SiN

So it's okay to be an asshole, as long as no one knows who you are? Again, I'm not saying I condone Fish's tweets, but I'm saying it's not unreasonable. I don't think it's fair to hold these guys up to some arbitrary higher standard, especially given all the abuse they take. Those quotes were just after a cursory glance of his twitter feed, never mind the FOUR YEARS of abuse from (as Erkki put it) "dumb idiots who have no other outlet probably". Of course it's possible to handle this kind of thing better (Chris Hecker did an heroic job) and I totally respect that, but at the same time I'm not about to dismiss the guy purely on this. As for rectifying the situation, again on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/PHIL_FISH/status/177108826909196288 I left this out earlier because I was curious about whether anyone (press or someone here) would dig deeper and actually get to the bottom of the story. And nevermind that the story is based on an incomplete out-of-context quote. Really, just this: http://chrishecker.com/Do_Your_Job_Well,_Please [edit] Also, the first three paragraphs of this: http://chrishecker.com/Me_and_the_Wii I'm tired of GDC being covered in a half-assed manner by journalists who paraphrase and write stories for page clicks. It's unfair to the developers (who really have no open forum to freely speak) and it's unfair to us, the audience, who get an incomplete story.

And finally, stuff people said to Phil Fish: "@PHIL_FISH Congratulations on being the man that destroyed the IGF by turning into into a shameful, corrupt joke!" "@PHIL_FISH you sucks son of a bitch" "@PHIL_FISH you scks racist dick" "@PHIL_FISH @PHIL_FISH Oh, it's just about some arrogant schmuck indie dev talking smack yet has zero released games. Gr8 read tho!" "@PHIL_FISH "Everyone is being mean to me!" Welcome to the internet age motherfucker, inflammatory comments get scrutinized!" I say we boycott all gamers for their abusive, inconsiderate and down-right rude behaviour.

Heh, this is golden: @PHIL_FISH said: "japanese games are just two western games duct-taped together." More tellingly: @PHIL_FISH said: "me and jon blow went into more details, comparing the first zelda, and the latest one..." "...and citing a few examples of why we dont like most modern japanese games." Which I've seen reported nowhere.

Man, if you're offended by that, you'd better not look at what people are tweeting at him. Honestly, I'm not condoning his tweets, but I understand where he's coming from. You try dealing with 4 years of abuse from gamers. :/

What Murdoc said. Seriously, it's not rocket science. I don't work in the games industry and the reasoning is pretty evident to me. I get what you're saying though. And I agree, it's kind of annoying. But what's more frustrating is how riled up gamers get over this stuff that doesn't really matter. Here's what I'm doing: buying a copy of SimCity the day it comes out. No DLC, no preorder, no deluxe edition. It will be great. Others will decide that the extras were worth $20, and that's cool too.

The same can be said about Chris Hecker's "a Wii is two Gamecubes duct-taped together" right? *rolls eyes* This shit is why (most) dumb-ass online "journalists" shouldn't be covering GDC.

It doesn't change my opinion tbh. I'm not surprised (or annoyed) by the inclusion of DLC, really, because it's not the "OMG EA are making this? WE ARE DOOMED!" scenario everyone was on about. That's what I was "defending", not the fact that SimCity would have DLC, or be on Origin, or whatever. [edit] and it's worth noting that the DLC is really just minor fun little things. You're not losing a significant chunk of the game, or anything. Anyway, more info on the Glassbox engine. The simplicity/elegance is fascinating really: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164870/GDC_2012_Breaking_down_SimCitys_Glassbox_engine.php

It's a stealth kickstarter.

Woah, Holiday 2012. That's pretty close! It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. From a production perspective, it looks incredible (epic, even), but everything else is on unproven/unknown grounds. I sure it'll turn out well, but it'll be exciting to see how 343 approaches the gameplay/level design/narrative differently than Bungie did.

Seriously, fuck you guys. RPS comments were the same, here's a long-awaited sequel to a critically acclaimed game, and all I hear is whining about "dumbed down for consoles", "DLC", "Origin", and "micro-transactions". And you know what? All of the above might happen. And that would suck pretty hard. But until then, you guys can take your damn cynicism and shove it. I'm going to be super-excited over this!

Oh yeah, GTA games! Forgot about that. But yeah, there's a difference between a journal/quest log and a transcript. The latter is very handy when you miss a line or two of dialogue, but obviously makes for a rather messy quest log. It depends on the genre, but for adventure games it's important that it keeps all the dialogue, because I want to know what the last few lines were, even if it's incidental to the story/objective.

