Marek

Question... besides the fact that you're part of a group of players, does politics figure into the equation? Things like who's attacking who, or players switching to another group, or maybe leadership change. Are those strong elements in the web games you play? I've been thinking about that because, as you say, when you begin to see through the game universe and really notice the level grind it becomes so shit and repetitive. Complex social dynamics seem like a good layer to have on top of that because people will hopefully create their own motivations and their own drama.

Interesting! What you say matches one of my little theories. I played KoL as, essentially, a singleplayer game, and only used the chatrooms if I needed a hint. Sure, it was nice when other players gave me a buff in there, but that's not the sort of social glue that keeps you connected. In the game I'm currently designing (this reveals my partial motivation for starting this thread ) you immediately start out in a small group of about 5 players, which can grow to up to 30. These groups are in turn part of factions. And within the groups are different roles that may, at times, have different interests or motivations. I'm hoping those things (as well as a few other features) will make it multiplayer focused and will make most of the social interaction happen outside of the forums and inside team forums, private messages, etc. Forums, inevitably, become the home of griefers or whiners, and I can't think of any solid strategies to really prevent that. Rodi: thanks for reminding me of the ability to easily get back into a game. It's easy to lose sight of that, and it's a very important point. I think if you're really genre/game agnostic (which is likely if you post on a forum like this) you'll usually get bored with stuff after a month no matter what. I mean I even got bored with WoW after 2 months. But I know people who have been playing Animal Crossing casually / on-and-off for over a year, and that's the sort of sustainability I find very interesting, both from a game design and a commercial perspective.

I think the problem with Kingdom of Loathing is that after a month or-so, the jokes have worn out and your attention is redirected to the core game, which in some cases isn't that good. I had to deal with a ridiculous difficulty spike. There was some kind of uber boss I couldn't defeat, and people told me it was because of the character class I had chosen. I didn't want to become a part of the community (despite the chatrooms being totally hilarious) so I gave up there. What I think is genius, however, is the Adventures system. They're like action points and you get 40 of them a day, but you can boost that quite a bit by cooking and eating various types of food, and mixing and drinking various cocktails (while avoiding drunkenness). This aspect is really addicitive and makes the game have a lot more in common with something like Animal Crossing (you play a little bit each day) than an MMO (you play all the time). I also like that Adventures are generally used for combat/exploration moves that always have potential for rewards, and not every frickin' tiny thing you do in the game. There's other browser games that are just waaaaay too AP based. NexusWar looks interesting! I'm clicking around in it now. It does a couple of interface things that are nice. Will dive deeper. And despite the possible spammy nature of the above post, I will check that out as well. I've got question. A lot of these games are good for only a month or so, and then you usually lose interest. What would keep you in an online game for a longer time? Are graphics a factor? Or maybe the discovery of new areas?

In-house, contract work, outsourcing to other studios, freelancers, slavery... we do everything.

Well, yes. Once you know the basics you can transition into any language, but a lot of people don't seem to know this. So you might as well mess around with a bunch of common ones, just so you're able to say you have worked with them all. Rodi: well, we have a screenwriter we're interested in bringing on board, but you never know.

If you have programming skills that's actually one of the most straightforward paths into the industry. If you want to be a gameplay programmer, familiarize yourself with as much scripting languages as you can (Python, LUA, Ruby, etc.). Then apply for a junior position somewhere. It's actually really uncomplicated compared to other positions of the industry.

That's funny, I had pretty much the opposite experience of Rodi's. When I started doing games I came out of 8 years of running AdventureGamers.com. And since I had enjoyed screenwriting class so much, I thought my main thing was going to be story. Then I actually made an adventure game in college and realized that I don't like coming up with stories, plots and characters at all. What I had actually really liked about screenwriting class was tinkering with the dialog, e.g. bringing it down to its purest chunks, leaving out as much expository dialog as possible, and implying as much through actions as I could. I would love to be a dialog editor on a game someday, or collaborate as a game designer with a screenwriter, but actually conceptualizing the meat of a story is not a hugely fun experience for me at all. I keep hating the premises and treatments that I write because it's all so lame, and it won't become interesting to me until I can actually start filter stuff and move stuff around. Like for my current project, I keep putting off writing a backstory or explaining the differences between the different factions in the game, because I just don't give a damn right now. I've become so much more fascinated by gameplay mechanics. When all the different game rules are in place, I'll probably come up with some justifications for some of the faction's abilities and so forth, but I'm not even sure if I'm going to spell them out. For another game that I'm going to co-design, we're planning to build a complete board game prototype before we write a single line of code. That sort of thing is ridiculously more exciting to me than I thought it would be three years ago.

