Anticipation 1

A couple of indie games that have been in development for some time are nearing completion. I'm jealous. I've also really been looking forward to both, so I'm also very happy.

I'll talk about one of them later, but one I'd like to mention now is The Path, a game by Tale of Tales. I've discussed this title briefly in the past, but I've been following it for quite a while. These are the folks that made The Graveyard, the art title about an old woman in a cemetery that generated a lot of discussion on the tubes about games as art, and challenged people's assumptions about what technically constitutes a "game."

From what I've seen so far it appears likely that The Path will again stimulate conversations about games as an artistic and storytelling medium. See for yourself.

The Path, Grandmother's House teaser 1 - the hall from Tale of Tales.

The Path has a unique and stunning visual style that comes across as more of an artistic rather than a technical accomplishment; a style that flaunts the creative talents of the designers more than the advanced computational abilities of the graphics engine.

The Path, Grandmother's House teaser 2 - the kitchen from Tale of Tales.

The game is a short horror game based on the old Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, although set in modern times. Will it again challenge assumptions of what qualifies as a game? Possibly so. As they describe it, The Path emphasizes "exploration, discovery and introspection through a unique form of gameplay," where "every interaction in the game expresses an aspect of the narrative." It is a slow game, giving players the freedom to explore as they wish. I'm intrigued by the possibilities.

The Path, Grandmother's House teaser 3 - the stairs from Tale of Tales.

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, the main duo behind Tale of Tales and The Path, recently announced that the game is at last out of beta and the plan is to release it on March 18th. It looks like it will be Windows-only (rats, not sure if there are any plans on a Mac release) and available for download from their site, as well as from Steam and Direct2Drive.

The Path, Grandmother's House teaser 4 - the library from Tale of Tales.

They also recently started up a new web site for the game, at http://grandmothers-house.net/, where you can check out more screenshots, movie clips, and eventually more material. I really like the style of that site. It reminds me of a few others I've seen in the past, and it has a quiet creepiness that appears to fit the game genre well.

If you can't tell, I'm really looking forward to this release. I hope it does well for them.

(Indie) Business is Business

Generally speaking, this is a good time to be an indie game developer. There are scores of inexpensive development tools and environments to choose from, many potential opportunities and channels for marketing and sales, and a number of great online communities for discussion and support. It's tough to make it as a full-time job, though. A few individuals or groups have done consistently well over the years, and of course there are the recent stories like Braid making everyone drool over the possibility of big-time success even for small developer groups. But for the most part, it's incredibly tough to find that sweet spot of just enough critical and financial success.

Take the story of Mousechief's Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, for instance.

Mousechief has been at it for some time, with a pretty nice track record -- a finalist at the first IGF in 1999 (Flagship Champion), and another finalist at the 2006 IGF (The Witch's Yarn). Then, last year, they released DHSGiT, a casual game set in the 1920's from the "teen romantic comedy" genre. I've only played the demo, and briefly at that, but clearly they did a nice job with the game and they've received a great deal of attention and acclaim for it: it was GameTunnel's 2008 Innovation and Adventure Game of the Year (loosely defining "adventure"); it was on GameTunnel's Top 10 Games of 2008 and a finalist at IndieCade 2008; and it was recently nominated for the 2009 Writers Guild Awards for videogame writing. That's the kind of recognition an indie developer would slobber over.

However, an interview with lead writer Keith Nemitz popped up recently on GameTopius.com, in which I noticed this little nugget:

TC: Has the success of Dangerous High School Girls (critically and financially) changed the way Mousechief plans on approaching games? Does it give you more leeway and confidence going into your next project?

KN: I'd say is been pretty successful since people are still talking about it, eight months after its release. Metacritic-style of the eight reviews so far it's holding a > 80% average. Only two are recognized as official Metacritic reviews. (both at 80%) More are on the way. Financially, especially after catching an arrow from BFG, it has yet to recoup its measly $30,000 budget. But it's still being release on new portals. I'll just have to tighten my belt a couple more notches. I'm not yet at the point where I'll have to cut new notches. However, if it doesn't make a profit this year I won't be able to fund a new game.

A few interesting points to note here.

First, you don't often hear about how much it costs to develop a game, so it's nice to see some actual numbers. $30 grand is a tiny amount of money as far as the games industry is concerned, but for small indie developers, of course, that can be a prohibitive (and perhaps scary) amount as Nemitz suggests -- especially if you're trying to develop more than one game at a time as part of your business plan.

