Month: October 2011

When Are Bad Ideas Good Ideas? Goats vs Nazis and Dropsy

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Kickstarter, bless ’em, have made possible many projects that would have been much, much harder for indie developers to initiate only a few measly years ago. We’ve seen plenty of really interesting projects receive funding via the platform, including Kentucky Route Zero, Octodad 2, Star Command and Blade Symphony.

Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform.

I don’t even know where to start – or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Nazis looks to be one part game, nine parts marketing campaign – heck, that’s exactly why we’re mentioning the project on the blog! The actual novelty value of juxtaposing goats to nazis is obviously up to the funder/player/developer to decide. If you DO feel that it’s a good idea, then off to Kickstarter you go!

As if Goats vs Nazis wasn’t enough for just one post, I also stumbled upon Jay Tholen’s Dropsy. Dropsy seems – by my estimation, anyway – to be a Windows-bound point and click adventure game about a… clown… that is manic, depressive or both? The hero, “hand-less, unintelligible, and questionably human” … “will also encounter colorful characters and mind-stretching logic puzzles in surreal, off-kilter landscapes”. Sounds a notch like Toonstruck to me.

Other than that, I haven’t the faintest idea as to what is going on here. But fret not, for there be video! The Kickstarter video gives you a fantastic idea of what you might be getting. (You’ll be getting crazy, that’s what you’ll be getting). Keep in mind that Mr. Tholen has set the funding bar for the game very, very low indeed, so don’t be afraid to pledge just because the measly sum of $225 has already been fulfilled.

P.S. Can’t believe I just wrote this post.

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Rage in Numbers

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

At the time of writing, the main support topic for Rage on the Steam forums has been viewed an amazing 475,000 times. The comparable thread on Bethesda’s forums – a whopping 140,000 views.

In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, but finding the paragons of the PC platform since 1991 – Id Software – as the offending party is rather inconceivable, even in a gaming world where Crytek, Epic and Rockstar Games have long since bailed out.

The texture popping above is related to the game’s texture Auto-Balancer, which somehow tends to load and utilize 4096k textures instead of the much crisper 8192k (or the gargantuan 16384k textures that take most of the game’s 21659 Mb install size!). 1)http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

More puzzling yet is the inability for players to bind numpad keys properly – especially the number 5(!?) – leaving left-handers in a proverbial bind. Different mice and keyboards are exhibiting various symptoms as well.

Let’s not even mention the 64-bit executable. …or lack thereof. Let us however mention the missing idstudio level editor, which is apparently dependent on the very same 64-bit .exe.

To wrap up this terribly clever post before things get utterly out of hand, we could take a look at the game’s collector edition (check out the comparison photo on the left), which comes bundled with a Rage comic that not only is 2/3 the size of the normal issues, but also only contains 2/3 of the Rage story arc. Boom!

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Ensnaring Customers: Spiderweb Carnage Sale

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

I’ll let Jeff Vogel, the man behind the Seattle-based RPG game company Spiderweb Software, do the talking:

Glorious October Carnage Sale! In celebration of a fantastic year (releasing Avadon and putting out our first titles on Steam and the iPad), we are permanently lowering the prices of everything we sell by 20% or more! Even better, for the entire month of October, all of our products for Windows and Mac will be 10% off!

In his blog, Vogel also outlines his motivations for the change in the company’s overall pricing structure:

A LOT of money is being made by selling games for cheap. So now , instead of selling our games for $25 or $28 (!!!), we’ll sell them for $20 or $15. I know this still seems like a lot, but I haven’t backed off on the key thing I’ve long said … People Who Write Niche Games Can’t Charge a Dollar. If you’re making a pretty, shiny, highly casual game with cartoon squirrels and you think you can find a million fans for it, go ahead. Charge a dollar. You’ll have to. But if you write games like mine? Low budget, old school, hardcore RPGs with lots of content? If I charged a dollar for it, I’d have to sell a copy to pretty much every interested human everywhere to have a chance of making money.

The end result of the price drop? Geneforge 1-3 go for 15% and 4-5 for $20; the same pricing structure applies to Avernum, too. Throw in the extra 10% October discount and you’re looking at some pretty cheap stuff. Avadon, now $20 on the website, is actually cheaper still on Steam right now, so you might want to take a look at that, if you’d like some extra DRM to go with your games!

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The Indie Stone: Brave-Faced & Hard-Headed

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

“Ah, but The Indie Stone is a brave-faced stone.” -Brendan Caldwell

In what can only be described (in suitably hyperbolic tones) as the most unfortunate development process ever (Duke Nukem Forever, you say? Ptsch! Ptschhh!), the Indie Stone have had their dev laptops stolen. According to the team, the latest update – and as such, months of work – to Project Zomboid was lost due to the game being backed up between the two stolen machines, yet seldom externally. A massive, repetitive witch-hunt by the gaming community subsequently ensued on both Reddit and Twitter, resulting in emotional distress, self-flagellation and many a brain cell lost.

Yes, perhaps the lost data should have been backed up better, but after such a costly setback, the isometric open-world zombie survival game developers need all the financial and emotional support they can get. It’s not like “Backups!!” weren’t the first thing they thought when the severity of the situation first unraveled.

The burglary is only the latest episode in an inexplicable series of unfortunate events; the team has had their Paypal funds held hostage by the evil bank-like corporation (also experienced by the Xenonauts team as well as Mojang); only shortly after the Paypal debacle, the Indie Stone also got a similar receipt from Google Checkout, who blocked new orders and revoked access to their funds.

A man blows himself up in a car next to the aforementioned flat; their expensive web servers crash. A development build leaks.

Once the team finally gets back on track, solving their issues both with Paypal and  Google Checkout by ingeniously pairing joke games to actual pre-order subscriptions – then, the burglary.

Gosh, these hard-headed, brave-faced guys, they’ve got stones all right, having already promised to “come back stronger”! 1)http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/10/project-zomboid-burglary-statement/ You should preorder Project Zomboid now – just to tempt the fates, spite the gods, piss off the demons and so forth. Surely something somewhere is trying to put and end to Project Zomboid. Let’s not let it, shall we?

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The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

I was almost going to let this pass by without making a note. Another Humble Bundle has gone up, but it’s one of those in–between ones without a number; moreoever, it was initially offering only one main game, which felt somewhat off and going against the community vibe that the previous bundles have had. But when that one game happens to be my favourite indie game of the year, and on top of that they go and add my second favourite indie game of the year 1)http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/10/SpaceChem-Added-To-The-Humble-Frozen-Synapse-Bundle, I just can’t deny it acknowledgement. There is over a day left and the total purchases just reached the million milestone. So what the heck, go ahead and buy yourself some substantial hours of smart indie gaming.

So what do you get for your voluntarily-sized payment this time? No less than Frozen Synapse and SpaceChem, two indie heavyweights, as well as Trauma and the previous Frozenbyte bundle if you pay above the average. As well as, of course, the opportunity to donate towards two charities, EFF and Child’s Play. As usual there is additional bonus content included with your key that inflates the total value to ridiculous proportions, such as the soundtracks and editors for some of the games, not to mention registration keys for Steam, Desura, OnLive and Direct 2 Drive should you feel the urge to add DRM to your DRM-free games.
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