I have to credit Penny-Arcade for pointing this out today. It’s some games made by GameLoft that are basically clones of Blizzard’s games, but they’re built for mobile devices. Of course, all of this is legal — they aren’t using any of Blizzard’s source code, artwork, or product names. (And people say copyright is too restrictive and is strangling creativity. Heh, heh.)

See how quickly you can figure out what Blizzard games they’re cloning. It shouldn’t take too long.

In line with “finally checking out some games I missed”, I downloaded the demo to Torchlight the other day. The demo gives you two hours of play time. It was pretty much what I expected: a dungeon crawler with lots of hack and slash. Not much in the way of story, not that I really care. One friend told me that he played lots and lots of hours of it.

I have to admit that these types of games don’t hold that much appeal for me anymore. I didn’t even play any of the Diablo games when they came out. Of course, there was a time when I spent tons of hours playing that type of game. I played the old Dungeons of Moria when I was a kid, and spent way too many hours on it. Here’s what it looked like:

Torchlight felt a little bit like the old Moria game with much better graphics, animation, a little more variety, a few side-quests, and not much story. The problem is that I’m kind of over those types of games. I used to feel a sense of accomplishment when I’d level up my character in role-playing games (a sense of accomplishment that would quickly fade as soon as I walked away from the computer). But, I don’t even feel that with the new Torchlight game. I remember one game developer calling certain types of games “immoral” because they played on our sense of accomplishment to get players spend hours doing tasks by rote. That description applies not only to RPG “grinding” but he was also attacking Facebook games.

I think if Torchlight was a little more challenging, I might’ve enjoyed it more. Admittedly, I started the demo on “easy” because I’m never quite sure what to expect in a new game and don’t want to get in over my head while I’m still figuring things out. I played the full two-hours of the demo, and my whole strategy was simply to walk into every group of enemies and start slashing. Heck, I didn’t even have to attack. I could just turn-on my shadow armor, and it would automatically attack enemies next to me until they were dead. I was basically Superman. It worked really well. I accumulated something like fifty heal potions, and only needed to use one of them in the whole two hours I played. The main challenge seemed to be sorting out my inventory – I could only carry so much stuff, so I needed to sell off my stuff every twenty to thirty minutes. The other “challenge” was that my mouse-button finger got really tired of all the mouse clicking I had to do. It was interesting to see some new enemies and dungeons as I progressed in the game, but none of them were challenging.

Getting back to Moria and the issue of strategy: it was really easy in Moria to get yourself killed. You had to be careful, and you had to run away. I remember when I first encountered dragons in the game. They were far more powerful than I was. I eventually figured out how to create a trap for them. In moria, you were able to cut through the rock and carve out your own tunnels. I eventually figured out a way that I could carve my own tunnels to trap them and then kill them with ranged weapons without taking too much damage. Of course, there’s no sense of strategy or creativity needed in Torchlight; you can just rush forward and start clicking to swing your sword around. Even if I had played on difficult, I think the strategy would merely consist of drawing one enemy away at a time, and using ranged weapons while staying outside the enemies’ attack range. All the enemies seemed to move slowly, so it’s pretty easy just to back up and take some more shots at them. You don’t even have to use ammo in Torchlight – you’ve got an infinite amount of it.

I’ve been spending some time checking out some of the games I missed out on the past few years. I missed out because I was always working on my own game, and my laptop didn’t have much graphics power. But, now I’ve got a little more free time and a good laptop.

One thing that astounded me was that Fallout 3 didn’t have a demo. I was talking to a friend of mine recently about having played the original Fallout 1 and 2, and was curious about the newer games and whether they did a good job with them. He said Fallout New Vegas was really good, but there were some problems with the game at release. Specifically, he mentioned this video, which is actually a pretty odd glitch in the game:

Anyway, Fallout New Vegas doesn’t have a demo, either. At this point, I won’t even bother buying a game without a demo. I want to see if the game is done well, whether I’m into it, whether there are a lot of bugs, whether it runs okay on my machine before I buy it. It’s shocking to me that they wouldn’t release a demo. Anyway, my friend said he’s loan me his copy of the game so I could check it out. I tried to install it tonight and got this error:

Duplicate Product Code

The product code you’ve entered has already been activated by an existing Steam account, and is therefore invalid. Your activation of Fallout New Vegas Retail has not been completed.

Sigh. Why do companies make this so difficult?