Second, I think it's notable that a game that has received so much critical acclaim has yet to break even. It's been only eight months since its release, yes, but given all of that recognition I would have thought its earnings had surpassed the $30,000 level. There are many potential reasons for this, of course, the most probable of which is the fact that the game got yanked from Big Fish Games just as it was kicking in, due to some content that was deemed "questionable" by a few vocal opponents. And yes, we all know that critical success does not necessarily guarantee financial success, but still. At $20 a pop, they would need 1500 unit sales to break even. If someone had asked me, I would've guessed that they sold that many some time ago, BFG snub notwithstanding.

But that's the thing; 1500 unit sales doesn't sound like a lot, but almost any amount can be a lot for small developers. It's easy to look at that number and think it should be simple to achieve, certainly not too much to ask for a game with as much critical success as they had. But without a dedicated marketing department it is far from an easy task, and in a case like Mousechief's it might mean all the difference between one project and multiple projects. I think it highlights what a lot of small indie developers are up against, whether they know it yet or not.

This is not a criticism of Mousechief, mind you, nor am I trying to implicate that they somehow failed to do everything they could have done to sell more copies. It's a complicated business and this is certainly how it goes sometimes, despite best efforts. Plus, it's still an ongoing process, and more recognition and exposure is likely to come. I admire them for the work they've done, and their recognition is well-deserved.

I do think that DHSGiT will surpass the break even point and be financially successful, eventually. But it's still a battle, even when you've got a solid, innovative game on your hands.

Targeting Older Systems

Way back when, when the Vespers project was first starting out, I had to decide which game engine to use. Initially, the choice was between the Torque Game Engine and the Unity engine. I eventually chose TGE for a few reasons -- at the time, the engine had been around longer than Unity, the community was larger, and it was less expensive and more straightforward to develop cross-platform games (specifically, Mac and PC).

Once that decision was made, then there was the choice of which Torque engine to use: the basic TGE engine, or the higher-end TGEA (TGE-Advanced) engine, which back then was called TSE (for "Torque Shader Engine"). TGEA offered a number of more advanced features, the most obvious of which was higher-quality graphic rendering. That came at a price, though; at the time, the engine would only run on Windows machines, and it required machines with graphics cards that could handle the bigger load. Also, although TGEA does now support OpenGL and Macs, back then it was not so clear if that would ever actually come to pass. Since I was more interested in developing simultaneously for Windows and Macs, TGEA didn't seem like the best option at the time. TGE had been around longer and was more stable, even though its graphics performance was not at the same level as TGEA.

For me, though, stunning shaders and slick water rendering were trumped by the desire to create a game that would run on a wide range of machines, especially machines that are older or without the top of the line video card. The problem there is that, given the length of time for development, it's hard to put (or perhaps keep) a finger on what constitutes an appropriately "old" machine. When I started development of Vespers, my main desktop dev machine was still fairly new and probably middle of the line. Now, however, the machine is going on six years old. That doesn't seem very old, and it still runs most of my applications nicely enough, but in computer years that's almost geriatric and at this point it's naturally much slower than the machines from the past couple of years.

This is not a big deal for day-to-day activities, but as we add more and more content to the game, we're seeing some serious performance issues on my now old machine, despite a few rounds of optimization. But that makes me start to question what I should be targeting for a minimum system requirement. I had always thought that my machine would still be somewhere in the middle by the time we finished development, but now I'm beginning to feel like it's toward the bottom end.

(In case the four of you reading this are interested, my dev machine is a Mac G5 Dual 2 GHz model, circa 2003, with an ATI Radeon x800 video card, but it also runs well enough on the same setup with an ATI Radeon 9600 card. My wife still uses a Mac G4 laptop, so there are certainly G4 computers still perfectly usable. But Macs have evolved over the years to faster G5 chips and now a couple of rounds of Intel chips, as well as more modern video cards.)

I've generally been going on the assumption that if the game runs well enough on my dev machine, by the time it's released that should be a fairly reasonable minimum system requirement. But it will be progressively more difficult to ensure it runs well enough on machines that are even just a little bit older. Still, my goal is to try and include as many older machines as possible. The more the merrier -- but within a still to-be-determined limit.

