Weekly Links #3
It was a week with few gaming news that caught my eyes, and I was busy
with other creative work, but what's there is pretty awesome.
Let's start with a game that's just too unique not to mention: Heroes
of a Broken Land, a combination of strategy, city building
and... first person dungeon crawling. I've always liked hybrid games
like that, and seeing that people still make them was nice; the gaming
world is way too fixated on genres nowadays.
Next we have Matt Chat, a beloved game critic, expressing some doubt
about the measure of success. As an amateur game developer
myself, and more recently writer, I can certainly sympathize: yes,
we've all been conditioned to think that "success" means throngs of
followers and a fat bank account. Whereas for example all I have is
a piece of software mentioned in Wikipedia and a few other bits and
pieces that people constantly seek out. But as I wrote long ago,
real success is long term. And as Matt Chat points out, you
can't please everyone anyway. Unless, I would add, you cater to the
lowest common denominator, and we all know where that leads. So my
intention and advice is to persist, persist, persist. Not that it's
any guarantee of success, but without persistence failure is a given.
And not even trying is just too sad.
Another fascinating piece of writing is Shamus Young explaining just
how powerful modern computers are (hint: it's downright
scary) and what game developers could do with it instead
of stupidly and unsustainably try and render ever more polygons.
I'd comment more on it, but it's a rather big topic, so maybe some
other time.
Last but not least, here's a video of a game a friend sent me --
a tournament-based, one-on-one 2D fencing deathmatch, like the first
Prince of Persia on steroids, except with even worse graphics. And yet
it looks crazy fun. Lucky we went through this indie revolution as of
late, eh? Enjoy, and see you next week.