Joystiq just posted a 20-minute promotional video to help fund a documentary about Minecraft. I thought I’d be able to watch it, but I watched the first five minutes until they reached the point where they start talking about the runaway success of the game that nobody predicted. I had to shut it off.

It still bothers me that Notch earned more money on average from one to two days of work than I earned in six years and resulted in financial disaster. I think I’ll have to take a break from games for a long while before I can get my head straightened out, because I have a hard time reading anything written by any small, successful indie company. It’s a bad thing that I can’t manage to listen to successful people in the games industry — it means I can’t really learn from them.

This is just a neat little animation. It’s actually a trailer for a video. The section beginning around 20 seconds into the trailer makes me imagine creating a little wargame with these personality-filled animations. Maybe something small that would play on a smartphone or something. You’d have your own little tribe that would go through history, conquering other pencil-drawn tribes.

When I first saw Angry Birds, my first thought was that it copied (or more diplomatically, “was inspired by”) another game I had played called Crush the Castle. I looked up some details, and discovered that Angry Birds was released on December 10, 2009 while Crush the Castle was available in early 2009, at the exact time Angry Birds started their development. I will say this: Angry Birds added a lot more personality to the game. I thought it was interesting that Angry Birds kept the monarchy/military theme for the enemies, with pigs dressed in crowns and helmets. Angry Birds also uses a slingshot rather than a trebuchet.

A comparison:

And here Crush The Castle (jump ahead to 30 seconds):

Link: Crush the Castle

Also, as a side note, the game “Osmos” which is included in the Humble Indie Bundle is also reminiscent of a flash game I played years ago as well. I couldn’t find the old flash game, but it involved controlling a fish to eat smaller fish while avoiding larger ones. Each time you ate a smaller fish, you’d become slightly larger. It was the same basic gameplay as Osmos, though Osmos seems to have added a few more features.

I finally went and tried out Defcon. It was originally released about four years ago. I had seen screenshots of the game before, but never tried out the demo and was curious about how the game played strategically. It was interesting how it’s setup – how your units have different modes, and it takes time to switch between modes. For example, your missile silos can switch between attack mode (where they can launch nukes) and defense mode (where they can shoot down nukes). The switch happens slowly, and the time-delay means making yourself vulnerable and planning ahead. I managed to get 6/7th of the way through the demo before I misunderstood what I was supposed to do, launched all my nukes, but didn’t destroy one of the enemy missile silos that I’m supposed to destroy. This resulted in the tutorial not letting me progress any further, so I had to bail-out of the game. It was disappointing that they didn’t plan for the contingency that players might not do everything right, and get caught in a situation where they can’t progress any further.

Video of Defcon gameplay:

One of the surprising things I noticed on their blog is that they almost shut-down in March. Their latest game wasn’t selling as well as they’d hoped and they were out of money. From their blog, Aug 20, 2010:

Internally we knew within about an hour of Darwinia+’s launch that it hadn’t done well enough. It took us about two weeks to really accept that and the awful realisation that we didn’t have enough to continue with the office or the staff. We had a bunch of creditors knocking at the door, but worse than all of that we were absolutely shattered. Darwinia+ had been really drawn out and I’d spent a lot of time selling the future to the team and when the rug was pulled away from my feet I really didn’t want to continue. Critically, neither did Chris. He’d had to spend a lot of time on Darwinia and decided that we had failed to live up to our original mission of making “Original Video Games”. Striking out on his own made most sense given IV’s failure: “We tried it your way, Mark – didn’t work”. So we started shutting things down. We reached out to our creditors and (amazingly) they accepted our payment plans. We closed the office and sold the tables and chairs. We let Gary, Leander and Martin go (another three that can be officially added to Nicholas Lovell’s redundancy tracker). They were amazingly stoical about it and I’m glad to say that they are all doing well. Then we closed the door on Introversion, rewrote our CVs from scratch, and started applying for jobs.

I guess this was rock bottom. We’d been through crises before, but we’d always wanted to solve the problem and find a solution, this time it was a bit like there was nothing left to save.

A couple of weeks rolled by and I found myself unable to accept the end. Chris too wasn’t actually ready to jack it in…

They managed to limp through it, even though they had to let people go from the company. I was pretty surprised to hear about their money problems since they’ve made a number of games I’ve heard of – Darwinia and Defcon being the most notable. Admittedly, I haven’t been very aware of stuff they’ve done in the past few years. Like I’ve said before, it’s feast or famine in the indie game business.