So that leads me to wonder: how long do you all typically own a computer before replacing it with a new machine? Adding memory or upgrading the video card extends the life of a computer, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm interested to know how long people generally keep their rigs before replacing them with a new box. Some people of course keep their old rigs around for different tasks, but I'm interested in knowing how old some of the systems are out there that people still use for gaming (particularly 3D games, like Vespers), and what kind of system people would be interested in seeing this game run on -- Mac or PC/Windows. If you would, let me know in the comments below.

Making the Rounds: Machinarium

This game has topped my list for Most Anticipated Seriously Beautiful Game for some time now. Amanita Design is a small group of indie game developers responsible for some very cool, short point-and-click Flash games in the past: Samorost1, Samorost2, and Questionaut, which was nominated for a British Academy Award. Hell, they've even made a short little adventure for a band I've enjoyed listening to in the past, The Polyphonic Spree, which includes some previously unreleased music. In each case, the recognizable artwork is beautiful, the gameplay is light and engaging, and the accompanying music and sound effects are charming.

For a while now they've been bringing this same style to a full-length adventure, Machinarium, which is an IGF finalist this year for Excellence in Visual Art. I've been following along from afar, and every small snippet I've caught has been raising my expectations. Now some new preview footage is available, and it offers a juicy look into more of the artwork and gameplay.

Machinarium Preview 02 from Amanita Design on Vimeo.

For those interested in reading more, there was an interview with the developers about a week back on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Or, just visit the Machinarium website for more vids and screenshots. I wish them great success with this game, and I'd like to see it win the Visual Art award at this years IGF competition. If you can't tell, I'm looking forward to playing.

An Aging Brew

So as it turns out, I'm looking through my older blog posts and I realize that today marks one year since beginning The Monk's Brew.

Although I had written a number of blogs about the development of Vespers over on GarageGames.com prior to starting this blog, I remember feeling apprehensive about doing this given the extra commitment it would require. Time is valuable these days, and I'm not a fast writer. Ideas abound, but I often find I lack the clarity of thought to put them into meaningful words. The last thing I wanted was to start a blog, and then let it die out because I couldn't keep up.

There have definitely been times when it was hard to keep up, and times when I've blogged when I should have been doing other things. But I've enjoyed it throughout, and I like having a place to toss out ideas about game design once in a while or to provide an update or some thoughts on the development of Vespers. I'm amazed that a year has gone by already.

The one thing I've gained above all from doing this, though, is a tremendous amount of respect for those who do this really well.

Writing well is hard. Writing something truly engaging is altogether different, and harder still. Whereas I often struggle to find thoughts and words and occasionally spew gibberish that utterly fails in its communication, some blogs just seem to do it right, consistently, and those are the real gems. You know each time something new pops up in the feed there's going to be a tasty morsel waiting there. I imagine that takes a good deal of practice, but there's a talent there, too; some folks just have a knack for spinning a good tale out of anything. That's a nice skill to have.

Jay over at The Rampant Coyote is someone I admire for this, and I honestly don't know how he can do it while averaging over a post per day on top of everything else in his life. Shamus at Twenty-Sided is a machine, sometimes posting a couple of times each day and never disappointing, especially when he's tearing apart the writing for some new console game. Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog is posting less frequently these days, but still has an amazing ability to stimulate intense discussion on story and game design, and maybe even one day I'll finally grasp whatever that is he's dishing out. Emily Short seems to have that clarity of thought and an ease with words that is rare and special, and she has an inspiring gift for critically assessing interactive fiction (and games in general). And then there's Jason Scott over at ASCII, who I swear could talk about practically any topic and weave something mesmerizing; he has a combination of skill and style that is uniquely his own and it's just damn good stuff, every time. There are many more as well, too many to cover.

I admire these folks for doing this right. They've all been blogging for a few years, and I'm glad they have. We'll see where this blog ends up; I'm hoping this year will be a big year for Vespers, and that should mean some interesting experiences ahead. Should be plenty to write about.

Thanks for coming along, and raise a brew with me to another year.

The End of January Vespers Thing

January was a very busy month for the game, and I feel like we've made some great progress on a number of fronts. I think part of the reason is that we had set a goal for ourselves: try as hard as we could to get most of the work for Act I finished by January 29th, the date of the first Utah Indie Gamers night of 2009, so we could show it off in public. Setting goals can be useful for getting people focused on particular tasks, and it's probably a good way to work even when those goals aren't met.

Which is a good thing, because we didn't meet that goal.

