Monday, March 22, 2010

Some Art

Here's a bit of art I'm doing for Rtype06, if he wants to use it, over on yoyo games.

Here she is with a black outline, to help show the hair a bit more
For the pose and some clothing (what little there is) I refered to this image (has a short interval). But what I've drawn is my own creation, not a scale down or anything.

I hope the angle of the pose is clear - bum towards us as the hips are swiveled slightly, bust in profile.

And here's a larger one, scaled up then using the game maker blur function at setting 1. You can see the pixel effect on it, but I kind of like the chunky retro look to it.

Money and seriousness

Geez there were alot of comments on gamejolt along the lines of 'Oh, I love to make games, I don't care about the money' or 'They are FREEware games!'

And yet these people are accepting money - how can you say your doing something just for the love of it, yet accept money? Note that if they had an option of not accepting ad revenue from their game and took it, I'd say they are consistant with their own words.

I mean, what does it take to be inconsistant there - is it a certain amount? If you say you do it for love and accept $5.00 it's consistant? But if you say you do it for love and accept $5.01 your hypocritical? Is there some magic sum where it switches over to that?

No, there isn't. Accepting any amount and yet saying you just do it for the love of it is bullshit!

And same goes for freeware - is there a magic sum where if you accept I dunno, $5.00, it's still freeware, but $5.01....

They're bullshit responces. Yet they were more than enough justification to get snarky for these people, apparently.

There was this guy I knew who was a postie, and he had a million in superannuation and was at retirement age. He just worked for something to do, and called the money chicken feed.

But it wasn't chicken feed/nothing to everyone in that delivery centre - to most of them it was vital.

I think alot of the guys responding to me perhaps even live at home still, or come from a pretty well off background. They wouldn't pick up a five cent coin in the street.

But I'll tell you what, it's pretty common to be serious about even one cent.

Try going to a shop and paying for an item short by one cent. See how many shops don't take that seriously.

I doubt you'll find many.

Either do it entirely for free or get serious about money - but nah, they don't treat it seriously.

Friday, March 19, 2010

"This is indie"

Duplicated from my blog at game jolt

Say you have this arrangement - a website provider is sitting there, when someone who has worked on a game for say 30 hours, submits it.

The website provider makes more money for having done no more work than before, as the systems automated. Say he makes net, 5 cents and that developer 3 cents.

Now say forty nine other developers submit games, for a total (including the first game) of 1500 man hours of development time. While the website host has done no extra work for these submissions.

The website host makes net $2.50 for having done nothing. Each developer, earns 3 cents for their 30 hours of work. Because other people put in 1500 man hours, the website host, for putting in zero hours, gets $2.50.
This is NOT indie.

And just check if your some middle or upper middle class kid, who basically doesn't value their own development time because you've never been at the sharp end of the stick. If you've ever gone shopping, and not gotten something because you didn't feel you had quite enough, maybe your qualified to respond straight off. But some of you probably don't shop for yourselves to begin with. Or to draw on an Auntie Pixilante rant

'...generally, achievements are used to artificially draw out the game. many contemporary games have little or no respect for the player’s time, and that’s something we need to change if we want people to play games who aren’t privileged kids with too much leisure time'
Emphasis on the priviledged kids bit.

No, this is no more indie than a nike sweat shop is indie. But because you don't value your time, or try and say 'I do it just for the love of it' since you never face the sharp end of the stick, you don't see this.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Subscription Model Idea

I thought of this when I first head of games selling lifetime subscriptions for over a hundred.

I'm assuming they take most of the lifetime sub money and bank it, drawing on interest from it to pay for the player.

So what if you took that to the traditional subscription model?

You pay a subscription as usual per month, but part of it is taken and banked. Once you have paid for a certain amount of time, the game becomes free to you!

'Cept for expansions and stupid mini pets/the usual gouges.

The ironic thing is I think anyone reading this might start comparing that they'd be paying several hundred dollars for a game when other single player games come out at around a hundred or less. So it might not seem like good value if someone presented to you that you can buy the mmorpg lifetime by subscribing for several hundred dollars. But yeah, your already doing that with wow or whatever, anyway.

That's another post I was gunna write - With people who play wow, if you take how much they've paid in subscription then go back in time to just before they started playing, and told them they have to pay all those subs upfront in order to play, would they pay it? Like say they've been playing for two years - before they started playing, if the game asked for them to pay $360 upfront or they can't play, would they have paid it?

I bet the honest answer is no.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

My cafe press store


I have a cafe press store now!
http://www.cafepress.com.au/philosophergame.436361020

Invaders. Space invaders. Sometimes there is no warning...but not this time! Now you have a handy sign!

Friday, March 12, 2010

It's a mmorpg about nothing

The reaction to this is just rediculous. It's like the episode of Seinfield, where someone gets really upset about double dipping. Or hell, any episode of Sienfield where people start acting up about small, unimportant issues.

These are your mmorpg friends...

There's a thing in table top roleplay, where people will play together but then they spend absolutely no time doing anything else with each other - they don't see movies together, they don't hang out and drink coffee or beer and talk crap. They don't go camping together. They do nothing else.

Yet some people at these games will call them friends.

They aren't. They are not part of your real life, they are just part of your game life.

And over here we have someone who, in a mmorpg, thought someone was their friend - but really that person gets crossed in the game - and the game life is all that's important to them. They don't share your real life with you, they aren't your friend.

