Starting a Bioware game is deadly to your free time. To mine, anyway. I played through Dragon Age: Origins for the first time last November, didn’t eat, drink, sleep, just kept playing until I was done. I got to the end out of breath and exhausted, but with the blood of the archdemon on my twin blades and the taint of the darkspawn simmering in my veins. ...
Coolest place in the galaxy? Well, if you’re in 1963, the coolest place in the galaxy is Cardiff, Wales London, England. And if you’re NOT in 1963, you’ll probably need a time machine of some sort if you ever want to meet John Lennon Ringo Starr just when he was getting started. If you’re Amy Pond, you’ve managed to ditch your hand-gun hubby and go off on an exciting trip through time and space to soak in all the fun and excitement Trafalgar Square has to offer. ...
38 Studios and Big Huge Games released the first cinematic trailer for their Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning at the San Diego ComicCon yesterday. It’s hard to get a sense for the game based solely upon its cinematic trailer. Videos like this aren’t supposed to be acquainting you with the UI and the gameplay, but for its milieu. What can be told from this? The opening shot shows a standard musclebound Kratos/Den type, beaten, chained, being infused with some sort of mystical force that turns him into a killing machine. ...
If I could, I’d be playing Recettear right now. (It’s pronounced Reh-keh-teer, not RACKETEER! How could you even think such a thing?) It’s only out as a demo right now, and I’ve played the heck out of that. Now and again you come across a game that turns the whole standard RPG tropes on their edge and come at them from a different angle. Dungeon Keeper had you building dastardly, trap and monster infested dungeons that lured clueless adventurers in with dreams of easy loot but gave them nothing but messy deaths. In My Life as a King, you take on the role of the town-stranded NPC who gives adventurers their quests. And in Racettear, you play the handy merchant always willing to sell a needy adventurer a handy sword or to buy some slime (+2!) from them. ...
A couple of weeks ago, Glee featured Lea Michele and Idina Menzel doing a duet with Fantine’s haunting anthem from Les Miserables, “I Dreamed a Dream”. That brought me back twenty years to when I couldn’t get enough of the musical; I ended up seeing it twice while it was in San Francisco, and then once a couple years later when a touring company visited San Jose. I’d memorized all the songs. I’d even read the book. ...
Via Slashie of Temple of the Roguelike, news of a NEW game programming challenge: Tiny Game 2010. A full game in 40x30 PIXELS, using the 16 color EGA palette. I remember EGA; I wrote an EGA video driver way back when I worked for Digital Research, Inc. The original one. Rules are: 40x30 (or 30x40) pixels, written as a Java applet with no external libraries required. I’d wanted to write my 7DRL game as a Java applet, but I had concerns about that, as my tests showed troubles running applets on a wide variety of browsers. Nonetheless, I program in Java for a living, so the real question is, can I (without the one week time pressure of 7DRL) actually make a fun game? ...
Unlike other offer walls, this one probably won’t infect your computer with anything TOO harmful. Like watching pretty alien spaceships blow up in all sorts of interesting ways? I do! I bought Gratuitous Space Battles the day it came out and every now and then, I build some fleets and watch them get crazy on the devious (but not as devious as me) enemy. Positech Games sent me a 25% off code for the game, good for seven days only, and two of those days have already passed, so if you’ve been wanting the game, be the first to use up this discount code when ordering: BNXP00099. ...
All the thrill of the adventuring life RIGHT IN YOUR BROWSER! Play for a minute, play for an hour, play for a LIFETIME! Fight fantastic creatures from your imagination and beyond! Go on hair raising missions that will shape the future of the UNIVERSE! (Caution: some advanced adventures may require multiple presses of the button to complete). By way of Scott Jennings, Progress Wars is a parody by Jakob Skjerning from Substance Lab.
The ratings for the entries in this year’s 7DRL – 7 Day Rogue-Like – game design challenge are in, and my entry, World of Roguecraft, is in the top 95%! So grats me ;) My game had its best scores in aesthetics (2/3) and scope (1.67/3). Can’t argue with that. I spent too much time working on the game engine and not enough on the game. Next year, I’m going to take the hint and work on my game engine ahead of time, leaving the seven days of the competition focused entirely on making a game. That’s what the winner did, and is within the bounds of the challenge as long as you note that your game is built on a game engine. ...
When I started with the 7DRL game design challenge, I’d set a timeline. I would need to get all the game mechanics done by last Sunday, so I could focus on adding content to the game, doing balancing, playtesting the game, polishing it to a fine sheen, until today it would burst on the scene like a supernova. I’d be getting piles of emails from indie game studios asking if I wanted to work on some cool projects, doors would open and angels would fly out begging me to expand the game into some monster AAA title and I…. ...