Which itself is probably a good thing, because I wouldn't have been able to show it off at the Utah Indie Gamers night anyway. This past Tuesday morning, I recall having a slight wispy cough as I left for work; by late Tuesday night, I was begging for mercy. The microbes have barely let up on their stranglehold since. I was pretty sure this was influenza (despite getting my flu shot), although some of my colleagues tell me a similar bug called parainfluenza is making the rounds here these days, and the symptoms are similar. It matters little, they both suck. There are few things more humbling than sleeping on the bathroom floor (because the bedroom garbage can was already full of my heaving) or shaking with chills on the couch despite layer upon layer of clothing and blankets. The Utah Indie Gamers night was Thursday. By then I was only feverish. Now I'm finally not feverish, but I've been reduced to little more than a cough, mucus, and virus factory.

But enough of that. The Vespers engine code is up to version 04k with the addition of a few lines to detect animation triggers. The Torque animation exporter allows you to set keyframes within animation sequences that act as triggers for whatever response you want, which you can specify in the object's onAnimationTrigger method. Like most things that involve the Torque model and animation exporter, it takes a bit of time to figure out precisely how to set this up, but I believe I have it working now with Constantin. I'm now using triggers to specify when to play the scraping sound of the knife skinning the hare, which is nicely timed with the motion of the knife. I'm also using it to more smoothly transition between his idle animations. That should prove to be a very useful tool in the future.

Constantin video. Best viewed in High Quality (bottom right corner).
(Might need to turn up the volume to hear it.)

A lot of the progress in January has been with the animations. Shawn has been working his tail off, and we're now basically finished with the Act I animations for Ignatius, Constantin, and Matteo. The latter two were already animated by our previous guy, but we needed to re-do them for a couple of reasons: first, the animations weren't so great and we wanted to improve them while adding lip sync; and second, we would need re-rigged characters for the first cutscene anyway. Constantin looks tremendously better now than he did before (even my wife noted this), with much smoother and more interesting motions. The same goes for Matteo.

Lem continues to work on Lucca, although it's going slow for him. But that just leaves Drogo and Cecilia, and once those two are finished, we should have ourselves an actual, complete Act I. Add a cutscene on top of that, and we might just have ourselves a working demo. Soon.

Despite having some family issues that demanded his attention for a while, N.R. made some nice progress in January mostly on the 2D front. Most of his efforts were directed at spiffing up the GUI and HUD elements for the game, and I'm very happy with the results. In addition to updated window frames, he designed really nice Options and Help window GUIs, incorporating some of the elements from the church fresco designed by Régis.

Options dialog.
He also incorporated a sweet ribbon design with a medieval image he obtained and utilized in the Main Menu GUI.

Main menu screen.
(Click for larger version)

He's also been working on additional visual goodies such as a more realistic and bloody stone for Lucca to scrape at, and a more interesting and natural appearance to the top of the belltower, exposing the floor boards while mounding snow around the outsides.

The new bloody flagstone.
(Click for larger version)

The updated top of the belltower.
(Click for larger version)

N.R. also spent a crazy amount of time working on a new Orange River Studio logo design for me during January, and I think we're getting close. By next month's update we should have a design finalized. N.R. has been dealing with a lot this month and I'm amazed that he's been able to get as much done as he has, and he continues to do some pretty amazing work. I am a very lucky person.

Despite my bitching about fonts earlier this month, I'm still in negotiations with the P22 foundry for a much more reasonable licensing fee for the Cezanne typeface, which is good news. I really like the font and I appreciate it for what it offers, and it's nice to know the P22 guys are very much open to creative solutions for this and are willing to work with small developers like me. I'm pretty confident it will work out well, and I'm really looking forward to settling on that font once and for all.

Finally, as I reported last month, we decided to try a little something different and utlize Pieter Bruegel's famous painting, The Triumph of Death, as the main background for our opening splash screen. I tried a couple of new things with the splash screen, including some nice closeups and crossfades, and I'm very satisfied with how it turned out. I'd like to go over some of the Torque-specific techniques I used to create it in another blog, hopefully during February.

So despite the bloody, protracted battle with the microbes, January turned out to be a very productive month for Vespers, and I'm looking forward to a good February as well.

blueful

Aaron Reed has written some pretty fine IF. Gourmet was one of my favorites from the 2003 IF Comp, just a lot of fun to play. It even has its own theme song (judge for yourself). And of course there's Whom The Telling Changed, which received much well-deserved recognition and was a finalist in 2006 at the now-defunct Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. I also see that Aaron was interviewed back then for Get Lamp, Jason Scott's (hopefully) upcoming documentary on text adventures.

