A great article on Free-to-play games

An excellent article about Free-to-play games. Go read it now.

As for my personal opinion, I agree with Andrew in a way that every customer always wants a bargain. That's why, for example, I always buy every HumbleBundle that is out. If I even don't like any of the games (that is never happened, BTW) I wouldn't be angry at all, since I got it almost for free. OTOH, I will never buy a free-to-play game, since I'm guaranteed to make a not-a-bargain deal, and that's not the only thing. This kind of games are naturally corrupted, like an arcade, to make money out of you. It feels kind of weird, and I just ignore it, since there is a lot of other games available.

I feel sorry for a little kids (and their parents), which are particularly naive and vulnerable to this kind of abuse. They don't realize what this is and sometimes spend lots of money for some 'crystals' in a game with their favorite cartoon heroes. I guess that's inevitable evil of games becoming a less art and more money making industry.

I don't think that it poses any real threat to gamers, eventually all who exploit this approach to much will suffer the consequences. The only sad part here is that talent is wasted driven by greed.

OUYA: first indie console

The phenomenon of indie games is out there for some years, and it's a great thing. However the only true indie platform was only PC. And PC is a great platform, but only for a personal amusement. But it's nothing compared to fun then you blay with you friend side by side, fighting to each other or against computer.

Since the great crash of 1983 the main game consoles were closed for indie developers. This wasn't major concern up until now, since indie devs are flourishing.

And OUYA perfectly hitted the spot. It's cheap and open to everyone. It's not that powerful, but indie games usually doesn't need that much power as AAA titles. OUYA is greatest thing that happened to console market for some last years. It will boost competition between console market players, which will be good for everyone. It will bring tons of new, beautiful games to people by creating an easy-to-enter market for indie developers.

It's success is inevitable, because it's just filling last missing piece in a complete puzzle.

Thoughts on Starbound and PCG

Well, it's been awhile, my vacation was pretty good, thank you :).

Meanwhile Starbound team posted some updates. Some thoughts on that. First pickaxes are confirmed. This leads to conclusion that Starbound is definetely a Terraria clone, in a good sense of that. I mean look at Terraria it's a clone itself (of Minecraft of cousrse).

However it's became more and more obvious what will be the feature of Starbound. It's procedurally generated content (PCG). This is not a new thing per se, but Tiy has a vision of moving it to a next level.

Usually PCG is limited to thing which I call 'playfield' (major) and item properties (minor). In Terraria it's, for example, a world (earth) structure. Item properties can be for example some modified items which can then start to glow (enchanted sword, etc). In Starbound, most items itself are created via PCG (more of a pseudo-PCG) which means that not only stats, but visuals of an items are somehow unredictable. This is very cool.

The key question however is how well randoness will be controlled and constrained. By that I mean, that PCG games lacks that soul part of a manually designed worlds. Imagine, for example, Fallout with PCG land. One the one hand each game would be somehow unique, that's a good part. On the other hand, you loose sense of the game world reality. The real worlds are static. So, it's really a challenge for a Starbound team how story mode (if any) will deal with randomness.

Tiy already mentioned some kind of global coordinates which players can exchange with each other and which will lead to exact same location for any player. I assume this coordinates are basically the RNG seed values which will allow to recreate world precisely on another user machine. This feature is already very good.

As a conclusion: so far Starboud is looking pretty awesome! Can't wait to play it.

Starbound biomes update

Tiy has updates Starboud site with Biomes post. He demontrates procedural generation of a somewhat random Biomes. Random here means that a set of sprites are combined to form new structures. And of course additional color can be applied to sprites. While still this is an incredible work, I'm a little unimpressed, becausue the biomes indeed look a little.. artifical, I would say. But this is still an early stage, and not everyone can show such thing even hand made, and this is a semi-procedural generated! So this is still very cool.

