How one man made 22 games in 22 years, mostly from his basement
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
The scale of the impact his games have had is shocking. Fans of ZUN's work are so widespread, you've probably seen some of the art, covers[3], or some of the fan works that it inspired. If you were near any amount of Anime fandom in the last decade, then you've seen a lot of stuff based on ZUN's work.
That said, a lot of people haven't actually played his original games, which are very impressive. They may seem impossible[4] at first, but they have a certain meditative quality once you get past the initial shock, and can be (in my opinion) surprisingly effective at tricking the player into a "flow"-style mental state.
[1] http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Team_Shanghai_Alice
[2] http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Danmaku
[3] For example, the youtube suggestions for this well-known cover of Bad Apple ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEUeWnV73U ) is full of people being creative with jsut that one song. Some of are surprisingly talented ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr7uwOp0Yck )
[4] Just don't play it on "lunatic" difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eJ...
Lunatic? I can't even beat a game on normal...
This is something I notice as a GM in tabletop games as well, and I think it's the same phenomenon. There is a tension between creators and consumers in that the former wants to provide a specific experience but the latter cannot help but to experience things their own way.
Every experienced GM knows that players lay to waste the best plans. They miss clues and items that they needed to progress, while finding unexpected workarounds to problems that should have been more challenging. They have too little power sometimes, but then find a few good treasures or spells and suddenly have far too much power.
Dealing with this tension usually drives towards one of two solutions: either control the experience so tightly that deviation is impossible (railroading) or try desperately to roll with the changes and keep things interesting. Video games seem to largely take the former solution, probably because it's the easiest way.
But talk to gamers, and while they'll fondly remember a good story or a good game they played, it is the moments of accident where the whole thing derailed that really gets people excited and talking. Gamers like being a little too powerful, going places they weren't supposed to be. Sadly, game designers have gotten very good at conducting their railroads, but have done very little to master the improvisational artform of letting players do what they want, of feeling free and powerful but still keeping a gentle hand on the steering wheel.
Being hand-held from one cutscene to the next is not playing a video game.
Of course it is, and it's tremendously arrogant to claim otherwise. This attempt at reduction via definitionalism is the same disease that infects people who get frothy at Twine. (Which isn't my thing, I don't generally enough visual novels either, but I'm not so arrogant as to project my preferences onto the entire classification of "video game.")
Prescriptivism is death. Don't be That Guy.
But they're still games.
Much like surviving isn't the same as living, savvy?
I also enjoy running just about any game though. With practice and the right preparation, a GM can riff off what the players are doing in any game.
I'm not a big fan of this because they tend to be too forgiving or not challenging enough. Older games were hard which made beating them rewarding. Games tend to be much easier now. Even if they adjust their difficulty it usually errs on the side of avoiding frustration for more casual gamer enjoyment.
It is tricky to balance difficulty. To again draw parallels between tabletop and video games: if the players get a powerful weapon at too low a level, it can wreck the fun of the adventure because there's no more challenge. The unfun solution (in my opinion) is to take away the weapon or in some way punish the players. Instead, a good GM offers new challenges that keep the weapon relevant.
Dark Souls has a good example of this. You can get a powerful sword fairly early which makes the first third or so of the game a bit easier. But it doesn't ruin the game or anything, because the challenge is still there and the later parts of the game scale beyond that weapon.
Dark Souls in general is an interesting example of a game that has several linear structures in it's gameplay, but still feels open and rewarding to explore. In many ways, what you explore most is your own ability to best the game and better master the environment, rather than exploring the environment itself.
I recently played Duke Nukem 3D for the first time in years and loved every minute of it. Cracking open a hidden wall and pulling out a weapon that shouldn't even be in that part of the game is so much fun. The last non-trivial secrets I remember in an action game* were in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, where you could stumble onto random phone booths or warp into strange miniature worlds with a little exploration. Games these days are all about structured, linear experiences — a shame for a medium whose primary strength is, I think, learning and discovery.
(As with all things, though, I expect we'll get a resurgence of "retro" FPS at some point or other. Really looking forward to the classic formula with modern tech!)
* Actually, I just remembered that the Rise of the Triad remake had a lot of good secrets, including secret levels with RotT-classic looks. So there's another 21st century example for you!
I turned 39 today. I have two kids, a mortgage, and luckily a tolerant wife with a good job. I started working on my own indie games in May 2014. Before that I was making 6 figures. This year I'm going to struggle to make 40k. If you count business expenses, that's closer to 20k. I'm in the trough right now.