He also lives about ten minutes away from my house. We met a couple of times at the quarterly Utah Indie Gamers Night, and he's a pretty fascinating guy.

Aaron is about to launch his epic new work of IF, Blue Lacuna, which he is calling an "interactive novel". Before that, though, there is an online prelude:


Rather than describe it, just follow the links and experience it.

I'm looking forward to trying Blue Lacuna. I've got some high expectations for it.

Curse My Expensive Font Tastes

Without question, some of the best advice I've been given on the business of indie game development has come from Tom Buscaglia, the Game Attorney -- probably one of the best attorneys representing game developers. Much of this advice comes from his Game Dev Kit, a set of information and forms for start-up game developers, which in my opinion is an excellent resource for any small start-up indie. Above all, the best advice is:

"Quite simply, you can not sell what you do not own."

So basically, any and all assets put into a game must be owned by the legal entity (company or individual) that owns the game, or they must have an appropriate license from the actual owner of the asset. Once you really get elbows deep into the development of a game, you quickly realize how complicated this can become due to the many categories and sheer volume of assets that are needed for game development. Every model, every texture, every musical piece or sound clip -- all of it must either be owned by the company making and selling the game, or they have to be licensed to sell it commercially.

This can end up being quite the chore, and it's good practice (especially for the small indie developer who is working primarily on his own) to keep a "master asset list" to track all of these assets and their ownership or licensing status. It also helps to bone up on some of the basic legal issues surrounding appropriate documentation of ownership, and to make sure you take care of those issues sooner rather than later. It's far too easy to slap a sound, musical clip, or texture into your game, even as as a placeholder, and then completely forget about it. Believe me, it sucks to have to track down that dude who helped you with your title music a couple years back because you never asked him to verify and transfer the IP over to you.

One of the assets which, I think, is most often overlooked in this respect is fonts.

Fonts are one of those things that I think a lot of people take for granted -- your computer comes with a whole mess of them installed, and it's easy to find hordes of free ones online. They're often passed around as easily, freely, and inappropriately as MP3s. But for games, fonts are an asset just like anything else, and unless you own it or are licensed commercially, you can't sell it. So the solution is to create your own or buy an appropriate commercial license, unless you want to stick with boring public domain fonts.

The problem for me is that I have a special thing for fonts. I love fonts. I collect them. I hoard them the way some women hoard shoes. I'm a regular customer on MyFonts.com and if they offered a frequent buyer rewards program I'm sure I'd soon be platinum level.

So for me, finding the font that is just right for use in Vespers is a long, exhaustive research project. Right now, we're using two main fonts in the game, one for the text input and output windows, and the other for most everything else (the main logo, menu items, titles, buttons, and so forth). The font for the text windows is not a large concern for me, as long as it is clear and legible at multiple sizes, and has at least some interesting style to it. Early on, I settled for a font called Flute, which is shown below. Flute is a pretty cheap font -- I think it originally sold for $8 and last I checked was free on MyFonts.com -- and there shouldn't be any problem getting an appropriate license for our use. The other font, however, is a bit of a problem.

Flute

Until recently, the font I have been using for all of the good stuff is called Cezanne, by P22 Foundry. Those folks make a lot of very high quality fonts that are used widely for commercial purposes. In fact, I've seen Cezanne in a lot of places -- on TV, in print, even on the cover of my local phone book. It's an extrordinary font that I think is absolutely beautiful, and of all of the fonts I've researched, this one really stands out from the others. I hesitate to say that it is perfect, but damn if it isn't close to that.

Cezanne

But you have to write to P22 if you want to use their fonts commercially and get a special license, like for what we're doing. And, of course, they responded by asking a wild amount of money for this, on the order of $1,500 -- half for embedding the font, the other half for the commercial license. Now, I understand this, of course. This font is a work of art, and it makes sense for them to expect an appropriate license payment from someone who wants to make piles of money on a product the appeal of which is due, at least in part, to their craftsmanship. But given that we're a small indie company with a development budget in the low five digits, this represents a significant fraction of our overall development costs. I tried a little negotiation, and they offered an alternative licensing plan that is less expensive, but it's still a lot. So I've been looking at alternatives.

