Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Considering Making An Indie Game? READ ME!

So I've yet to do an official "post-mortem" piece on Neofeud, mostly because I'm too busy running on 52 cylinders trying to get it on Steam, get visibility and sales up as high as they can be, and everything else that goes along with releasing your first official commercial game.  And RL.

But, I just read this article from Indiewatch, a horror story from a first-time developer who suffered setback after setback after setback for several years, and I felt total sympathy and absolutely had to comment.  If nothing else, to help others avoid some of the of the pitfalls who are thinking about plunging into the adventure, or as I term it, "The Odyssey" of making an indie commercial game.  Without further ado:

HOW TO MAKE A GAME WHEN THE WORLD IS FALLING APART AROUND YOU

For me, making a game seemed like a brilliant idea!  I’ve wanted to make one as far back as when the Atari 2600 was considered the most powerful console.  So why not give it a try?  It would be a good life experience and I also would be doing something I enjoy.  What could possibly go wrong?


My response:


"A great read, and a wild trip man. Good to hear that you came out of it. As an indie dev who blew 2 1/2 years on a game with a different set of trials and tribulations, I can only say, I empathize. You're making the best decision of your gamedev career at this point to do something small, and the second best decision of your career to work on your game solo. I'm going to badly paraphrase Doom's creator, John Romero now: "You don't just make Doom. First, make Pong. Then, make Space Invaders. Then make Mario. Then, eventually, you make Doom." Which is to say, it sounds really great to want to just make that giant MMO right off the bat, and it seems like a waste of time to work on these smaller projects that probably won't net much revenue at all, but this mindset is truly the biggest pitfall.

Gamedev is in many ways more complex than film-making, which is one of the most complex and risky endeavors you can take on. You are going to make mistakes, just like the first time you ride a bike, or the first time you buy a house. Making the mistakes early, on a small project, before things can get painful, expensive, and full of drama and potentially lawsuits, is the way to go. I always plan for everything to go 4x as bad and take 4x as long as I think, and I calculate into the schedule all of these Black Swan disasters, like my computer exploding and two of my backup drives being lost or stolen simultaneously. So I have 6 backups. I have literally had multiple backups go out simultaneously, so I have not regretted the decision.

Plan to have anyone that you bring into a project abandon that project at some point unless they are making enough money to pay all their bills *during the project*. This is why I brought zero people onto my project when I made my first official commercial game. It took me over a decade to get enough experience to do the writing, art, programming, music, and half the voice acting for my game, and I realize that is not a price that everyone is willing to pay. But then you could also spend ten thousand dollars, and years of your life trying to skip ahead, only to wind up with nothing, also. Again, Romero made 300-something games over the course of more than a decade before he made Doom.

At any rate, good luck with your next game, and I truly hope that it succeeds for you this time!"

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Shardlight - A Post-Apocalyptic French Revolution (My Review)




I've just finished my playthrough of Francisco Gonzalez (Grundislav Games) Shardlight, a post-apocalyptic steampunk adventure, and now I want to go hang-gliding with a top hat and a Victorian coat, curing uber-tuberculosis patients in a Fallout-like wasteland. By which I mean, I loved Shardlight. Here's a summary of the game (from imore.com)
At its very core, Shardlight's story is vintage post-apocalyptic. A catastrophic event — good old-fashioned nuclear war in this case — has drastically changed life forever and surviving in the world is downright difficult. In Shardlight there are two classes of people, the Aristocrats who are in charge of the new world order, and common folk who are just trying to survive. You play as Amy Welland, a lowly mechanic, who stumbles upon an underground rebellion seeking to take down the Aristocrats. This turns out to be problematic for Amy, as she wants to enter a lottery to win a vaccine for the deadly disease known as "green lung." By performing dangerous jobs for the Aristocrats, common folk can earn a lottery ticket to try and win a vaccination, but now Amy has been tasked with spying on the rebellion!


The game itself is very well written, and to me strikes me as something like Fallout (the 90's-golden-age RPGs) if Brian Fargo and Tim Cain had been obsessed with the French Revolution and Dickensian period, rather than Leave It To Beaver 50's idealism. The world has ended, and you've got all the Mad Max trappings -- scrappy survivors using ammoless guns to light campfires started with 30-year old turpentine, rubble and dreary single-hue color schemes everywhere, rotting corpses. But instead of a Pip Boy and Star Trek jump suits, you have wig-headed aristocrats lording it up in the still-standing skyscrapers, done up inside to resemble Versailles. The corpses are not fed on by mutants or deranged clusters of cannibals, but rather, Edgar Allen Poe's ravens. The Grim Reaper plays a big role.



 My favorite part of Shardlight, apart the completely enjoyable characters (Tiberius the Alpha Aristocrat and pretentious / psychotic pontificating asshat is near the top of the list) was the play of subtext, the witticisms in the interweaving tapestry of tropes of Post-Apocalypse (tm) and Tale of Two Cities Europe. The dirt-faced urchin children, playing jump-rope to nursery rhymes like, 'The Reaper Comes For You' like the gang in Oliver Twist, against a backdrop of a 21st-century skyline annihilated by nuclear blast. Resistance movements somewhat akin to the Brotherhood of Steel, but wearing feathered caps and wielding swords and crossbows, rather than miniguns and power armor. Nuclear wasteland-ravaged Robbespierres, plotting in basements through code phrases and messages steganographed into artwork and signs, awaiting their moment to strike a coup and let the Palace Royalty know what they think about, "Let Them Eat Cake" (Let them eat lottery-jobs in this case.)