Also for now it's still not 100% confirmed that you will be able to dig earth, as in Terraria. I mean it wasn't in any video or screenshot, and nobody from a team confirmed that this would be possible. However from what it looks like, I would say you can.

Terraria, second encounter

Redigit, after some 3 months, appeared again on Terraria Online today with extemely intriguing private profile post, which says just "Planning something big..":

Despite all my respect for his courage, plain and somehow awkward honesty, I had a strange feeling about all that situation. And now that little post is a relief! Looks like Redigit just took a really big vacation with his family after that incredible pace from the moment terraria was released to Terraria v1.1.2. That's was just 8 months. Eight months!

I think he needed this time to evaluate current situation. I don't think he wanted to halt development in such a way. I think something went not so good within a team. Particularly Tiy (main spriter) left to potentially rival project Starbound. BTW Starbound site is updated today with new info (good coincidence for starting conspiracy theory). Also I have a feeling that Terraria main codebase was of a rather low quality (negative fact of rapid development), so it's harder and harder to add new features and fix bugs. Major refactoring would require significant amount of time, which is probably not worth it. Stopping project this way is also hurting his reputation seriously, I'm pretty sure he understsnd it even better than me, so there surely was some serious s**t which forced him to such decision.

Anyway, that happened and so be it. I'm just happy that Andrew didn't took a three year vacation, but just three months.

As for what he is planning.. I have no idea. For now I have just some guesses (in decreasing probability order):

1. "Teh final" big Terraria bugfix patch for 1.1.2 version, signed as final version;
2. Terraria 2 (or put any other name here) announcement;
3. Announcing new team and continue of Terraria development.

Items 1 and 2 can be announced together.

Street of Rage Remake v5

Holy sh*t! Have you seen this? Never believed this will ever will be possible, but it's true! The project page will say it all:

It has been 8 years of work, but the final version is here, this is complete and ready for download, Surprised? :-)

Eight years! That's a truly dedication to one of the best action games ever. I don't know why SEGA or someone else didn't already do the same thing, create a sequel using all power that is available now. Being an extreme fan of original SOR series I don't know how I missed such a huge thing, looks like it was around from about 2009 already. Yet it better to play that game then it's finished and polished.

The remake is absolutely wonderful! It doesn't seem like a amateur fun-project at all, on the contrary all assets looks like a professional quality, better than many commercial games. Music remastering is of wonderful quality. You should absolutely give it a try, it's free! The only sad thing it's not opensource in any way. But who knows, maybe in better future it will be?

Brian Fargo interviews

Brian Fargo interviews concerning mostly Wasteland 2 funding, development and much more. Very interesting read for any game developer and gamer.

Digger.NET in development, part 2

As mentioned in previous post I've started by convertion graphics data to real graphics file format. The easiest part was symbols data, i.e. game font. The result is as follows:













This is a 192x192 image (16x16 symbol grid), there symbol is located based on it's ASCII code value.

The symbol data was a simple single bit per pixel, there each pixel was half of the byte. For examle symbol A was represented as follows:

A
0x00 0xff 0xff 0xff 0x00 0x00
0x0f 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xf0 0x00
0x0f 0xf0 0x00 0x0f 0xf0 0x00
0x0f 0xf0 0x00 0x0f 0xf0 0x00
0x0f 0xf0 0x00 0x0f 0xf0 0x00
0x0f 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xf0 0x00
0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0x00
0xff 0xf0 0x00 0x00 0xff 0x00
0xff 0xf0 0x00 0x00 0xff 0x00
0xff 0xf0 0x00 0x00 0xff 0x00
0xff 0xf0 0x00 0x00 0xff 0x00
0xff 0xf0 0x00 0x00 0xff 0x00

Initial A is a header the rest is the symbol data. Full symbol data file can be viewed here.

Digger.NET in development, part 1

As you probably may not know, I'm very interested in game development, but, unfortunatelly, after some attemps some years ago, still have not done anything interesting. Some time ago I've learned about XNA, and again was ready for another attempt in learning this part of software development world.