We don't have a thread for Iwata Asks. An enormous crime since this is the best interview series all year. Ninty president Satoru Iwata takes the role of interviewer and introduces the dozens of personalities behind the games and hardware. In between the more predictable answers are some great details giving you a tiny window into the minds at Nintendo. Miyamoto, while mentioned often, is featured only in a handful of the chapters, which is incredibly refreshing. In fact, all these interviews made me re-respect Miyamoto, whose legendary status I thought had completely surpassed his actual involvement (an assumption I now realize was completely wrong). The latest two chapters focus on Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, and Iwata squatting. Does this guy look like he could be the developer of Wario Ware? Yes he does.

I'll let others speak for themselves, but for the past two years I've been working at a media/advertising company (which also has a console games sister company). Mostly been doing short-cycle projects for 3rd party clients, like advergames and web games. Those projects kind of led up to an elaborate internally developed online game that I've been lead designing for a year now. We've been pitching it to publishers and I expect we'll get funding soon and really ramp up production. It's exciting. Regarding Kroms question: you're going to hate this answer, but... it depends. My job makes me very happy and the company culture here is amazing, but I also know people (outside Thumbs) at other companies who are less fortunate. If you want to be a design lead, be realistic, set your expectations low and prepare to find a secret weird route into the industry. Nobody is interested in a newbie designer unless you make the next fl0w or Narbacular Drop, which isn't the most likely thing to happen, so you gotta find ways to gain experience in different ways.

I liked this one. The writer's intentions were good. What I disliked though was how much boxing footage was shown. We don't have to see a crowd yelling all the time, or people exchanging space bucks or whatever they use. They spent too much time in the editing on things in or around the boxing ring that don't really matter, and it really dragged things down. 5 minutes less of that, and 5 minutes more dialog, could have completely corrected the balance. But, anyway, I prefer this episode to all the ones since Collaborator.

Did you guys hear there'll be a Theme Park DS? That along with The Settlers and SimCity shows that publishers are finally doing what everyone said they would/should be doing when the DS was launched.

Well, that's a client-based game. You don't play it on the web, you download it and start it up like any regular game. It's apparently pretty good though.

Game industry wind produced by much larger asses...?

Spread your wings, and GO... GO WITH THE WIND! The wind of the game industry. Not that wind.

Oh yeah!

Let's see. Ben is at SEGA, Alex at EA, Steve at Perpetual Entertainment, Lawrence at Namco, Spaff and Nick at NCSoft, Rusalka did a thing at Climax, Bob is ... uhh, going to London (shit I totally forgot what his new gig is), Jake and Doug are at Telltale, Chris of course went to Shack, and I'm working at a game dev in Amsterdam. It's the Idle Thumbs exodus.

It's understood that most B-brands in supermarkets try to look as much as A-brands as possible by aping their design. Consider for instance every bottle of ketchup that tries to look like Heinz. In games I thought such blatant copying attempts had stopped (since the days of Great Giana Sisters et al). Actually, not so much. Look what I saw advertised today: Oh so you mean this? Nice font you picked for the logo... *cough*

Ponies! Ponies! I know a lot about ponies!

What do you mean? It's common industry practice not to release such numbers.

From what I understand enough people are buying Sam & Max and Telltale are doing fine. But maybe Doug, Jake, or Emily can tell you more given that they actually work there. There's a little kernel of truth to your rant (there was a lot of opposition to 3D, for a time) but I disagree that this has anything to do with the current state of the genre or the current state of its followers and in fact I disagree with your characterizations of both. Incidentally, adventure games are the topic of our next podcast, so maybe I shouldn't post too much in this thread.

Good feature. Yay 1UP.

What's perhaps most amusing about that ad is that it says "7.99 a piece", like someone might come in and buy multiple copies... P.S. The eyes are not Mac compatible!!!

A classic case of "remowned".

Yeah no HDMI on 360. All that stuff sounds like a good plan. Although I just realized there will be Wii to RGB Scart cables in Europe. Is that equal to Component in quality? In that case I could connect Wii with Scart, 360 with Component, and have both VGA and HDMI free for PC/laptop connectivity. Edit: this random page from Google says "Component > Scart > Composite".

Fuck. I meant component, obviously. Much sharper. WORDS. TOO. SIMILAR.