It’s been almost a year since I last looked into IF authoring systems, and the market has shifted again. A Hugo title became the most talked about game in 2011 — one that features extensive multimedia and random combat to boot. Yay for Cryptozookeeper! There is also an ever-increasing number of (choice-based) Web games, outnumbering those written for my new favorite platform, TADS 3.

Speaking of that, soon after a new release of TADS came out with Web play support, thus bringing the old powerhouse in line with its main competitor, the news spread like fire that a new online service came out enabling people to author Inform 7 stories online. To top it all, mere days later the young Quest system announced official support for a similar feature!

All that rekindled my interest in authoring, so what started as a test drive last year turned into a serious porting effort. Whether a tiny, retro-styled text adventure is a good match for a modern authoring system and the current IF scene remains to be seen. But whatever happens, the porting process taught me invaluable lessons.

On the one hand, a more sophisticated authoring system requires some adaptations. Puzzle solutions that couldn’t be implemented with a two-word parser become the default; others must be adapted to the full containment model. Unimplemented nouns become unacceptable and so on.

But! Not everything needs to be changed. The original Catch That Cat relies entirely on nonverbal communication with the NPCs, and that still makes perfect sense for the cat. Using explicitly listed objects to decorate a room, as opposed to flowery prose, is part of the game concept, and that works even better when you can outright mark them as Decoration.

Verbs are more of an issue. Two verbs that any casual IF player will try are TALK TO and USE. Luckily, TADS 3 has the former by default, as for the latter, the default response for non-existing verbs is:

The word “use” is not necessary in this story.

which cuts down on the number of extraneous verbs I need to implement. (That, and TADS 3 has an enormous list of built-in verbs.) On the minus side, those verbs I can’t get away without involve more boilerplate than I’m used to. Oh well.

One stumbling block was turning a large, hairy block of if-else instructions into declarative code. Not only it required considerable lateral thinking — not my strong point — but it resulted in more code, not less. At least the interaction is more natural now, and hey, that’s the kind of thing that makes game development as fun for me as playing games.

Last but not least, I managed with a bit of work to install the latest FrobTads and figure out how to use it, only to realize I will still need the official Windows version to build stand-alone games, as well as for syntax highlighting, until I can find or make my own.

Looks like the adventure is just starting… again.

P.S. I found the TADS 3 library extensions in the mean time. Durr!

Adventures in Interactive Fiction by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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.

To which Nightwrath replied, “easy for whom? professionals who have used such tools for years?” And I remembered something else he told me recently (and which matches my own observations), namely that many amateur projects seem to fizzle at the stage where a character model loads and can be moved around on a simple map. You may say that’s burnout: they used up all their energy to get to this point, and they have nothing left for the game itself. And I admit that being able to focus on making the game proper is a good thing.

But you see, that’s the real difficulty.

There, I said it. Making the engine is laborious, but straightforward and exciting. You know exactly what your goal is, and all you have to do is tackle the various problems one by one. But once you get to making the actual game, suddenly we’re talking hard decisions. And if you thought programming was fiddly, wait until you get to polishing.

Tell you what. Fire up your favorite 3D modeler and model the rooms in your own apartment (just the walls and such for now). Done? Now furnish it. Grabs some premade models off the net, we’re just playing. Tired yet? Animate the doors to make them swing. (You did add doors, right?) Make the light switches flippable, too. And do you have textures on everything? Good. Now multiply that by 50 or 100 for a single building. How many of those were you planning to have in your game?

If you haven’t run away by now, maybe we can talk about collisions, interactions, AI waypoints, the AI proper, dialogues, flavor text… Or assembling all of that in a game that’s playable, winnable and fun.

You want all these operations to be as easy as possible. You want to, because you’ll be doing them again and again, way past the point where it stops being fun. That’s plenty of effort right there, never mind that effort in itself does not imply quality results. As for the need to make compromises, when did that become a problem? You can’t even do engineering, or design (which is a branch thereof), without plenty of compromising. Don’t you think Shigeru Miyamoto had to compromise with Mario? Or Gunpei Yokoi with the Game Boy? And yet they are the most popular video game character, and the best-selling gaming device ever, respectively.

Effort, quality and compromises by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

No, I won’t give you an “in the old days” speech. Things were different back then. But I’m thrilled to live in an age when so many people can make a contribution to the world’s culture, without having to ask anyone for permission. As Michael Masnick put it recently, We’re Living In the Most Creative Time In History, and that’s not a given. Be grateful for this freedom. Fight for it.