 As a purely post-apocalyptic story, or a purely historical story, Shardlight would've still been a good game. But where it elevates into a truly original, truly great experience, is in these moments of genius. A game after my own heart, having done a culture-mashup not dissimilar to Shardlight, albeit with a slightly different sub-genre of science fiction, and instead of the French Revolution, a more 'Feudal' era of history. ;)

I give Shardlight five radioactive fragments out of five.

P.S. Be sure to check out Grundislav Games' upcoming title, Lamplight City!

P.P.S. And then check out the rest of the publisher, Wadjet Eye Games' titles!  They are all awesome!

Friday, April 7, 2017

So, if you were thinking of getting Neofeud, I recommend doing it by this Saturday, because until April 9th:



Which essentially means you get the entire soundtrack (2 1/2 hours of music) and the original screenplay, for free!


:)

In addition, if you're more of a bookworm type, Neofeud - The Original Script is now available on Lulu for four bucks. :)


Neofeud has been featured this week on Game Jolt!


So what's next for Silver Spook Games?

A Neofeud 2, or another Silver Spook Games project is on the proverbial 'table' at the moment, but this is of course contingent on the success of Neofeud 1. If I can free up enough time and make the finances work (I'm a husband and dad with two kids so I've got other 'stakeholders' to pitch to) then there is definitely the possibility of a sequel in the cards.
I am in talks with some other folks and there are a lot of potential projects on the table. It's still early days post-release of Neofeud, so we'll see how well the game does, and go from there. There are a few things in the protean phase, but it is kind of top secret right now!

Neofeud Deluxe Edition 25% Off! And Neofeud 2!

So, if you were thinking of getting Neofeud, I recommend doing it by this Saturday, because until April 9th:



In addition, I'm currently working on a 'Let's Play' Walkthrough for Neofeud (because boy are my fingers tired of typing out hints to the growing number of Neofeud players!)


Which essentially means you get the entire soundtrack (2 1/2 hours of music) and the original screenplay, for free!

:)

In addition, if you're more of a bookworm type, Neofeud - The Original Script is now available on Lulu for four bucks. :)


Neofeud has been featured this week on Game Jolt!


So what's next for Silver Spook Games?

A Neofeud 2, or another Silver Spook Games project is on the proverbial 'table' at the moment, but this is of course contingent on the success of Neofeud 1. If I can free up enough time and make the finances work (I'm a husband and dad with two kids so I've got other 'stakeholders' to pitch to) then there is definitely the possibility of a sequel in the cards.
I am in talks with some other folks and there are a lot of potential projects on the table. It's still early days post-release of Neofeud, so we'll see how well the game does, and go from there. There are a few things in the protean phase, but it is kind of top secret right now!

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Ghost In The Shell Review

Ok, so GITS the movie has definitely exceeded my expectations, which were colored by teh interwebz.  That's the last time I listen to your opinion, cyberspace!

It is definitely CPAF, but with some unique texture to it.  The obligatory Blade Runner cityscape-age is redolent of the Total Recall remake, to me.  Lives up to Masamune Shirow's brainchild, I feel, even if it's slightly Hollywoodized.  It takes Ghost In The Shell 1, throws it in a blender, and reassembles the sinew and bone and synapse back together such that you recognize the DNA (the thermoptic-camo water fight, the self-mutilating kill of the spider tank scene are near-verbatim) but with a wholy unique story.  

It doesn't quite take GITS to the next level, asking or answering any questions posed by the highly-philosophical, metaphysical series, nor does it pioneer into previously unmapped territory, cinematically speaking a la The Matrix, but it does have it's own unique 'self'.  Its own original 'ghost', if you will, and not just another popcorn action thingy.  (Although we scarfed multiple refills of large, heavily buttered popcorn for this flick!  It's got teh actionz, no doubt!)

There's been a lot of CG tricks and such with regards to humans with prosthetics, androids, (Ex Machina the most recent exploration thereof) but the way the Major is handled has that 'lived in' sense, that gritty reality to it, as she is fighting her brain's embodiment into this foreign, corporate-perfected husk of synthetic nerves, steel, and alabaster dermis.  You get the sense, from ScarJo's performance, that she is in fact going through a sort of bodily dysphoria, and social alienation, as she attempts to adjust to her new 6-million-dollar-body.  

I was also surprised by how well they handled Motoko Kusanagi's transformation into the Platonic (and very much caucasian) 'ideal beauty', and the scene with the mom was deeply touching.

I'm also glad that they gave Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, a chance to really unleash himself, after his little blip of a presence in the last American would-be Blockbuster scripted out of cyberpunk lore -- Johnny Mnemonic.  Being a huge fan of the guy, I feel they finally let Kitano do his stoic Yakuza badass thing, in the role of Mamaki.  He's really the most menacing entity in the entire movie, with just a nature-rendered body and an ancient revolver, and he really brings a gravitas and grounding to the massively computer-modified neon smorgasbord.

Wish we could've got more into Togusa, Batou, and all of the gang, and again, there's not a whole lot of new narrative, societal-poltical, science fictional, or other ground explored in GITS: Live Action, but hey, it is a big live-action movie, and you've got 90 minutes to make multi-millions, and you can't talk for twelve-plus hours like an HBO 'Prestige TV' series.  You have to 'ninja slam, machine gun bam, thank you Johannsen ma'am' and get the hell out of there before everyone falls asleep or the LA Brass calls in Michael Bay and nukes your green screen Tokyo set from orbit.

I give Ghost In The Shell Movie 3-out-of-4 lucky ninja stars in a Chiba pawn shop window.