You can get an old build of the game off my website (http://www.shinyfish.com/neonjack/), but frankly it's a bit crap. I'd wait for the GDC build.
I released an indie game in 1994. Three of us worked on it and two of us had high pressure jobs by the time it shipped (we'd worked on the bulk of the game in easier times). For its time, the game was pretty successful but it didn't make us very much money and so we went on to more lucrative pastures.
It's very tough just to get noticed -- and it's far harder now. We were in Australia at the time, the web pretty much didn't exist (we released initially as shareware, later as "commercial", although the shareware release made us more money).
(It must be harder to go from 0-40k than from 40-100k+.)
One of things I can offer is access to great 3d/2d artists cheaper than those in the US, I could even cover the 100% of their costs if we agree something out that benefits us all.
(Which is to say, if anybody happens to be or know art folks looking for a little bit of work, get in touch? Email's in my profile.)
The grass is always greener -- the nice thing about going in to a shitty office is getting paid. I love the freedom I have right now, but the struggle to make it sustainable is incredibly stressful.
I don't know anything, any more. I don't know whether what I'm making is any good. There's a million ways that it's not as good as what's in my head. I don't know if I should've devoted more time to a different project, etc. etc.
Maybe the timeframe for some things is far too long for an individual to be successful at (especially large, complex, technical problems).
But for simpler things like games and books and such– I think if you dedicate yourself to it, there should be some people who appreciate it. Especially considering that there are billions of people in the world, and more of them are getting connected everyday. If YOU really, REALLY like something, it's practically a guarantee that somebody else does, too.
I'm kinda naively optimistic, though.
A lot of it was just, by modern game design standards, broken."
This totally resonates with me (replacing "game" with some other domain). I feel like I'm 100 times better at programming than in my early days but unfortunately also 100 times slower. I'm probably too much aware of what can possibly go wrong with every line of code I write (or maybe it is just getting older and/or losing interest).
I wish Blades of Avernum had done better. Blades of Exile was one of my favorite games. There were some community scenarios that were just so amazingly good. I think if I'd had some way to port them over as well it would have worked out a lot better.
Try the remake. The demo is free.
Really, I think the biggest difference is just that I don't have as much time to play games as I did growing up, and there are exponentially more games now that demand my attention than there were back then.
But in the end, the story and the world is so damn fascinating, and how it changes in real time is really damn awesome.
This goes to blizzard
Minecraft?
The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be.
It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence.
The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay.
The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you.
There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development.
Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents.
It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.
I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2, and the things you can do as a player in that game are just absurd. You can stop time. You can be permanently invisible and kill bosses without ever being detected. You can summon extremely overpowered monsters.
It's honestly so refreshing to have unique abilities. World of Warcraft ruined a generation of RPG design because devs believed that everything had to be "balanced", whatever that means. So we have a bunch of uninspired game mechanics in a pretty shell.
I'm glad to see there's people still acknowledging that games do not have to be fair or sane or balanced. Their beauty is in their madness.
And yes, a wizard who can cast Project Image, Spell Immunity: Abjuration, Spell Immunity: Divination, Improved Invisibility, Time Stop, Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Power Word: Stun and Power Word: Kill is not comparable to a Fighter with a big sword, and he shouldn't be. Attempts to make the two "balanced" just become absurd, as World of Warcraft has shown.
I think the main thing as pointed out is that in seeking balance a lot of 'fun' or 'interesting' elements have to be thrown out.
This makes sense, as mastery of the Weave grants powers that are physically impossible to perform within the world's natural laws.
Magic by definition is bending/breaking the rules of the universe, and as such it should feel like it if you spend the countless hours needed to master it and persevere to the end. It took me dozens of hours of reading the spell descriptions from scrolls to just understand how spells interacted and worked together. It would have been far easier to say "screw it" and go with a fighter or paladin that focuses on disrupting enemy magic users. But I stuck with it, and am glad I did because using the magic system in BG2 is immensely satisfying. It requires an absurd amount of knowledge and expertise. It rewards future time orientation, patience and planning over impulsive "give me whats best right now".
Fighter and wizard wouldn't be very different if they were equally as effective from level 1 to level cap. They'd just be the same class with different variations of the same skills...which is exactly what happened in WoW.
Furthermore, unless you're soloing BG2, you have a party of six consisting of a variety of classes. Therefore, you'd never have to re-roll as a mage, because there would be a mage in your party ready to make up for any magical shortcomings you may have as a fighter. Your role then becomes keeping him safe and taking care of the less magically inclined enemies.
