Category Archives: General

On competition, card games, and Netrunner in particular

I’ve started playing Netrunner again. This time, rather than the CCG that I played with Kurt back in our ancient college days, it’s Android: Netrunner, made by Fantasy Flight Games (who I freakin’ love), and it’s a living card game.  Which in essence means that it’s a lot cheaper, and easier to keep up. As per usual, I’ve jumped in with both feet and an arm.

And that leads me to the first part of this discussion: Competition.

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Kev’s Slog #13

One of the strangest and most interesting video game stories has to be the story behind the game Paranautical Activity. If you haven’t ever heard it, then I’ll talk about it now. The story so far:

A little over two years ago, Paranautical Activity (PA) was on Greenlight. With Greenlight being new and the votes for his game not coming, the lead developer Mike Maulberg went to Adult Swim Games (AS) as the publisher. Since AS is a trusted publisher, the game would be given a free ride onto Steam. Of course, AS would take a huge cut of the money (25%), but the developers needed Steam.

However, Valve insisted that nobody was allowed to bypass the Greenlight system and blocked their entry. Originally, they said that using a publisher as a free ride wasn’t a way to bypass Greenlight, despite that many games have done this. In effect, the developer Code Avarice’s only fault was that they left their Greenlight page open and didn’t remove it prior to partnering with a publisher.

Maulberg is an outspoken person and he immediately went to the press telling everybody that he had been blocked by Steam and Greenlight was a broken system. He also vented a huge amount of anger, and while it was blunt and crude, he had a point. The Internet and the press quickly rallied behind him and PA became a symbol for Greenlight’s broken system for a time.

Eventually PA passed through Greenlight without AS, and it entered Early Access. But in time, the game soured with some of the fans who felt that the game’s promised goals were not being met. Maulberg openly attacked his harshest (and rudest) critics, often mocking them on social networks. It didn’t take long for Maulberg to have the hate that is normally reserved for Phil Fish.

A few days ago, PA was updated to have new Halloween content. Steam made the update not easy, and this already irritated Maulbeck. When it was released, Steam accidentally tagged the game as Early Access again, meaning that it would be hidden from many users that filter those games (including myself). Maulbeck snapped and raged on Twitter. In the end, he threatened to “kill Gabe Newell.”

Death threats are illegal, and Valve (or maybe Gabe himself) didn’t take it kindly. Within a few hours of his post, PA was removed from the store and they were muted on their forums. Valve sent Code Avarice a formal letter that they were no longer doing business with them. The game networks reported on this as well, turning the game and company into pariahs overnight.

Just hours ago, Mike Maulbeck hoist himself on his own petard, announcing that he was leaving Code Avarice entirely. He would not have creative control, have no access to the game or forums, and receive no money from the game. He issued a very earnest apology for what he said. He asked the Valve Gods to put the game back on Steam, and not punish the others in Code Avarice when he was the only person doing bad things.

Somehow I feel that this story isn’t over yet.

Kev’s Slog #10

I’ve been watching several presentations from this year’s GDC conference, and some of them are extremely good.  The Game Developers Conference is about people in the video game industry talking to other developers about what they are doing, and maybe they can help others learn from their successes and mistakes.  Some of the presentations are quite informative and interesting.   I’ll try to see if any are worth commenting on in the future, but the presentations are an hour long each so they are quite time consuming.

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Some press, including Jim Sterling, recently blasted the conference for some of the presentations.  One of the worst offenders was called “Monetizing Teens in a Safe and Legal Manner.”  I will admit that looking at that title will make many people feel truly disgusted, as I think that video games are already exploiting fans enough, and now they are going after children that may not know better.

But this proves a point.  If you just read the headline and not any of the context, then you often miss the big picture.  I hate to say it, but that means that Jim Sterling jumped to conclusions and got some of his information wrong.

