Dungeoner: February 2010 Archives

Lively Ivy - Independent Game Development: Fantasy vs Reality

By volsung on February 28, 2010 10:42 PM

Lively Ivy (Erin Robinson), the developer behind Nanobots, Blackwell: Unbound and Spooks, directed a presentation at Indiecade where she spoke about the myths on independent game development. Thankfully for all of us who weren't there, she has just posted the slides of the presentation on her blog.

While it may not be as awesome as the actual presentation, it's still nice to go through them. Some of them will make you smirk. Some of them may make you cry.

Death Raiders - A wedding gone wrong

By volsung on February 28, 2010 10:05 PM

Today was the last day of the Second Season of the Death Raiders Alpha. To celebrate it, we run a small event where two of the players engaged in a small ceremony that reached its climax with the couple casting "Link" on each other:

This power is very special. The effect and energy cost are permanent. In this case, both were using the level 5 version, which means from now on, each power one of the characters casts on the other will get a +6 to intensity (which is insane!) as well as some special secret effects.

As usual, when you're hosting a wedding in a corrupted church, things got a bit messy, and we couldn't even have the traditional feast. Well, kind of, as we almost were served as the main course for the hordes of ghouls commanded by three lichs and a ghoul chieftain.

While we got a couple of problems (including some technical issues in one of the final combats), everything ended up nicely, and the couple survived ;) The "raid" took almost one hour and a half, but it was worthy. Some nice loot and half a ton of experience (I got 10 points, which meant 5 more levels of Accuracy, no less.

And so it finished this season, with the town citizenry so fond of their heroes they are planning to spend ~30K gold coins on the market tonight.

Preview - Guerrilla Gardening: Fighting the system with fertilizer and a shovel

By volsung on February 28, 2010 12:30 AM

General Bauhaus, the city's fascist dictator, has had all the green space in town destroyed! Trees are banned! Flowers outlawed!

The new game developed by Spooky Squid Games starts with that premise. As a member of the resistance, our job in Guerrilla Gardening will consist in provoking the rebellion of the citizenry using the power of plants. Yes, plants.

The cute pixel art graphics and animations can't hide this interesting Commandos-like game. We cannot confront the police with our limited arsenal, so stealth and tactics will be our main weapon. Using the words of the developers, "We generally describe the game as Harvest Moon for anarchists, but in actual fact, it's a little closer to like if Jet Grind Radio* and Thief had like a love child, and it was made out of pixels... like little pixel art, instead of being 3D... that's sort of what this game is: It's sneaking in stealth and... am... pissing out authority with plants". (Source)

Promising. Can't wait to put my hands on it!

*Jet Set Radio outside USA.

Design - The Meaning of Death

By volsung on February 26, 2010 8:31 PM

I've played some Dragon Age during the past days. Even though I'm not sure if I'd qualify the game as something as amazing as the critics say it is, I've found some really nice stuff throughout the game, and hell, it's being quite fun. And some times frustrating, in a lovely way. Probably many of you have lived the following situation:

The last head falls to the ground. Enemy corpses lay around your badly injuried (but still alive) party members, as they rest for a couple of seconds cathing their breath. They need to ration the provisions, as the final confrontation against the $evilmotherfucker feels closer and closer.

The group continues its journey through the dark dungeon, following a perfect formation. The full-plated warrior walks first, followed by the rogue and the archer. Behind them, the mage. There's a big room at the end of the tunnel they're walking across right now, roughly at 15 metres in front of them. The warrior draws his sword and holds his shield, anxious. The party moves forward and... "click". Silence. Trap.

Fire everywhere.

The warrior tries to get back to verticality, only to see how the party is ambushed from both sides. First one to fall? The mage. The group tightens their positions, trying to overcome their enemies, and the battle rages. The archer is bleeding a lot, and won't be able to hold much longer. Her wounded look reaches the warrior, who suddenly pauses the game and, getting pallid by moments, exclaims:

I haven't saved the game for... 40 minutes!!

