The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Month: July 2005 (Page 3 of 4)

Making Entertainment On The Cheap

Fresh Hell pointed out a couple of good articles on ScriptSecrets.net which discusses an interesting topic – how to make movies on the cheap. It resonated with me since we have similar issues when building games as well. As much as we’d like everything to be the biggest and best, and as much as MMOs inherently invite the need of every feature under the sun, we constantly try to figure how to use and reuse art and code in order to keep costs manageable and testing under control. Continue reading

Why Don’t Some Great Games Sell?

Over on Game Matters, Scott Miller has started a good thread discussing why Ico didn’t sell, despite it being considered a work of wonder by everyone whose tried it. Idlenews has a similar thread about Psychonauts, a game that appears to be doing abysmal numbers despite being beloved by anyone that’s tried it. The latter was closer to my heart — I only dabbled in Ico, but I’m now nearly done with Psychonauts, and I’m loving every minute of it (well, up until I get jumping-puzzled out for the night). Both threads are good, albeit depressing, reads. Continue reading

“Eh, We Changed The Rules”

I like to read the articles on Magic: the Gathering’s website from time to time, since it’s nice to see how another industry happens to handle a ‘live’ game environment. I found this one amusing, since it talks about all of the different rules and platitudes we come up with, and how the Vision ™ can stray from day to day.

[S]o we changed our minds. We do that a lot. I know Mark Rosewater and I both like to write about all these little rules and guidelines that R&D makes for ourselves and how those rules guide our philosophies and decisions. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: those rules and guidelines tend to apply fully the day they were created, a little less the next day, then a little less, and so on, until we’ve changed our minds completely.

True, true. The end result is that my blog history is full of me contradicting myself.

People Are Easy To Offend

The recent hullabaloo about a sex game in GTA: SA brings to mind an experience I had on Meridian 59. We got angry mail threatening to sue us because, and I stress I’m not making this up, someone decrypted a file in their Meridian 59 and found it was full of every possible profanity you can think of, stuff that’d make a sailor blush. The file, of course, was the index we used for the profanity filter. Continue reading

The Psychology of Price and Value

It’s a common trend in games, nowadays, to figure out how to pick up the gamer and shake him for loose change. And I foresee a backlash. Among the recent news:

Continue reading

The Life of the 3rd Party Developer

Want to know what it’s really like to be part of a small game development studio? See this remarkable diary that talks about a company called Ninja Theory building a game for a next generation game platform – from the business perspective of pitching the product, paying the bills and landing the deal. They talk about how agonizing and scary the whole process is, even though every publisher that saw the game loved it. In particular, his interactions with the publishers are just priceless. Continue reading

Sin Episodes – Too Expensive?

Ritual is releasing a sequel to Sin in episodic format.

Ritual Entertainment’s long-awaited Sin 2 is to be released episodically over Valve’s Steam digital distribution system, with episodes lasting around six hours each to be released “every three to four months” for around $20 (£11.38) an episode.

This is interesting from a number of angles. Despite Steam’s massive unpopularity (and not all undeserved, I should add), there are many who think that digital distribution will catch on in a big way, possibly even going so far as to save gaming. As Scott Miller points out: Continue reading

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