If you’re wondering, that GDC presentation wasn’t about monetizing teens at all.  It’s about free-to-play games that are targeting all audiences (which there are millions), and telling developers how to put in parental controls and prevent kids from unintentionally spending money.  Unfortunately, yes, many F2P games target children.  I need to emphasize that I do not approve of it.  However, I’m saying that singling out video games for criticism is very silly, because millions of products intentionally exploit children, including animated movies, breakfast cereal, toys, snack food, and fast-food restaurants.

In any case, I think that parents should be more active in their children’s lives and families should establish ground rules about phone usage.

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Alexander Bruce, the creator of Antichamber, talked about his game at the GDC conference that happened last month.  He talked about how he spent seven years working on the game.  There were a number of truly fascinating things that I learned from the hour-long presentation.

You may know that the game was originally called Hazard: The Journey of Life and it was a very deliberate and personal reason for this.  The game represented what he was going through and it’s almost an extension of himself.  Since it was called Hazard for the first four years in development, he didn’t want to change it.  But he talked to many other indie developers who told him that the title didn’t match the gameplay, and it made the game sound like a FPS game.  He then changed it after debating about it for weeks, and this was the right choice in retrospect.

I was surprised to hear that he didn’t actually write to Valve to have the game on Steam.  Instead, Valve contacted him and asked if he would use their platform, thus making his game an exclusive Steamworks title (like Civilization 5 and others).  This was in 2011, two years before he was ready to ship the game.  That’s how much they wanted his game.

Toward the end of the game development, Alexander Bruce started to lose his mind, and I’m not saying that figuratively.  The pressure of making the game was immense and he was literally breaking down.  He had been fighting so hard to get noticed and get recognized by the media and the industry.  When he was starting to get it, it only made him more depressed as all the negatives of fame came with it, such as the fear of failure.  And worse, he spent so long working on getting fame that when he got it, then it felt like he had no goal anymore.

I need to point out that he is not alone.  Davey Wredon, the developer of The Stanley Parable, mentioned the exact same thing–that fame makes you sad after a time, and it’s hard to understand unless you’ve become relatively famous.  Wredon says that he doesn’t like talking about his game anymore and wants to move on.

At the very end, Antichamber was a huge hit.  It became the #1 best selling on Steam for a time, a feat that’s very hard to do as an indie game developer.  Alexander Bruce had the three things that every person wants:  He was incredibly rich.  He was famous and respected by his peers.  He had dozens of awards across the industry.  You’d think that having the holy trinity of success would make him very happy, but it didn’t.  It broke something inside him.  He had the kind of mental breakdown that is frequently exaggerated on TV, where he would scream at himself in a mirror.  He said that it’s hard to understand because most people can’t see a downside to wealth or fame.

At the very end, he had a Q&A session.  He only answered five questions, but the shortest one was the most powerful.  “Was it worth it?”  Alexander Bruce paused for a second and gave a very interesting answer.  He said that if it was a year ago, then he would have said that he wasn’t sure.  But now that he’s gotten help and he’s doing better, then maybe it was worth it.  However, it’s unclear if Alexander Bruce will ever design another video game ever again.

Kev’s Slog #7

The game Ether One is finally coming out on March 25 and it looks very brilliant.  The original trailer made it look very action oriented, but there’s no shooting or running in this first game.  It’s an Unreal engine game, it’s a standard adventure game that’s a little different.  If you want, you can just wander around if you want with no enemies or time constraints, and you’ll experience the story at your leisure.  However, there’s puzzles in the game that when solved, add to the storyline and enhance the experience.  The puzzles are incredibly difficult.  One key feature is that you can only hold one item at a time, so this goes against adventure gaming where you randomly collect inventory items and then throw all of them at a puzzle to somehow solve a puzzle by accident.  Still, the puzzles are reportedly logical and they avoid most of the pitfalls that show up in most point-and-click adventure games.

The story is that you’re a Restorer, a person that is trying to fix the memories of people that have damaged minds (in this case, dementia).  But as always, there’s more to it than you’d expect.