A new article says that a US court has ruled that software publishers can prevent reselling software (i.e. used software). The ruling (if upheard) could allow publishers to kill the used games business. The whole “used games” and “used software” sales market has been opposed by a few companies. Some companies see used sales as undermining new sales, and while I don’t agree with their attempts to eliminate used-sales, I can understand why they would be irritated by the fact that GameStop makes a lot of money from used-game sales. Nearly half of GameStop’s profit comes from used-game sales. Because of their markups, GameStop earns 85% more money on the sale of a used game than a new one. At the same time, the publisher gets paid when a new game is sold, but not a used one.

Autodesk* has also tried for years to shut-down used sales of its software – including blocking eBay sales. The typical method for doing this in the software world is to give users a “licence”. When software is counted as a “licence” rather than a “sale”, it opens up more options for publishers to restrict what a user can do with that software. For example, they can sell the user a non-transferable licence (i.e. no software resales). On the other hand, if software is “sold”, then it falls into the legal structure of the “first sale doctrine” which means users can do things like resell their software. The first sale doctrine was originally setup a hundred years ago, and applied to things like books. Book publishers tried to shut-down used bookstores (for fear that used book sales were undermining new book sales), but courts handed down the “first sale doctrine” that said people can resell them. The main way that software “licences” are being challenged is by arguing that publishers are using “licence” as a legal ploy to restrict what users can do, when, in fact, it’s really a “sale” masquerading under the “licence” term.

I think there’s a certain logic to preventing used-game sales, I just don’t think it’s strong enough logic to convince me that users should not be allowed to resell their software or buy used software. I also think the act of shutting down used-sales creates a degree of dissatisfaction among users, and creates the idea that companies have too much control in their lives what they can do with their software. This unhappiness among users has to be weighed against the monetary benefit of eliminating used sales. While eliminating used sales might increase revenue in the short term, it might create longer-lasting resentment, as well. As we all know, CEOs of companies can be ridiculously short-sighted – either because everything is measured and rewarded on a short-term basis, or because they lack foresight. Based on that, I have very little faith in business leaders making the right long-term choice.

On a more positive note, it’s rumored that Steam will begin allowing users to sell their games back to Steam (at a reduced price, of course). Presumably, their logic is that players who can sell back bad games will be more willing to buy new ones (i.e. there is less risk involved since they can get back some of their money if they don’t like the game). Even if it doesn’t immediately result in more sales, it makes their customers happier which keeps them coming back. Funny how companies seem to be moving in opposite directions. Also, I don’t really expect used-game/software sales to disappear anytime soon. GameStop is bringing in $1 billion per year from used-game sales, so they’ll spend millions to block any disruption of the used-games market.

* Footnote: I have to admit that I’m not really a fan of Autodesk. They have a tendency to buy up their competitors (e.g. Maya and SoftImage), in an apparent attempt to prevent meaningful competition in the 3D Modeling world. This allows them to charge higher prices.

I saw a story on slashdot recently. The creator of “Minecraft” had his paypal account suspended, and he can’t get his money out of the account. The money was for pre-orders of his game. He started developing the game in May 2009 and released an alpha version of the game the same week. So, how much money in pre-orders does he (claim) to have? 600,000 Euros (roughly $760,000). That’s pretty mind-boggling for one and a half years of work. It’s also a few orders of magnitude more money than I’m earning. (To be honest, my initial reaction to the story was that the number was fake, and it was all a big publicity stunt. After reading a little more about it, though, I think it might be true.)

I’m planning to release financial numbers for my game at some point in the future, but I’ve already suggested that it hasn’t been a financial success. And, it’s not that I need to make a ton of money, like Minecraft, but I at least need to make enough to pay my bills. I guess it’s all feast or famine in the indie game business. I think 99% of us are on the “famine” side of it.

Update, Sept 18: I just got some numbers from the sale that started last month. There was a nice increase in revenue from that, so that’s encouraging!

Two interesting links:
20 Counterproductive Video Game Covers
My favorite in the list is Phalanx, a “hyper-speed shoot-out in space” with a banjo player on the front cover:

11 Great Playable Video Game Satires
My favorite spoof is the “cow clicker” Farmville spoof:

Creator Ian Bogost: “You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom ‘premium’ cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called ‘mooney’), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.”