No More Slamdance

Overheard from Jonathan Blow, he of Braid development fame, via Sam Roberts: the Slamdance Games Festival is cancelled, and appears likely to be no more. No big surprise there, but it's unfortunate nevertheless. What a startling and swift fall into oblivion, triggered entirely by one little controversial entry.

It's a shame because, as one commenter noted, it was a good way for indies to get exposure outside of traditional gaming circles. Aaron Reed's report of his experiences there pushing his interactive fiction game "Whom the Telling Changed" was great stuff, especially the game transcript analysis he provided. Other shows are picking up the slack, like IndieCade, but there was still something about Slamdance being in Park City along with the Sundance festival that made it seem bigger than "just" a gamer's event.

Being Indie, Being Resourceful

Being indie can definitely be tough sometimes. I've often said that indie game projects are kind of like fish eggs: thousands are laid but few manage to survive to adulthood. Content for a 2D or 3D game, whether it's artwork, music, voicework, or animation, can be a real problem for a small team on a shoestring budget. It's no secret that content, specifically character animation, has been the biggest challenge for Vespers.

Sometimes, it takes a little creative thinking to figure out ways to stretch those limited resources.

A while back, when I was looking for help with voiceover work, one idea I had was to try tapping into some good but inexpensive local talent -- theater students at the University of Utah, where I work. The casting call I posted ended up being picked up by a local talent company, which brought in a lot of additional talent, but the end result was exactly what I needed: great people with great voices who enjoyed working on a fun project for what essentially amounted to peanuts.

Animation, however, is a different beast that requires a bit more of a commitment, so I was never very keen on trying a similar approach. Nevertheless, recently I learned that the University of Utah also has a new interdisciplinary program for undergraduates called Entertainment Arts & Engineering, which is a joint program between the School of Computing and the College of Fine Arts. It's basically a curriculum to prepare students for careers in the digital media and entertainment industry, specifically for videogames, digital animation, and computer-generated special effects. How enticing.

So I contacted one of the program directors and told him about Vespers, to see if it might be possible to work something out with a few of the animation students who might be looking for some experience and a chance to showcase their talent. He circulated it among the faculty, and before long I had an informal face-to-face with one of the teaching faculty who specializes in graphics and animation, and has worked in the computer graphics industry since 1985.

The meeting went very well. He seemed to like the idea behind Vespers, and thought it would be a good opportunity for some of his students, many of whom he thinks would really appreciate the chance to work on something like this.

What I found just amazingly generous is that he essentially volunteered to be something of a faculty representative for the students, and take on the tasks of finding interested students, teaching them the pipeline, providing help when needed, and holding them to the task. It's difficult to overstate the value of someone in this position; having a person that knows all the details about the animation, exporting, and file preparation process, and who also knows the students and is in a position to manage and organize them, is worth more than I can imagine. I'm still just astonished that he is willing to take on this effort.

It will still be some time before things get rolling, though. The biggest issue is that we've done all of our models and animations to this point in 3DS Max, and he and the students basically work only in Maya. So first there is the issue of converting our character models to Maya format, which is not nearly as simple as it should be. Then there's the task of getting him familiar with creating and exporting animations from Maya to files that work with the Torque Game Engine, which is a quirky process that anyone familiar with TGE will tell you requires some time to learn. Once we reach that point, he can then be in a position to get the students up to speed, and so far there are at least a handful who have expressed interest in working on the project.

I'm really excited about the arrangement, and if things work out it could be the real boost this project needs. I'd also like to think that it could lead to other projects down the line, since it seems to fill a need on both ends. We'll see how it goes.

Foggy Times at Pastel Games

A new flash game called "The Fog Fall" was recently released by Mateusz Skutnik of Pastel Games. Skutnik, as some of you know, is the incredibly prolific creator of numerous flash-based point-and-click adventure-style games, such as the Covert Front series that earned the #2 spot on indiegames.com's Best Freeware Adventure Games of 2007. The Fog Fall would appear to represent the start of a new series, although other series (including Covert Front and DaymareTown) are still being produced.

The game has the same haunting look and feel as the Covert Front series, although The Fog Fall takes place later in time, in an alternate post-nuclear history around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The overall series objective is not entirely clear, but the graphics style and the sound effects make for a very typically enjoyable experience. These are simple games, and often it distills down to just hotspot searching and keypad puzzles, but they are also undeniably engaging and entertaining. There was one particular puzzle in this one that left me scratching my head and reaching for the walkthrough, and I'm convinced I never would have figured it out otherwise. But despite that, I found it to be a nice short diversion. Over time this particular type of gameplay or visual style may lose its appeal, but for now I know I'm still enjoying it and I hope Skutnik keeps putting these out for some time to come.

You can play the free game online or download it at ArcadeTown.com. Go on. You know you want to.

On a related note, Skutnik also just came out with the fourth installment of the "10 Gnomes" series, this one called "Foggy Flat". For those of you unfamiliar with this series, they are short games all with the same one goal: find the 10 gnomes hidden in the pictures in less than 10 minutes, with a simple point-and-click interface. Very simple, and entirely a hotspot search, but disturbingly addicting.