And don’t forget to check out Computoguy’s blog.

How cool is that?! by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I also want to write some documentation, including a getting started guide, but that will require setting up a proper website for Ramus first, instead of a simple homepage. I’ll get around to it, just not right away. Thanks for your patience.

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.

On reusing engines and libraries: absolutely. Even if that means you need to work within certain creative constraints. But there is such a thing as a bad engine, and you’re definitely better off rolling your own than trying to hammer one of those into shape. Moreover, you’ll want to make your own toy engines anyway, in order to understand the issues involved.

On aesthetics as opposed to bleeding edge graphics: well, yeah. 8-bit videogame stars such as Mario and Dizzy are iconic despite the fact that they were a few pixels tall. Or perhaps because of that: technical constraints forced their creators to make them look striking, and it shows. Come to think of it, Tetris blocks and Space Invaders aliens are commonly used decorations, so much so that Taito reportedly started asserting a trademark in the latter. (Luckily, the former are too generic for such a treatment.)

On tools: I keep hearing people say that “good craftsmen don’t care about their tools”, probably in the sense that they can do a good job with whatever is available. But I say, you try making a replica of Michelangelo’s David with nothing but a blunt pickax, then we’ll talk. So yes, I’m with Mr. Koster and Mr. Barnson here.

On procedural content: what do you mean, “you can’t make your whole game with it”? Diablo, anyone? Minecraft? Hellooo… Sure, there are games that can’t really do without hand-crafted content, such as adventure games and story-oriented RPGs. But some games clearly can be purely procedural.

On systemic game design: well, d’oh! We have a whole history of games (*cough* chess *cough*) based on nothing but systems, which are still played after thousands of years. Is it hard to design them? Just ask a boardgame developer. Is it worth the effort? Just ask the guy who created Settlers of Catan…

On prototyping: its importance can’t be stressed enough. It’s way too easy to put nonsense on paper, as many a writer has discovered when fans of their books caught them. But at least a work of fiction can survive a plot hole or two; a faulty game design can be outright unimplementable.

There are two ways to make games with less work: one is to mind the return-on-investment curve and avoid work that doesn’t pay. The other is to work smarter.

(Illustration: Monopoly Money by John Morgan; CC-BY)

Want cheaper games? Work less! by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

As an amusing coincidence, the issue of storytelling in games has recently resurfaced. You may have noticed Kelketek’s earlier post, but the Rampant Coyote also chimed in, even twice, not to mention this post on how improvisational theater can inform game stories. And it just happens that storytelling is the one other skill (beyond coding and art) I need in order to make serious games.

But first to get something done.

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.

Their respective reasons for closing down are interesting to compare as well. See, nowadays there is so much of everything that “why am I doing this?” may well be the single most important question to keep in mind. GamePro was apparently doing it for the money. Not that GameSetWatch didn’t need money! I’m paying to keep my websites up, you know. Everyone does. But there’s a difference between needing money as means to an end, and wanting it as your goal. Take the latter path, and I assure you that everything else will be secondary.

What’s wrong with that, you’re going to ask. Well, even if you are one of the few people who is genuinely motivated by money (and those are a rare breed indeed), how long is your resolve going to last when riches fail to materialize month after month?

I’ve abandoned more than one project myself. An experimental wiki engine ended up powering a handful of websites, simply because it’s still available, and hackable, and I’m still around to answer questions. An unfinished game turned into a series of tutorials, and the assets ended up on OpenGameArt. And you know what? I don’t regret it for a moment. I’ve had fun, built up a little reputation, and learned things that are bound to serve me well sooner or later. As for money, I’m making enough from web development. But money comes and goes. Other accomplishments stay.

(Illustration: Circuit City by Ed Yourdon; CC-BY-SA)

How (not) to close down by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Work has ramped up as of late, preventing me from working on my projects much. On the plus side, I’m in a mood to write code again, though not on my existing games. But mostly, I’ve been thinking about art.

Among other things, I joined OpenGameArt and contributed some art I had laying around. For all that people make fun of programmer graphics, one of my submissions was actually appreciated. Having been made with a clear purpose in mind must have something to do with that.

I’ve also made another raytraced scene, and thinking of more. One of these days, maybe I’ll have enough of them to inspire an adventure game.