I've always thought, for some reason, that the main font in the game should be a handwritten font. I'm not entirely sure why, I just feel like it communicates the feel of the game (from the Abbot's perspective) the best. So I'm looking to maintain that, but there are only so many options. Once you get past a few good ones, most handwriting or calligraphy fonts start getting far too curly, decorative, or perfect. And I'm not that easy to please.

Suffice it to say that I haven't come across another one yet that has jumped out at me as a clear replacement for Cezanne, but there are a few options. The best of the bunch is a font called Whitechapel, from Blambot, a foundry that specializes in comic fonts and lettering. It's a nice handwriting font that I think conveys the right image, although I still think it's a step below Cezanne and it doesn't completely satisfy me. So when Blambot told me that our use of the font constitutes "redistribution of a derivative work of the font" which would cost $500 for an appropriate license, I thought, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Whitechapel

One of the problems here is that our use of the font is a little atypical. Often under most font licenses, it's illegal to include the font file itself, such as the TrueType file, with a distributed game. But with games powered by the Torque Game Engine, you don't need to include font files with your games -- the Torque engine takes all of the fonts used in the game and creates a special kind of bitmap file for each font and size. The characters are basically rendered to a bitmap and stored for later display. There's no way to reverse engineer it, and no way for clients to take that bitmap and somehow install it on their machine. Nevertheless, many of these companies still believe that this constitutes embedding and redistribution.

I do have permission to use another font, Secret Scrypt, a very cool font from another very cool font foundry called Canada Type. It cost a mere $30 for its commercial fee. It's a bit heavy for my tastes, but it was actually the first font I started using for Vespers, so I may end up just going back to the start with respect to this font.

Secret Scrypt

Curse my expensive font tastes.

Write from the Start

So pretty much one of the most challenging parts of making games for the small indie or hobbyist developer is getting the extra help you need. The developer who can do it all on his or her own -- programming, artwork, writing, modeling, animation, web design, yada yada -- is a rare breed with far too much talent and disposable time. When I made Missions of the Reliant way back when, in (gulp) 1994, I could handle most of it myself because things were just...simpler. I didn't have to worry about modeling or animation, and web design meant little more than plain text and a few animated GIFs (mostly I just focused on BBS's and AOL -- and, sadly enough, eWorld). Life, as they say, was so much easier when we were young.

Unless you start from the beginning with a set of partners, it's tough to find people who are willing to put the necessary time and effort into your project, particularly if they're not being paid. But once you start paying people to provide the services you need, the expenses can start piling up fast. That's especially true for modelers, animators, and 2D artists, where the good stuff usually doesn't come cheap. And since the majority of small indie and hobbyist developers who initiate new game projects are programmers, not artists, you end up with a lot of projects that die on the vine because they just can't obtain or afford the artwork that is needed. As one person I knew said, it's cheaper to program than to create art.

A while back, as these thoughts were bouncing around inside my head, I began to wonder how different it might be if a game project was started by a visual artist rather than a programmer. I started a thread on the GarageGames forums to see if people were familiar with any such projects, and it turned out to be a pretty long thread. Some good thoughts there, but not a lot of games that started with the artist and lasted through to completion and release.

That was a couple of years ago, though, and I know of (or suspect) a few examples since. One that came up recently, as reflected upon by Chris over at The Artful Gamer, is the Quest for Glory II remake by AGDInteractive through the efforts of artist Eriq Chang. As Chris notes:

"I call this a 'renaissance' of computer game re-makes because the creative torch has finally been returned to artists. Instead of designing and conceiving games from scratch without any attention to their expressive qualities (as we see in most commercial games), AGDInteractive (has) put artists behind the wheel and allowed them to drive the creative process."

But I'm not really here to discuss how visual artists can drive creative game development. The reason I bring this up is because I was reminded of this topic during a recent web chat about a similar concept.

Back at the Austin GDC last year, I found myself most interested in the discussions and talks on game writing, and through those interactions I was introduced to the Game Writers SIG, a "community of game writers whose goal is to improve the quality of games writing by increasing overall awareness of the craft of games writing and how it fits into the game development process." Although it's not exactly my specialty, I enjoy following the e-mail list discussions from a distance. Anyone else interested in signing up for the mailing list can check out their sign-up page.

One of the topics that often comes up on the list is how to better promote the idea that writers should be involved in the videogame development process much earlier than they typically are. What often seems to be the case, as I understand it, is that writers are engaged well after a game has been designed, such that the writers are frequently asked to fill in gaps or otherwise work within a well-established framework that has little chance of being altered much. As such, there is little opportunity to shape the project from the beginning, or to impact game design and gameplay mechanics through the writing process.