And suddenly you begin to consider your items in a totally different way. Is that expensive Greater Healing Potion more valuable than your time? Should you just use more resources than you'd usually do? Suddenly death becomes meaningful. It means wasted time and effort. It also means frustration. Developers nowadays know that very well.

It's strange to find a new game that doesn't autosave your progress every few steps, especially when there's a difficult part about to happen. If the game involves combat, you'll have lots of ammo/healthpacks right before the difficult confrontation. You die? Just try again, until you win. Games are now infinitely more approachable by non-gamers than ever. It has, of course, lots of benefits for the game industry. It has also brought stuff like this.

I won't say Arkham Asylum was a worse game because you had checkpoints everywhere, but it certainly failed to bring out my inner rage as Dragon Age did. And that feeling, well, maybe I'm a bit of a masochist, but I found it just awesome.

Death Raiders - Tons of new content

By volsung on February 21, 2010 7:44 PM

We got lots of new graphics for Death Raiders this week, apart from the tiles I mentioned in the previous post, and I'd like to mention a couple of them. While many were taken directly from the RL Tiles (altars, fountains, stairs...), and Tome Tik (jewelry...), there are some made from scratch (and consequently, worse, but I'm still kind of proud of the results).

I'll start with the new ghoul army in all its glory:

The first one is the original, who has been with us for some time already. As always, they're shown zoomed, twice their real size.

These freaks will also accompany us from now on. High level dangerous stuff here:

From left to right: The new Lich, the new Greater Lich (or Demi-Lich, in fact), three possible versions of the Noctal / Noctumbra (a high level shadow), and the Keeper of the Summit, a really big skeleton motherfucker.

The city itself also got some love, and all the buildings were re-done, and we added a couple new as well. I think most of them are self explanatory:

That random tree is the forum, or at least it's planned to be in a not-so-distant future, hopefully. And, to finish the pic-spam, a small shot on how these buildings look on the actual game:

There was even more! Tunics and dresses for the different gods and, as you can see on the previous image, a couple of changes on the city map (something that tries to resemble streets, a new sign on the North Gates...), but I already wasted a lot of your bandwidth with this, and soon enough you should be able to watch everything yourself :P

Any feedback or suggestion, is, of course, welcomed. Unless it has anything to do with the quality of the art ;)

Death Raiders - New environments

By volsung on February 19, 2010 10:39 PM

So, we've just implemented new variables on the terrain generator, specifically, more tiles. Before, the generator built either walls or grounds. It still does that, but now those walls or grounds may be made out of different materials: sand, rocks, grass, wood, lava, water, ice... and right now that's more or less everything. There are, of course, new types of classical dungeon tiled floors and walls.

At this very moment, it's just what we could call cosmetics. However, the possibilities this new generator opens are almost endless, from themed dungeons with specific bonuses/penalties, to special tiles with some kind of effect attached. Think for example in a dungeon inside a volcano, with rivers of lava where you could push your enemies to, or an old grove full of dry grass where fire damage lasts a couple of turns, or even spreads! Water able to wear out your clothes, rust your armor or penalize your movement, quicksands...

And as a matter of example of the new tiles (taken directly from the RLTiles and TomeTik), a picture of the first exploration we did of the new "themed" dungeon, where Tanhausser had to flee leaving Felhias behind, thanks to a Banshee motherfucker. Loads of fun:

(Click on the image for full size)

As always, any suggestion or feedback is welcomed!

Flame Warriors, by Mike Reed

By volsung on February 17, 2010 11:32 PM

I'd like to bring your attention to the awesome website Mike Reed created some years ago. It hasn't really been updated for ages, but it doesn't matter, as it's a source of knowledge able to withstand the passage of time. Why? Because humans are more or less the same they were when the page was created.

Flame Warriors is the place where I learnt everything I know about forums. Well, maybe that's exaggerating a bit, but I did learn somethings. If you have to deal with other people on the Internet, you'll probably be able to find some good advice on how to confront them on the aforementioned site.

