Zen Of Design

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

Category: Personal (Page 1 of 9)

Dungeon Boss Update

January 8, 2016 /

The game that I’ve been working on, Dungeon Boss, has been doing quite well.  Shortly before Christmas, we added Guilds & the Tower of Pwnage to the game. Yes, I named the Tower.  These features have been getting solid reviews, and the game has been performing quite tidily.

IGN recently did a Let’s Play of the game which was pretty nice.  We also had a pretty awesome Christmas marketing video that showcased our Christmas skins.

We also get some fan reviews:

Well they said that it was addicting and they’re right. I played all day and night. Haven’t slept in months. The wife and kids left me. Played all day and lost my job. I had no money so I lost the house also. I lost everything but Dungeon Boss kept me company. After I lost my iPhone to the bank I jacked a random guy’s iPhone. Then I decided to live full time in McDonalds. Dungeon Boss has now been my life. McDonalds provided me wifi in my hard times. Well I gotta go. The court date is soon for jacking the iPhone. Adiós

Dungeon Boss

September 7, 2015 /

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Last Tuesday, I launched a game.  It’s doing quite well.

Boss Fight Entertainment released Dungeon Boss in a worldwide release on Tuesday in partnership with our publisher, Big Fish Games.  This marks my first foray into mobile gaming, and indeed my first serious work on a published title that was not an MMO of some sort.  So it was quite a novel experience for me, and quite frankly one that I needed.

The game has been doing exceedingly well so far.  Google featured it on their store on Wednesday, and Apple returned the favor and added on an Editor’s Choice award (and a really nice review) on Thursday, which has just resulted in our numbers shooting into the stratosphere.  It’s currently sitting as the #1 most downloaded RPG and the #2 most downloaded Free-to-Play game on the Apple store behind Happy Wheels .  Our revenue position still has a ways to go, but this publically available list here claims that we’re number 30, and we’ve been rising steadily as our population gets deeper into and more invested in the game.

According to AppAnnie, we’ve reached the #1 RPG spot for 70 different countries.  However, we’ve only taken the #1 game spot in one country – Latvia, oddly enough – though we’ve hit top 5 in 24.  While this is all incredibly heady stuff and the chart-watching makes for a pleasant way to spend the holiday weekend, when we get back it will be entirely about how to make the game even better, as well as holding our breath to see if the metric patterns we see extrapolate moving forward like they did in beta.  If so, Dungeon Boss is well positioned to be a huge part of the App Store landscape for years to come, and I’m very proud to have been a part of it.

Three Very Different News Stories Mentioning Me

March 11, 2015 /

Well, minorly, anyway.  This magazine offers their coverage of #Gamergate, offering the phrase I surely hope appears in my obituary.  Being in the same sentence as Tim is quite an honor and a privilege.

Those within the industry openly made statements against Gamergate, including: gaming companies such as Blizzard and the Entertainment Software Association (commonly know as the ESA and gaming’s top trade group); publications like Game Informer, Polygon, and Giant Bomb; and creative luminaries such as Tim Schafer and Damion Schubert. Some statements where measured, like the ESA’s assertion that “There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats.” But others weren’t. Schubert called it “an unprecedented catastrofuck,” which remains one of my favourite combinations of words ever. Even the vaguest of questions about the legitimacy of the movement seemed to evaporate.

Motherboard.Vice picked up on and expanded upon an investigative story I began… for science… about a month ago: Cock Hero is Guitar Hero for Wanking.  In related news, the artists behind this emerging art trend feel perhaps I don’t fully understand their craft.

Also, I finally put the slides up for my talk to GDC on the F2P model – sorry for the delay.

That Stephen Seagal Moment

November 27, 2014 /

About a year ago, I decided to lose some weight with the Rock Band Exercise program.  In short, Rock Band on Expert Drums will totally and completely kick your ass.  Along the way to losing about 40 pounds, I gold starred 400 songs.  Yay, me.

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Well, most of those pounds found their way back on me, and I have some time to kill while I seek out funding and/or jobs, so I’ve been picking the drums back up.  I decided a good place to start would be to re-gold star the songs I’d gold-starred in the past (gold-star is above ‘5-stars’ and means ‘near perfect’ on most songs).  So far my hit rate is… not good.  About 40% of the songs, I’m able to gold star again.  The other 40% will take me getting back into fighting shape.  Some percentage of that, I have no idea how I beat it the first time through. Continue reading

Poking My Head Up, Seeing My Shadow

April 2, 2010 /

Here’s an article I wrote for the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.  Long-time readers may see some repeat themes in this one (including the Gameplay Triangle), but I’m introducing it to a new audience, so there.

Massively multiplayer games are not new. The first true massively multiplayer game was a text-only virtual world called MUD, put together by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. This little window of dizzying text descriptions was a far cry visually from the seductively lush 3D virtual worlds of today, but it was enough. Enough to get the genre started, and enough to get armchair designers across the world to imagine the possibilities, and debate philosophical matters of game design. One of these questions, still asked today, is whether or not massively multiplayer environments should strive to be games or to be worlds.

Also, yesterday a slightly more tentacle-in-cheek interview with me was posted on Gamespot.

Original comments thread is here.

Down Goes Illidan

July 28, 2008 /

Last night, my guild finally managed to take down Illidan Stormrage, the end boss of the Black Temple.  It was an enormous amount of work to get there.  I think I joined the guild about this time last year, and back then we were taking babysteps into Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling with Lurker.

According to WoWJutsu, 5.18% of all U.S. raiding guilds have gotten down Illidan, which amounts to roughly 4000 of ‘em.  (That being said, with our fresh kill, we rank in the low 2000s).  Split the difference, and assume that each guild has about 35 raiding members (probably low), and you’d guess that about 100K people have popped Illidan.  A small fraternity, but actually not as small as I expected. Continue reading

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