I don't like subtitles because they ruin dramatic/comedic timing, but I also miss a line here and there. Two games solved this quite smartly: - During the first cutscene of Uncharted, it prompts you to press Square to toggle subtitles. You can do that at any time. So I'll be watching a cutscene, and if I miss something I can quickly toggle the subtitles, read it, and then turn them back off. - I'm surprised nobody mentioned this: Grim Fandango! It keeps a transcript of all the dialogue in the pause menu. Genius idea that no adventure game ever bothered copying, much to my annoyance.

I noticed that a little too, but it's not too worrying for two reasons: (1) Tim Schafer is leading this project, and he gets modern design. I actually think it'll be kinda interesting to have Gilbert being the first principles/old school designer, work along side Schafer, the modern design principles designer. (2) I've never read something Ron Gilbert said about adventure games that I disagreed with. He *really* understands how to make adventure games work, as opposed to how to make "what adventure game fans expect from adventure games". I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly... but do you think pixel hunting is a good thing? It definitely *is* a big problem, but continues on due to expectations from fans of the genre. I'm hoping DFAG will be super-progressive, getting rid off a lot of the filler/crap that exists purely to pander to the existing audience. It'd be great if DFAG was not only an excellent adventure game, but one that also has appeal beyond the pre-existing market for it.

Yeah, oops. So I don't know about the games industry (and in my defense, I mentioned that up front), but in my experience at bigger software development companies, testers are computer scientists/engineers, so they get the same (or close to) starting salaries as developers.

Kingz, sorry, but you're just wrong. The idea that "more people = more productivity" is false is not an unverified truism. Have you heard of The Mythical Man-Month? The main thesis is: You can call that an "unverified truisms" if you want, but said book is (to quote again) "widely regarded as a classic on the human elements of software engineering." No harm in open sourcing something. But NOBODY open sources their PRIMARY source of income, and then DEPEND on open source contributors. Yes, they should. And they do. But it's a very different flavour of commenting versus external usage. If you're lucky there would be! That's easy to spot! But it takes just a few lines in a few-hundred line check-in to mess stuff up in a way that's more-or-less invisible. A "ridiculous mess of random garbage" isn't the problem. Bad code masquerading as harmless, good code is the problem. Heh, sounds kinda like the so-called "dead weight in traditional management". I don't know where you get the idea that managers at software development studios "[order] people on your payroll to toggle bits". Managers are actual developers who also manage a team of developers. A good software developer lives and dies by the quality of it's management. Do you seriously believe that Linux is developed by a bunch of developers in their spare time, for free? That's absolutely not the case. Unix was (and continues to be) developed by *paid* employees at major corporations like IBM, Sun, Oracle, Apple, etc. Similarly, Firefox is backed by and primarily developed by the Mozilla Foundation (a not-for-profit), and WebKit (the rendering engine behind Safari, Chrome) is primarily developed by Apple. You cannot crowdsource mid-to-large scale, consumer-facing engineering projects. There's a lot of value in open source, no doubt. APIs, tools, a good deal of web architecture, programming languages, are all great uses of open source. But the assumption is that the project will evolve over a long time, and be unstable, incomplete or buggy for a good deal of the time. This works for tools, but does not work for consumer facing products. As for your Linux example: what's the most successful iteration of Unix to date? MacOS X. Closed source. And when will "Linux be popular on the desktop"? Next year, as they say every year. The people who donated more than the $15/30 minimum buy in could afford that because they work 9-5 jobs. Those are the people you want, and those people could not give their 100% because, well, they have jobs! See the "Mythical Man-Month" above for why "10 developers giving 10% is just like a free employee!!" is not the case. This is not what testers do. Again, from my experience, testers make the same $65-80k starting salaries as developers, artists, producers do.

Two points from a software developer's (not in the Video game industry, mind you) perspective: 1. On the budget thing, a starting position as a software developer in the States is around $65-$80/yr. Artists, testers, producers, etc have comparable salaries. 2. On the crowdsourcing development thing, it's somewhat naive to think that "more people = more productivity". "Playtesting" means something very different to your average gamer vs. a professional tester. That's why most companies don't bother. It's only worthwhile for load-testing (and sometimes balancing) multiplayer games. As for porting to other platforms, the overhead required to document code for open-source usage, managing check-ins, testing external changes, etc, etc is almost always more than the overhead of just doing the work internally. I know it's nice to think that the community can solve these things, but software development is very complicated, and as things scale up the coordination overhead outweighs the productivity benefits.