There is one caveat that I should point out for this game.  This is called Ether One on purpose, as it’s the first game in a series.  The game will not have a definite ending yet as there’s plans for Ether Two (and who knows, maybe even Ether Three).  Of course, this is all pending as sales, press, and fan reaction will determine if more games get made.  This is a problem with many episodic games as you never really know when you’ll see the rest of it, and even my beloved Kentucky Route Zero has been criticized by some for its slow release schedule.  But even KRZ is not the most notorious episodic game with no conclusion.  Valve fans will know what game that I’m talking about.

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Super Game Jam will be a new documentary about indie game development.  While there’s been many films about indie games lately, there’s three interesting things about this one.

One, the documentary is being produced by the indie publisher Devolver Digital (located right in my city of Austin).  Devolver Digital’s most recently published game is Luftrausers, but Hotline Miami has to be their biggest success story so far.

Two, the film will go straight to Steam, indicating that Valve is pre-approving this documentary without Greenlight or anything else.  I sometimes wonder if this is part of Valve’s new initiative of releasing films on Steam.  The Dota 2 documentary “Free To Play” is on the verge of being released to everyone.  Also, in a recent Reddit AMA, Gabe Newell has stated that Valve is still working with J.J. Abrams on whatever secret film/game project(s) that they have planned.

And finally, the film will be broken into five chapters which will release one a month starting in April rather than one long film.  Each chapter will be under an hour, and each will be a self-contained story.  The idea behind Super Game Jam is that two individuals from different indie developers must sit down and create a brand-new game in a 48-hour game jam.  In short, ten total people must create five unique games.  The developers have been carefully picked to have very different styles of games to make sure that they won’t create another game of the same genre.  Some of the developers are quite famous indie developers and I think this could be an interesting experiment if done properly.

See the trailer here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyJf0k2s59g

What I’m Playing #1

I find myself wanting to come to CootB, but just having random things to write about seems unlikely to produce the relevant mental discipline.

So! A series! Weekly (where Weekly exists in the universe that the Podcasts come out monthly)! Fun!

This is going to cover a range of things, with a single theme: What I’m Playing (hence the title). Whether that be board game, PC game, console game, MMO, iOS app, whatever, it’s going in here. Which makes sense for me, because I veer wildly between what I’m doing, often in a single night. It’s part reviews, part discussion, part musings on whatever I want. Which is what really drives readers!

So!

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Frozen: The Alternative Ending

Warning #1: Tons of Frozen spoilers, if that’s a problem.

Warning #2: This is, I’ll admit, basically Frozen fanfic.

I really really liked Frozen.  And to me, at its heart, Frozen was an origin story for an Ice Queen.  That’s why “Let It Go” is a fantastic song.  It’s why I loved Elsa creating the giant snow golem – she didn’t *want* to, but she *had* to – that’s the hallmark of a great villain’s back story.  They didn’t *set out* to be evil and vicious.  Events just progressed in such a way that, while in retrospect things might have gone differently, each step at the time seemed like the reasonable, necessary thing to do.

And Elsa is perfect.  She has a strange gift through no fault of her own.  She tries to control it, and can’t, so tries more desperate measures.  And then the goddamn world interferes, and now, this is happening.

So here’s what I wanted to happen: The final scene.  Elsa has accidentally cursed the one person she ever cared about to death.  Anna is DYING.  She’s frozen.  People are trying to save her, and Elsa herself is trying to stop them, willingly or no.

And then, in the movie, good wins, Anna is saved, Elsa loves her sister, yay!

But I want a version where Anna stays frozen.  I want Elsa to watch her sister freeze, watch everyone try to stop it, and watch it fail.  And then know that the only person she’s loved, and who loves her, has just died because of her actions.

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Destiny & /dance

I’m returning from a long hiatus, to post this vastly important message.

I am extremely excited about Destiny, the upcoming persistent world shooter from Bungie.  It’s a post-apocalyptic, dudes in future-tech with guns fighting aliens movie.  The classes are things like “Warlock” and “Titan” and “Hunter.”  That’s about what I need in a game.  So I’ve been following it since the E3 reveal, and I’m excited.  Except for one thing.

/dance.

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