As a big first task I've decided to port a Windows version of Digger Remastered project to .NET. The original source is a DirectX Windows C application. The project I've started have two main goals: 1) maintain and improve original C source; 2) create XNA port of the game.

For a relatively long period of time I slowly cleaning up, commenting, and refactoring original source code. First big improvement was that I moved hardcoded graphics description data to a separate files. After that I was generally really bored with a project, since with such little comments in the original code it was really slow and frustrating task to decipher it. So, with a help of Learning XNA book I've decided to move on.

The first part is to convert original graphics data to real graphics format. For that porpose I've created Digger.Convert project. It's sole purpose would be a set of graphics files, which will be a sprites for a game.

Game uses custom graphical font to display text. I think it's a good idea, as a first step, make an XNA app which will print text with this custom font from a keyboard in realtime (kind of text editor). This will be my first milestone in XNA project.

How should development of a game ends

This one is a good example (there is also part 2). Terraria is incredibly good game. Actually it's the best game I played in a last year, and I mean all games, not just indies. But. You should be honest to your players and youself, you should not be a pusher. There were, clearly, big possibilities to continue further development of Terraria. But it would be a fake. If developer is making only money on it. I think modern game development suffers pretty much from make money goal. So such an action may seem absolute madness to them. If it was, say, Blizzard, then we would see Terraria 2, 3, World of Terraria etc. But with such pusher behaviour, your game idea, your game world, is on steroids and will always results in unnatural and very predictable games. Starcraft II is an example. It's a very good game, but it doesn't have a soul, it's a pure marketing product. I think large game studios became hostages of themselves, they just can't work another way now, or they will go bankrupt. This is the part there indie studios have major advantage over them. This explains why indie games are so popular lately: they have soul. Like an old games, then there wasn't unstopabble sequels, addons, prequels. There is exception though. Valve managed to fight temptation to make money, and continued to make good games. But that's a personal opinion. 

Anyway, there is some very interesting game in develppment now from some other creators of Terraria. It could be a hit, it could be a failure, but I'm most certanly will try it!

Update. An interview with Andrew "Redigit" Spinks the creator of Terraria. I'm glad to find this particular answer which just says that I meant to say, but in some fewer words:

What is your take on the future of indie games vs. the big-name developers?
It’s not my intention to bad mouth the big-name developers, but from my perspective the recent rise of indie gaming is due to big-name developers losing touch with what gamers want. Gaming shouldn’t be treated like a business. If you genuinely enjoy your product, then there is no risk involved because others will as well.

Old games: Popcorn

I'm kinda like old computer games rather then new ones: they always run fast on your computer. OK, just kidding. However there are some really old games, which I was happy to play back in the end of 80-s, start of 90-s at my father's work. One of them was Popcorn:

I'm actually amazed now, how fast it made it's way then to USSR. Released in 1988, and I was playing in it in 1989 already. Popcorn is actually clone of Arcanoid game, and it's best of it kind until release of Ricochet Lost Worlds game, which I really suggest you to try out.

I'm always amazed how this incredible graphics was made back in 1988:

Now, DOSBox is totally rules. Amazing piece of software. Only it allowed my to create that blast from the past today. How I've managed to find POPCORN.EXE? Don't even ask about it, 'coz I don't know, and don't remember it now. Still I would gladly accept English version of the game, since my copy if French one (I believe it's native language of game creators). It was there for some reason on my hard drive, waiting for a miracle to come, since if you run it in plain Windows XP you get:

Which is about blocking low-level disk access to hard drive (which is good, XP is a nicely protected OS sometimes). But it works in DOSBox! Not as good as I want, but works!

You can view gameplay and get the game here. Even back then the game was freeware! Kudos to creators! I wasn't aware what freeware meant back then, I was thinking that everything is free on PC. Ah, tabula rasa.