Yeah, what an incredible turn of events. I hope my chin-stroking didn't come off as grumpy or cynical, because I'm totally over-the-moon about all this. Last night, especially, was insane. I was playing Starcraft + Skype with friends, telling them about this thing and how much Double Fine raised. Except after every game I alt-tabbed back to Kickstarter and had to revise the number! By the end of the night, they were at $650,000. When I woke up this morning they hit a million. The best part is that it couldn't have happened to a more hard-working, passionate, talented bunch of people. They deserve every penny!

I think my point is being lost here. So I definitely funded this in a heart-beat (I put down $250), and I funded Venus Patrol for a similar amount. I've done a couple of other (design related) Kickstarters too. I'm more than happy to fund this stuff. But again, if donation-based funded can raise $100,000 and $1,000,000, could crowd sourced investments raise even more money? There's a big difference between spending and investing. Perhaps people would be willing to put up *even more* money if there was even a small chance of a return-on-investment. With that in mind, would we be able to fund a $10,000,000 game? I may be totally wrong, but I think it's an interesting thought. An investment-based Kickstarter may be a formidable contender to the developer-publisher model. EDIT: This is kinda my point. I'm guessing a low budget for a season of Firefly would cost around $10-$20 million to fund. Given around the same number of contributors the Kickstarter would fail. I love Firefly, but I wouldn't spend $2,500 for a season of it. But as an investment, $2,500 isn't all that much.

Oh, totally. I just wonder what the (admittedly fuzzy) upper limit on donating is. We've already seen Venus Patrol funded for $100k, and Double Fine Adventure game will hit *at least* a million dollars. That's an order of magnitude! Can we kickstart a ten million dollar game? If not, I'm curious if a donation/investment hybrid model would help. I totally agree that it "COMPLETELY changes the dynamic", but maybe it would be an opportunity to rethink the artist/investor model. What if we could maintain the Kickstarter mentality ("follow your vision", etc), but with the added monetary benefits if the artist ends up turning a massive profit? Now that I think about it, it would be similar to a crowd sourced version of the Indie Fund.

Two thoughts: 1. We've anticipated that as the gamer generation grew up, wealthy patrons would emerge to fund these "impossible" titles. It's now quite obvious that the Internet can sidestep the need for one wealthy patron. Crowd sourcing means that a larger group of people, all paying (at worst) a bit over their comfort zone can make the impossible happen. That's awesome. 2. For all the talk of the publishing model being upended there is, of course, the fact that games are far more expensive than the proposed $400k. But here's another problem: what's in it for us? Look, I'm more than happy to fund Double Fine's game, but as Kickstarters get increasingly ambitious, someone will eventually ask "if we're putting down so much money, surely we should get a cut in return?" I think that's an entirely reasonable request. A crowd sourced publishing scheme will be the next step in funding projects that run into the millions of dollars. And I think it's a good thing, as long as the artists can maintain creative control over their projects.

Woah. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure :tup:

Tim talks at length about Happy Action Theatre in his Gamasutra interview: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6691/happy_action_happy_developer_tim_.php What I like most is how HAT is not so much a game as it is a toy. I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately, and how it doesn't have to be a market aimed exclusively at kids...

Thanks! Yeah, can you tell I've been thinking about this for a really long time? Basically, I've been writing homebrew on any embedded device I could get my hands on (Palm, GBA, DS, PSP, J2ME phones, and finally, iPhone & iPad), and I've been playing handheld games obsessively since the early DS days. I think the next step is to takes my walls-o-text and turn them into a blog post (or three!) The discussion definitely helped me get my thoughts straight, so thanks for that guys.

No arguments here. What I loved about Ghost Trick and Stacking was that both dared to switch up conventional adventure game mechanics, but not to add action sequences like most failed revive-the-genre attempts, but to enhance the puzzle aspects of the game. It'd be lovely if we saw that trend continue into 2012.

I just posted my massive goty.cx essay thing on my blog. In short... GOTY: Portal 2 The rest (unordered): Deus Ex: Human Revolution Uncharted (1 & 2, yes I know I'm late) Batman: Arkham City Jamestown Joe Danger SE Handheld GOTY: Super Mario 3D Land Also awesome: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective A lot more ranting here: http://caffeinemonster.tumblr.com/post/15662933424/my-2011-in-games Great year for video games, eh?