No Time To Play

There’s been much talk lately about Unity 3D. A combination of rich toolset, portability, price and other factors conspire to make it increasingly popular. The recently released Indie Games Developer magazine opens with an article on it, and this sentence jumped at me:

In fact, [Unity] is so simple that it sometimes scares people off initially as they do not believe that something so easy to use can produce professional quality games and that there must be compromises to be made.

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Well-known game developer Raph Koster starts 2012 with a 6-point guide to making cheaper games, to which the Rampant Coyote responds thoughtfully as ever. Here at No Time To Play, we are definitely interested in this particular topic, though we prefer to frame it as making games faster instead. Since time is money, that’s the same thing in the end: both come down to making games with less work. That’s especially important nowadays, as development times/costs are skyrocketing towards unsustainable levels (as Shamus Young points out at every turn).

But how can you do that? Let me add my own two cents first.
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Two gaming publications have just announced that they’re closing down. That in itself is no big deal, except perhaps for the timing. What is interesting is the different ways it was handled.

On the one hand we have the GamePro magazine issuing a press release a mere week in advance (which promptly drew the ire of Internet archivist Jason Scott). On the other hand, we have GameSetWatch explaining their reasons in a very personal manner, and explicitly promising to keep the website online.
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I know I am a little late to the party (seven months a bit too late perhaps), but now I think is a good time for me to say something about a “little” game called Rift. I will not speak here about the game itself (that will happen in a future article), but about the hype surrounding it and the market in which it has grown its own segment. Some may have heard of Rift, some may have not, but at some point it had a shiny trailer which ended with the phrase: “you are not in Azeroth anymore”.

OK, now I am getting to some familiar grounds. For most gamers Azeroth is already famous thanks to World of Warcraft. Unfortunately many people do not seem to know there are other MMORPGs besides Blizzard’s mammoth. Heck, some of them don’t even know what the term MMO really stands for. Or the fact that WOW copied the key elements form a pretty famous game called Everquest. Or the fact that MUDs were the basic ground on which the whole “MMO” thing grew up to become what they are today.
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Logo from Wikipedia

Good Old Games (GOG.com) has released the first and second trilogies of the Ultima series.  This is significant because for many people, Ultima was their first delve into computer RPG’s.  Not only that, but the Ultimas for better or worse have shaped all the RPGs that have followed it.

Some things that are staples today in what is considered an “expansive world” (like the ability to cook, or NPC schedules) started or at least became popular in the Ultima games.  And Richard “Lord British” Garriott, creator of Ultima, is a model for many developers who would like to strike it big in the world of game development starting from nothing but lines of code and a PC.

So, whatever your opinion of Ultima, it has a lot of historical significance.  And so I bought the two trilogies on GOG.com and started playing through them.  This article is going through the ones I have played, comparing my recollections of the games with my actual playthroughs and noting things that are interesting in each title.

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen;

Felix has been kind enough to give me permission to make a mess of post on this site, so in the proud tradition of programmers everywhere: Hello, world!

Let me warn you; the first part of this is going to read a little bit like a rant, but I promise it gets constructive.  And I’m not ranting against things I hate, I’m ranting about things I wish could be better.  Things, in fact, that I love.  To my mind, this is vital for game developers to see; we, as a collective, need to always learn and strive to make better products.  We need to learn from the good and from the bad, and always play with an open mind.

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Last night, my friend Felix asked me for an article for No Time To Play, and since I owe him and this time I knew I can do it, I started thinking about games once again and my history with playing. And I thought about sharing with you as much as I can in a blog post. So, this is it: my (incomplete and far from final) story with games.

I used to be quite a gamer. I was playing around 2-3 hours a day on average, and I had 5-6 hours sessions at times. I loved it. I was escaping to alternate worlds, exploring different situations and having a wonderful feeling whenever I was winning.

Not anymore. Now, when I play games from time to time I can’t help myself analyzing them. I see most games as repetitive, dull, without substance. Maybe I learned too much about how my brain works. Maybe I’ve seen more of the real life and games seem artificial. Or maybe games are not what they used to be.
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What is it with people waking up in 2011 to declare they know what CRPGs (computer role-playing games for the acronym challenged) are, better than anyone else? It’s doubly annoying, as the genre is rich and diverse on the one hand, and solidly anchored in a tradition of pen&paper games on the other hand.

The latest to try and squeeze countless games into a narrow definition (and complain about it) is this write-up from an online magazine I hadn’t heard about before. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, that’s okay, because the tl;dr version is right there at the beginning.

None of these games (ed: DA, Fable, Final Fantasy) are role-playing games. They are, in fact, nothing more than story-driven strategy games.

At that point, I almost stopped reading, because the author is criticizing a bunch of very different CRPG franchises for… capturing the essence of Dungeons and Dragons itself.

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…But does anyone need to be saved? Good question, and to be honest I think lately the paying customers need more and more patience just to keep staying… legal. What? Shouldn’t “legal” be the word by default when it comes to any normal situation that regards the average citizen? I mean, it the eyes of the law we are all innocent until proved otherwise. We don’t ban knives because people could stab other people… and some countries do not ban weapon carrying… but let’s not go there. Usually it’s people who kill people, but some people like to think that “guns do kill people”. I could come up with examples of people who were killed using… a fork. Now, should we “ban” forks? Of course not, that would be insane.
So, everyone who possesses a fork is a potential… killer. Kind of far fetched, isn’t it? And let’s not forget the part with “innocent until…”

Well, apparently when it comes to software or video games… you are not as innocent as you though you might be. You have the potential to be one of the filthy creatures that is stealing some other people’s hard work.

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Let me tell you about the man named Chris Crawford. A legendary game designer, he created several landmark war- and strategy games, and most importantly wrote a good deal about it. His 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design (available for free online) is pretty much required reading in this business. For at least 15 years, he’s been working on a system for interactive storytelling called Storytron — formerly Erasmatron — which he hopes will revolutionize gaming.

After reading my recent article about games and stories, a friend pointed out that my ideas sound a lot like the concept that underlies Storytron. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my point at all, and whether the misunderstanding was my fault or his, a clarification can only help.

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