Enjoy.

Better Than Free (or Pirated?)

I read a couple of interesting blogs recently, and began to wonder how they might be related to the indie game scene.

The original piece was written by Kevin Kelly who, among many other notable things, helped co-found Wired magazine. On his "semi-blog" The Technium, where he posts thoughts on his next book, he authored a piece called "Better Than Free" back on January 31st -- and it triggered an avalanche of discussion, all of which I naturally missed since I have no sense of these things.

In the piece, he discusses how to approach the creation of product value in a digital world, where free copies proliferate in the "super-distribution system" of the internet:

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

He goes on to discuss his eight categories of "intangible value" that we can buy when we pay for something that could be free: things like immediacy, personalization, authenticity, and so on. Some very interesting thoughts, and if you're an internet hermit like me and haven't seen or heard of this piece before now, I recommend checking it out.

I was directed to the piece by an entry on Jason Scott's blog, ASCII. Jason is the creator of the BBS Documentary, an awesome DVD set that archives the history of the electronic BBS (which I highly recommend). He's also currently working on a new documentary, GET LAMP, a similar work on the history of text adventures, and one which I'm really looking forward to.

In his blog, Jason talks about how he applied some of the principles discussed in Kevin's blog to his projects. For instance:

His version of Immediacy (the ability to get the stuff hot off the presses from the content people) is basically what I exploited/used for the BBS Documentary, selling pre-orders by the bucketful and ending up with something like 400-500 DVD sets ready to go out the door as soon as they arrived at my house. In fact, I ended up having to hand assemble these things to get them out quicker. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars of pre-ordering, so I took that stuff seriously.

He's doing a similar thing for GET LAMP, but in the blog he also brainstorms new ideas for the project. One he seems to like is an "ultra-deluxe" version of the film, which buys you a special code. When you e-mail the code back to him with your phone number, he responds with a personal telephone call. You can chat with him, praise him, yell profanities at him, whatever you like; that's the added value you get, a brief period of access to the creator of the film.

While this method seems more appropriate for getting the customers who would normally pay for the product to pay more than they might have originally, the system in general is trying to push "things which can not be copied," which in this case is a one-on-one conversation with someone with whom you might not otherwise have access.

Just as with music and movies, of course, games suffer from the problem of "super abundance" from pirating, and it makes me wonder if indie game developers have or could use this type of strategy as a response -- providing value where there is otherwise none. It might not be very successful at converting pirates into paying customers (such a thing likely does not exist), but it could be an approach that indies might take advantage of to improve sales and revenue in a difficult marketplace.

It seems to me that indies are better suited for this kind of approach than the big developers; better positioned to provide the kind of personal service that is apparently the key to this strategy.

I haven't paid close enough attention to the business side of indie games to know if there are developers out there who have tried approaches like this that would qualify as ways of providing "intangible value", but I would be interested in hearing about those who have done so or are thinking about it...

IGF Ramblings and XYZZY Awards

Just a couple of thoughts as I daydream about what it would be like to have a game nominated as a finalist for IGF...

I really wanted to try to go to GDC this year, finally, to get a glimpse of what it's like. Alas, it was not to be. Another work trip this week made it too complicated to try and do both, especially with a busy week ahead of me and the in-laws coming for a visit this next weekend. Ah well. Next year, I think.

Speaking of which, thanks to TRC and Scorpia for posting and linking to the finalists for this year's IGF. I'm a little disappointed that we don't have any real adventure games in the list this year -- I guess we haven't seen enough innovation with graphical or text adventure games to catch the attention of the judges.

I was also a little disappointed to see how difficult it was to find Mac versions of the finalists. They may be available and I'm just missing them, but best I can tell most are PC-only. I did get a chance to play a couple of the browser games, including Iron Dukes and Tri-achnid.

Iron Dukes is well done, and I like the style, with its fictional late 19th century theme. I enjoyed playing the brief demo, although there was not much in the graphical presentation or gameplay that came across as really innovative. I liked the simple RPG-like elements that intertwined with the treasure finding, though. During one play-through, I quickly recovered two treasure items worth $13,500 each, giving me a lot of cash to work with, and I was really impressed at the sheer number of items available for purchase -- it looks the full version of the game will be quite large. Some of them were a little questionable, though. "Authentic Squid Tits" and "Caucasian Semblance"? Hmm. I'll definitely check out the full version of this.

Tri-achnid looks to be an interesting experimental game, but I had a lot of trouble with the controls during my brief time with the game. It was enough trouble that I gave up on it relatively quickly, but when I have some time I'll go back, re-read the instructions, and give it another try. Overall it looks intriguing to me.

For the others, looks like I'll have to boot into Windows. I plan on checking out Goo! and Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island, which I suppose is the closest of the finalists to an actual adventure game. If I get the chance I'll also check out Audiosurf and Synaesthete, both of which appear to incorporate music into game play in interesting ways.

In other news, as Emily Short has pointed out, it's that time of year again, time for the first-round of voting for the XYZZY awards for the best IF games of 2007. The nomination form and full list of entrants can be found here. Thanks to Emily and others for highlighting this.