But everyone talks about how they make such good friends on mmorpgs. It's really social!

Bullshit.

Now if you manage to catch up with these people in real life, for other events (and sitting around drinking beer and talking crap qualifies as an event!), then cool...but see, it's not about the mmorpg anymore. It's bigger than that.

Suzina bought some wow gold.

Think about the stuff you've forgiven friends for in your life. I bet some of them have drunk all your beer, or maybe vomited in your car or something. Did you put them on ignore?

When you start putting the integrity of a frigging game ahead of a 'friendship', it either means you into that game like a cult, or it just wasn't a friendship.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Here's a quote I came across somewhere...
As a professional, I want to be paid well for the high quality work I do. I do not do high quality work only because I want to be paid well.
Currently for my own situation I think I need to be paid for what I do out of sufficiency needs. It's kind of crushing of the creative spirit, really. Some people spend many hours on their games then either put them out for free, or provide content for portals at mere handful of cents.

They say they choose to give the game away? Is it really? If no one would have bought it, is it really choosing to give away the game?

And I mean, you want to be paid for high quality work - you don't just do it to be paid well? Do you really have that choice? Lets say you don't do it - say you lose your job, your capacity to supply yourself with food and shelter. Is not working for the money really an option that you have, or are you just humouring the idea your in such a position?

Is it just denial to think you really have a choice? Like if you had a patch of land you didn't have to pay tax on, and had crops going for food and had a house, yeah, you have a choice about whether you do work to be paid because your basics are covered.

I write this because I think there is, perhaps, a vast number of people out there sustaining a rather nasty, exploitative system, because they are off in their own private matrix's where they have a choice about things, when they don't.

Or in more TL;DR terms, three days of missed meals before revolution...

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Some target numbers for mmorpgs would be nifty

I was playing runes of magic the other day and I realised that in play, I'd simply be made quite alot happier if there was some sort of rating system for beating monsters - like killing them in X number of seconds. And your character would get to a new zone, and be lower level and lower kit, but you'd see your number improve and get closer to the number then finally beat it!
A bot from global agenda, simply because it looks cool!


Yeah, sure, it's still basically accumulating numbers to beat it. But it'd be more interesting than accumulating numbers and just going 'more is gud!'. Atleast it's hitting a goal here.

Also I hate bloggers labels box - I wish it showed the more commonly used ones, like wordpress does! I can't find the important ones at all easily!

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Some screenies from a platformer I'm working on



Saturday, March 6, 2010

New Game! Bullet Prose: Have No Part

Some bullet hell plus some prose: Bullet Prose

I made another quickie game! Dodge the bullet hell, try and read the strange quotes of a real life public domain book! Hear the strange music! Try and beat my retry score of 12 for the whole game!
Play it here!
http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/other/bullet-prose-have-no-part/1741/
Or even just check out the page, since it grants me some ad revenue (thank you!)
Excerpts taken from the interesting public domain title:
War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0701101.txt

This is a short development time game.
Made in about thirty minutes, using a preexisting engine that itself was made in about an hour.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Do you really want challenge?

I'm still wondering about that since a discussion at MMO crunch.

For example, say there's a zone rich in nodes and treasure chests - and the company has an employee called Gus who patrols around a monster NPC to attack players. Let's say he has around 20% chance of finding you, usually.

BUT the company tells the employee hey, if you wanna take bio breaks or just watch some TV or talk on the phone with your girlfriend, that's fine.

At those times he's not going to catch you at all, of course.

Now, is that satisfying? Is that really facing any sort of risk? Because that's what the majority of PVP is in most mmorpgs. The enemy might just be entirely absent.

There was no risk. Are you into facing risk, or do you just like to give the impression you are but your really happy to actually be in any situation where Gus is absent, so your just collecting treasure in the face of no real risk - but because you don't know that's how it is, you can say to everyone you did face risk?

Are you actually happy for Gus to be on the can?

If not, to me, your not into risk. Your just into the impression or illusion of risk.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Board game design: Throw it to the players to decide, with no 'we can't decide' option



Awww, no WTF responce from me, just agreement for this thread!

Filip points out the procedural flaw really well - if you throw something to a group to decide, one very valid and all too possible outcome is that they don't come to an agreement. So have a default!...except the bulk of RPG's don't have that!

For some people, I suspect they like being forced to agree with no default to get out of it. Indeed I think Frank will, in that thread, prove to be one of those people.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Do you think if you dislike something in a game, it's a mistake?

Once again my 'What the firetruck?' responce to someone elses blog becomes a post here...I'll paraphrase my responce here

If something is an unintended side effect and the developers did not intend it to happen, fair enough to argue against it.

But if they did intend it to be part of the difficulty of the game, even if only tanks have to face it...well, what? Do you think difficulty in any particular game has to revolve around what you personally dislike?

Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it's a bug.

I mean, where does it end? If you think your in a position to argue away intended challenges, where do you stop? Which ones are acceptable to your sensitive palette?

And what of the thousands of others - what if they think they can argue this way, and what challenge you think is okay, they think is a big bad spoils their fun bug? Someone, somewhere might have their fun spoiled by what you think is okay - and as much as you think you get to determine what is a bug rather than an intended challenge, so do they. So it must be removed!

Eventually all challenge gets removed as there's always someone who's fun is spoilt by practically any challenge and you end up with...a themepark.

Oh yeah. Right.