The MMOification I mentioned also has this issue of only allowing you the control of one character. This means all characters must be jack-of-all-trades, because otherwise someone will have to be stuck doing the less sexy roles such as tanking, healing or buffing/debuffing. Or in the case of the BG2 wizard, being completely useless for half the game.
Multiplayer game design has a long way to go before it reaches the wonders achieved in the past decade in single player games.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that enemy wizards also turn all of your strengths against you, because the player does not have any particularly special powers that enemies are denied. In fact, the player is at a far lower level for most of the game than enemies encountered and must rely on wits alone to survive most fights. There's a mod (Sword Coast Stratagems) that enhances enemy AI, and it is universally acclaimed as making BG2 into one of the most difficult games in existence. Every fight becomes a high stakes chess match...one small mistake leads to instant death. Aside from Dark/Demon Souls, I don't know of any games that come close to this level of tactical difficulty. I find these experiences to be immensely rewarding, and have a hard time playing mainstream games because they seriously lack this element.
But again, the fact that they allow you so much freedom in creating your character is incredible. You can even triple class! I sincerely miss this kind of freedom combined with the incredible depth of the AD&D 2nd ed rules.
I'm looking forward to Pillars of Eternity, but I'm quite sure that mechanically it won't be nearly as fun as BG2. Those developers just know better than to implement such insane mechanics again. Which is why it won't be nearly as entertaining.
It seemed like in classic there were all kinds of hidden tricks, and bugs to exploit. Most of which were pretty harmless.
However the best players knew all the tricks and used them to their advantage. If you wanted to do some of the top tier content you essentially were required to know tons of little tricks to min/max the game.
Now everything is super streamline, no tricks, everything is documented. But the game is a little less fun. Instead of finding fun, we now have to be handed it. Plus the game is orders of magnitude easier... When was the last time you died in a 5 man?
I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down.
Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons.
All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so.
They took chess and turned it into tic-tac-toe.
My big problem with WoW is the reduction of classes to three roles (tank, healer, DPS) where class is really just a skin on the role, and the reliance on repetition. (We must have cleared some 40-man raid zones over fifty times.) Scripted technical boss fights are, in my opinion, the equivalent of shooters where you need to memorize where every enemy will appear -- it's "challenging" but it's not interesting.
Welcome to the golden age of Entitlement where everyone thinks they deserve a trophy no matter how badly they perform.
This is the attitude of a generation of kids raised on participation trophies who expect rewards just for showing up rather than for accomplishments.
Of course, things go quickly sideways when your fighters that are spawn camping the trolls get knocked out...
For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot.
It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.
I'm glad he's doing what he's doing and doing well at it, but this is a very conservative approach to making games and IMO rather redundant with commercial game development. If I just want to trek around a big, semi-open world and do the same damn thing over and over building a character, there's a half-dozen Bethesda games that let me do it in 3D or approximately 3000 Roguelikes.
Generally the effort of playing an indie game to me is only rewarded when they show me something I haven't seen before - and there's real possibility in these kind of lo-fi games for emergent behaviors and cool gameplay that isn't being strangled by the huge content pipeline of a commercial game (where anything that happens has to be brilliantly animated and at least reasonably voiced by someone, making it unlikely that too many emergent 'surprises' can happen).
I like his games and have spent some money on them over the last 20 years, never regretted it.
They are not focused to appeal superficially visually. Someone who solely ranks games by polygon count would be horribly disappointed. Thats just not his market.
Not a very good comparison since most games do not look like this, while most written texts do. I'm not saying the games are bad anyway. I'm actually hyped to try them out.
Vogel's games are based on a few different iterations of his in-house RPG game engines and he has remade/updated his most popular Exile/Avernum series in each generation of the game engine so some of them are very nearly the same game.
And they're fantastic. Dated looking and punishing but expansive and detailed and intricate.
I remember reading a post by Jeff were he mentions that instead of redoing all graphics and art in each new chapter of his series, he prefers adding content in other areas like gameplay and story, and his customers love that.
I don't know if this is true. It seems like it is though. It's what keeps game development a hobby for me. I'm decades too late to the scene now with hundreds of games being released every couple of months. That's a lot of pressure if you're going to try and make a living off of it with a mortgage, retirement savings, kids, and the whole nine yards.
I doubt either side would intentionally rip the sounds from another game when there are relatively cheap and safer alternatives available. If you're right, it's probably a case of the same sound pack being bought and used - this type of thing happens all the time with anything related to audio.