures, action games, adventure games and real-time strategy games. His schtick is to make whatever game he’s working on completely bizarre and usually hilarious.
8. This developer pioneered both single-screen and online multiplayer games years – perhaps decades – before their time. Also famous for being one of the first transgendered game designers in history.
9. This developer wrote the first smash hit for the ZX Spectrum, then followed it up with an even bigger hit. He then disappeared, not only from the gaming scene but from society in general. It took years to find him, and it turned out that after blowing all his money he had just wandered around Europe living in communes, planting flowers, and working at fish canning plants.
10. This company had the goal of making movie-style experiences on computers and consoles – a difficult task given how primitive the machines were at the time. Their goal required them to become pioneers of game graphics and their games usually looked better than any of their contemporaries. Gameplay usually consisted of movie-style scenes with some degree of interactivity interspersed within a larger strategy or resrouce management game.
Aw.
Richard Le Parmentier, who played Admiral Motti in Star Wars but much more importantly signed my cheesehead, has died.
I’m sad now.
Godus
Well, I guess this was inevitable. Peter Molyneux is attempting to remake Populous. Which means that Planitia could easily become superfluous.
Now, I don’t resent Peter one bit for this. In fact, I kind of knew it was coming. A few months ago I watched a presentation Peter gave about the development of the original Populous, and at the end, he showed off a multiplayer version he’d been working on with massive islands. That drew a great deal of applause, so it was fairly natural that Peter would try to go forward with that project.
What I don’t like is what is happening to the project. Godus, at this rate, will not get funded.
There are a lot of people who feel that Peter has broken past promises and thus can’t be trusted with this project. And Peter isn’t helping anything by making similar promises for Godus; he swore there would be a tech demo out on Friday, for instance…it has not seen daylight yet. And if it doesn’t come out within the next couple of days, it will be too late for that tech demo to sway people into supporting the Kickstarter.
But the general consensus I’m getting is that people are effectively punishing Peter, in a sort of inverse to how they rewarded Tim Schafer. That makes me…uncomfortable. It seems a little unfair to punish everyone at Peter’s company – as well as the many people who would love to see a Populous remake – because of Peter himself. In this case, I think Peter can be trusted. It’s a small company making a small game for a relatively small amount of money. I’d like to see more people take the risk and fund Godus.
Lots of Closed Doors Recently…
And here is a window.
I have a chance through Kickstarter to become the lead programmer of a great real-time strategy game – Conquest 2: The Vyrium Uprising! This would allow me and my family to get back to Austin, and would help me to get back into an industry I love but I feel has been very abusive lately.
And you get a great game to boot!
Planitia’s Progress
Once again, I find that I am the least talented person on my own team.
Here’s the new villager for Planitia, modelled, textured and animated by Alexis Bogue. Look at him! Isn’t he adorable? Don’t you want to just pick him up and cuddle him and keep him safe and SMITE WHOEVER WANTS TO HURT HIM WITH LIGHTNING BOLTS?!
I can already see the plushie!