But first, to get my work/life balance back into shape. See you around.

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.

The problem that rose after Blizzard’s fulminant success with their MMO consisted in the facet that many other developers tried to reproduce the same success using the same formula (more or less). Others, on the contrary, they tried to get away as much as possible from the formula. And yet, most of them failed, one way or another, and when I say “failed” I do not mean that their games were not successful. Far from it, if you think about raw profit. However, they could never get the same numbers they saw when they looked at the elephant in the room: World of Warcraft.

Some of the MMORPGs of the “post-WOW era” had an average success, like Lord of the Rings Online, or Aion (a game which is more than successful in Asia, and less in Europe or north America). Other MMOs, like Age of Conan or Warhammer Online had huge initial sales followed by a rather abrupt abandon of the subscribers. Apparently, the subscription retention rate was not very high for any MMO which appeared in the last 5 years or so.

In the spring of 2011 another MMORPG was launched, its name being Rift. It came out of nowhere, with an anonymous IP and a fresh lore to sustain its world. It was labeled from the beginning as a WOW-clone and as a matter of fact their initial advertisement did not help that much either. The last words in the presentation are: “We’re not in Azeroth anymore”. Some people were disgusted by this publicity maneuver, others were intrigued, fact is that in the end it worked. People who played WOW either tried, either completely adopted the new game. Other people migrated from older games like LOTRO or Everquest 2.

Rift has become the new star for raiding or people interested in end game PVE, and who either were bored of WOW or were trying to get into something fresh. The fact that Rift is a success cannot be denied, its big number of servers and fans alike stands witness to it. Did it reach at least partially WOW’s success? Probably not, and it is rather hard to predict further development since in just a month we have another big MMO launch which could change things a lot for any player: SWTOR.

The actual number of Rift’s subscriptions remains a mystery still, but at a more recent estimation were situated at about half a million. It’s not bad at all, if you come to think about it, but apparently for some people is still not enough. For some people it’s all about numbers, and that is not always a good thing. There is a wide spread opinion which states that WOW started losing some of its charm the moment in tried to please everyone. And when you have got 11 million subscriptions… it’s really hard to please everyone. You kind of get on the road of pleasing no one.

The decrease in WOW’s subscription numbers this last year is not much of a mystery when you come to accept the fact that we are talking about a game which is seven years old, a phenomenon in itself. It has come to a point where no matter what it does it cannot shatter us the way it used to be. No mechanics wise nor lore wise. Because let’s be clear – Burning Crusade was extraordinary mechanics wise: it introduced flying for starters, while Wrath of the Lich King was intriguing lore wise: you finally got to battle against Arthas, the villain of Warcraft 3, stuff of legend. Therefore it was rather hard to top all of that – there is so much you can do with one game, even if its name is World of Warcraft.

Some of the games that appeared in the last five years had the bad luck of showing up during WOW’s primetime, when it was the undisputed king in mechanics and lore. Perhaps Aion would have had more players, or even Age of Conan if they were not so unlucky to battle against Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

Some would say that Rift’s success is a result of WOW’s decay, and that people who were bored or disappointed after the last expansion found a temporary refuge in this game. That could be the case, and if you combine that with Rift’s rather aggressive marketing campaign and the fact that the game in itself is rather good – you have a winner. Not a WOW killer (I hate that word), but a definitive success. In a market which is very harsh and still dominated by the Blizzard’s behemoth.

Now, about Rift – this is a game about generic high fantasy, in a world with no tradition behind, with a lore which was newly created, and all this in the MMO market has a higher potential for disaster than any well established IP. And yet… established IPs like Age of Conan or Warhammer failed, while Rift seems to be doing quite fine.

What is the secret? The secret seems to be the fact that Rift was launched… (sort-of) complete and polished. Surprise – that is all you need for your MMORPG to have success (besides some good marketing campaign, of course). There is no revolutionary mechanics, nor some extraordinary lore, but the feeling you get when you log on… is just the right one.
I only played until level 10 or so, but I like the game so far and I can tell you it is the kind of MMORPG that drives me back to play it. I could not say that much for Age of Conan, to be honest.

Is Rift a work of genius? Probably not. Some say is average, some say it sucks, some say it’s awesome. But everybody says it’s fun.

(Illustration: Rift Sign, by Ewen Roberts; CC-BY)