"Confront them?" you may be asking right now. Well, we all know that forums are made around interesting discussions created by restrained people that try to empathize with the people they are discussing with, only in some alternate universe. In ours one out of three users will try to verbally eat your heart out, and threaten to do it in real life as well. With this small grimoire of power, you'll be able to quickly categorize your enemy, and that is half of the battle. At least, that's what my previous and dilated experience tells me.

In any case, it's just hilarious enough (although not less true because of that) to just spend half an hour reading through the descriptions and watching the pictures.

Ubisoft - Dumb DRM is Dumb

By volsung on February 17, 2010 8:39 PM

Ubisoft just managed to go one step beyond stupidity with their new DRM system the PC version of Assassin's Creed II comes with (as will do Settlers VII). While it's already obvious that internet based DRM systems aren't really offering much more anti-piracy value than a sticker on the game box saying "please, don't copy me!", they might be not annoying enough for the customers. You know, who doesn't have Internet these days? Almost every player has; however, who's lucky enough to have a perfect Internet connection that never stops working? Hm...

Yes. What you're thinking right now is what Ubisoft thought their users deserved. The game will constantly check "something" on the Ubisoft DRM servers. You lose your connection, you're dropped to the main menu, losing all your progress since your last checkpoint/savegame as well.

So, summarizing; Ubisoft thinks that you should crack their software if you have a bad Internet connection. Isn't that the best way to promote pirate copies? Oh, wait, what were we trying to achieve...? Woops...

GJ, Ubisoft.

Death Raiders - A brief exercise of interaction

By volsung on February 17, 2010 8:08 PM

We've just implemented the skeleton of a new system in our online roguelike, that feels nice enough to comment on it. We're giving some life to the villagers of the town!

Before you start thinking in lots of sprites moving around the buildings, I'm going to make clear it has nothing to do with that (at least not yet, in the future... who knows...!). The villagers, for now, are something "virtual", even metaphorical. They do exist, and they have a meaning, even if we don't see them. What do they do? They buy stuff. They prowl around the market searching for the best offers, and leave their money. That's good, especially when you're the seller.

But at the same time, they don't like to get out from the protection of their stone houses if there's a "threat". Villagers only like relatively "safe" markets. When will they consider it's secure enough to go outside? When they hear the success stories of the adventurers crawling through the vast dungeons around the city. This means, the more successful the players are in their quests, the more stuff the villagers will buy (and the more they will spend).

While this is already interesting somehow, it's just the beginning. We have lots of ideas on how to improve the system, including an overall "corruption" status. Corruption as in rotten corpses (you know, the Undead theme...). The implications this may have are yet to be decided, but almost everything could be related somehow to that, from the strength of the enemies to the quality of the loot or the amount of stuff you can get from the shops/temples/whatever. Any suggestion is welcomed!

Finally back... Back! BACK!

By volsung on February 16, 2010 8:31 PM

At last!

I got Internet at home, just today. Oh, Internet, I missed you so much... ;_;

Now, the "WTF-Are-you-totally-insane?" side of this small update: 8Mb/768Kb = ~100GBP. So, you better praise me! Look what I'm doing for you!

GRAAAHH!

PD: Real blog posts will be coming soon!

Preview - Boryokudan Rue

By volsung on February 3, 2010 8:46 PM

Boryokudan Rue is the almost unpronounceable name of a single man (Joshua Nuernberger), nominated for the IGF 2010. Promising between 4 and 8 hours of gameplay we'll get one kick-ass old-school point-and-click adventure with action sequences (remember the Indiana Jones series by LucasArts?), including the always "kick" action. What else may we ask?

Well, a decent story would probably be nice, and it seems we're going to get it for sure. The game features two different plots that will merge at some points; quoting the official info:

First, you play as Azriel Odin, a regretful cop en route to planet Barracus to meet and extract a mysterious defector trying to escape from the notorious crime gruop, the Boryokudan. Second, you play as Delta-Six, an amnesiac patient in a sterilized facility, who must survive and escape in order to find out why he is there.