Something like this was brought up again on the SIG's monthly (roughly) chat meeting, which I checked out for the first time this past week. The discussion turned to the creation of a list of arguments the group could use to convince game companies of the benefit of hiring and involving writers. One member, Reid, posed the following question:

"Here's an idea. What if the SIG made a small game to showcase the value of writers when they have more creative control and are brought in early?"

In response, Corvus brought up the idea of using Inform to create a piece of interactive fiction. Nice idea, I would have to say. But then again, there are already plenty of excellent IF games already out there that have been written by, you know, writers. Is the problem that game companies aren't familiar enough with good IF games, and they just need someone to make them take a closer look? Or is it perhaps because companies that make graphical games might not be terribly interested in what text-only IF games might have to offer?

I don't know the answer to that, and maybe I'm missing the mark, but I do know how I feel about the whole idea -- it forms the basis for the Vespers project. When I started this thing, the goal was to create a 3D first-person adventure game that was based on an established interactive fiction game. The main reason was to see how a typical text-based interactive fiction game would mesh with a visual 3D interface, but just as importantly, the idea was to start with a game that was fully designed and written by a writer. That's one of the big advantages to having started with Jason's Vespers game -- the plot, dialogue, characters, setting, puzzles, all of it was already written, tested, played, and critiqued. We knew what worked well, and what didn't. Characters and setting were already nicely fleshed out. All we needed to do (easy for me to say) was to take that entire game design and translate it from text to graphics, while still keeping most of the text.

In the end, Vespers might not necessarily be the best example to show game development companies to convince them of the value of starting with a game writer, but I certainly hope it will encompass this idea and at least help move the field in this general direction. That's the goal, at least.

A secondary but related goal is to use this game as an example of what, specifically, interactive fiction has to offer to the mainstream videogame industry. While I wouldn't necessarily describe IF as a "mature" medium, it has been around considerably longer than most other types of videogames and, as such, I believe it has a maturity that perhaps other genres lack. This extends to some of the more interesting areas of game design (at least to me) -- puzzle design, narrative design, character development, and conversation dynamics, to name a few. I think there is a lot that mainstream game designers can learn from some of the better or more advanced IF games. It's an overlooked genre and community, and it's something I plan on submitting to an upcoming GDC for a lecture and/or group discussion. We'll see if anyone's listening.

Text Adventuring, MMO-Style

Coyote and Scorpia beat me to it, but apparently a group is interested in bringing the Zork universe into the MMO realm, as reported on Ars Technica. It's to be called Legends of Zork and published by Jolt Online Gaming, a group headquartered in Dublin. There isn't a whole lot of information available yet, though.

From the press release:

"LegendsofZork.com will provide online gamers with a persistent online adventure, playable from any Internet browser. Players take up the role of a recently laid-off salesman and part-time loot-gatherer, as he explores the Great Underground Empire. Designed to provide gamers with a casual MMO game they can play on their laptop, desktop or Apple iPhone (in school, work or on the bus), there’s nothing to download, just go to www.legendsofzork.com."

I have to say I'm not completely surprised, given some of the recent advances in browser-based IF and multiplayer IF. Of course, there is Guncho, a multiplayer IF system based on Inform 7, which was released not too long ago and has received some nice attention, although I haven't spent much time with it. But multiplayer IF is also not exactly a new concept -- it just hasn't been done much.

Most people will think immediately of MUDs and so forth, which is entirely appropriate as a precursor to multiplayer IF but which I'm not sure I would necessarily classify as IF. And others have approached it in the past, notably Mike Rozak, who has both written about multiplayer IF theory and put his money where his mouth is with his graphical multiplayer IF-like system called CircumReality. Interestingly, Home of the Underdogs lists a couple of games under the heading of "Interactive Fiction Multiplayer Titles", but I wouldn't exactly classify them as such (both of them, Fallthru from 1989 and Zyll from 1984, are really just text-based RPG games).

Still, I can't say I've seen anything yet that I would point at and say "Now that's multiplayer IF", at least not until Guncho came around.

It will be interesting to see how they implement this, and I'm not really sure how it will go. It's also not clear if this will be free to play, or if they have some sort of business model for it. I do think there is a potential niche market for multiplayer IF, but I imagine those kinds of games and scenarios would be especially tricky to construct. I'll be keeping my eyes out for this.