The first teaser has been released so you all can appreciate the marvelous hand-drawn artwork and graphic effects pushing the Adventure Game Engine to the limit. The techno-noir OST that will accompany us throughout the game has been composed by Nathan Allen Pinard.

The game is going to be finally released as a commercial title (the author admits he's been beating the bush for some time already) but there's no official date scheduled yet.

Review - Which, by Mikel Inel

By volsung on February 2, 2010 10:36 PM

Which is a short a game created by Mikel Inel that will scare the shit out of you. We're trapped in a small house and need to get out. To do so, we'll need some help of the other person living in the place... A game about decisions, even if there's only one during the whole game (it features has two endings).

The game's brief enough to be spoiled if I tell anything else about it, unless it's mentioning its very particular graphics. It's possible to play using 3D glasses to have an even more scary experience. That's the reason why the video below looks split screen (Youtube doesn't allow embedding of 3D videos), so you might want to check it on Youtube itself.

It's so awesome, it's going directly to the Downloads section!

Rant - Freedom of Choice

By volsung on February 1, 2010 10:09 PM

The other day I found an amazing offer on Steam; for the weekend only, you could get the first 5 X-Com Games (UFO Defense, Terror From the Deep, Apocalypse, Interceptor and Enforcer) for only €2. A nice price to pay for four of them. I guess getting Enforcer as well dropped the price of the package.

But I'm not going to write about Enforcer (yet; it deserves a video at least), but the previous games. X-Com, for those who didn't have the luck to play them and only know the most recent titles from the series (Aftermath, Aftershock...) was one of the greatest turn-based strategy games ever conceived by a human mind. The premise was simple: protect the Earth from the Alien menace. Build a base, train special soldier, research new equipment (including alien gear), instalations, even vehicles, and get rid of the alien scum once for all by killing their hive-mind. Terror From the Deep and Apocalypse follow the same pattern, although the latter confines most of the gameplay to one "Megacity".

Interceptor was a rather interesting space flight simulator (as it still had some of the cool things, like corporations that provided funding, bases, different kinds of ships to pilot...) and Enforcer was a devilish miscarriage. So, I'm going to center on the first three.

What made them so special? Well, first, they were hard as shit, and very unforgiving; you could save the game during the combat sessions, but, if you forgot about it and one of the members of your crew died, you were screwed. And dying was easy: enemies hid, waited for you in rather decent ambushes, and used all shorts of weaponry against you, no mercy. But even if you managed to overcome them, there were certain rules. You needed to capture some of the aliens alive to gather data from them. To do so, you needed to stun them, which usually involved (in the second game) close quarter combat weapons. As if it wasn't hard already. You even needed to get some of their submarines/spaceships in order to be able to advance, and if you didn't make it when you should, you could find yourself unable to finish the game. The same goes for some of the stuff you could research. You could get into the endgame too soon, and only a lucky savegame old enough would mean not having to start from the very beginning.

Frustrating... but it could be worse. You could lose your main base to the aliens, and get them basically conquering the world while you were trying to rebuild your defenses. All the funding gone, the game doesn't tell you you've lost, even if you can see you have. And then, another Alien attack, and you lose all your X-Com. Game Over.

How could people think back then these games were amazing? Nowadays they would hardly get a good review.

Well, it featured some pretty awesome micromanagement, but what made it shine was the freedom. Every action was important, but more than put into place, you were dropped by the game in a quite unpleasant situation. You're given tools to fight the Aliens, but they are surely better than you. Is it better then to take three aquanauts by the rear entrance of the Alien submarine or would that mean your flank will get too exposed? Maybe there's an alien after that mound right next to the ship. Oh, well, a torpedo blowing up one of the walls of the shipcraft could be a better option. Or maybe it's better to save the torpedoes for some of the bigger Alien motherfuckers... Did I mention that ammunition was scarce as well?

UFO Defense came out in 1994. Fifteen years later, we got "You have to burn the rope" by Mazapán. And I can't but smirk like a mad man.

February 2010 Archives