Jake

Idle Thumbs 74: That Meat Boy Sat Me Down

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with a traditional Steam arrangement, you can potentially know a couple weeks or months in advance of your public launch if you are on Steam or not, and then you have the opportunity to plan how you close your game, and how you build your marketing campaign and assets, around that fact. If the way to go for Greenlight is "finish your game, you have to build the Steam marketing assets anyway," that seems like it's placing even more burden of unknown on developers who are trying to close and market.

I had no idea Steam worked like this pre-Greenlight; I'd assumed it was strictly an "after-market" type deal, only listing games that had already been available elsewhere. What you're describing sounds more like XBLA and (I assume) PSN, where developers target Steam as their "main" market. (But, I'm presuming, with almost zero chance that Valve would ever act as a publisher for a 3rd-party title, unlike Sony & Microsoft).

As for the question of "bias," I still think (like I said to Greg Brown) that it'd be welcome for Valve to have a curated section of Steam -- not even for the developers so much as because I think those guys generally have good taste in games, and I'd be even more enthusiastic about a game if Valve recommended it than if a majority of fans recommended it. I still think it'd have to be kept completely separate from Greenlight, though -- the only way Greenlight works at all is if they keep up the idea that it's the customers voting and Valve is keep completely hands-off.

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I'm not concerned that we'll have fewer games -- I agree that we will end up with more games post-Greenlight. I am concerned that we'll have different games. Steam is currently undeniably biased about which games get on there. That said, I don't think Greenlight will fix that bias, I think Greenlight will change the bias. It may allow more games onto the service, but it has the potential to do it at the expense of other titles which are already getting on there. That's not an optimal solution. I'd like a system which allows more content onto Steam but throwing a giant binary lever from "approval process" to "crowdsourcing" seems like it's going to have a lot of less than ideal side effects, regardless of the positives it also brings. It's also all speculation, and Valve does seem attentive to what's going on so far. I don't think anyone sees Greenlight as a catastrophe or something, but the potential ramifications seem worth discussing.

I think you guys are probably right that a system like this is undeniably biased like that. The worst case scenario I see is that Steam gets a lot more games, but a much less diverse selection. I'm not too pessimistic about it though because I think Valve has a financial incentive not to flood their storefront with samey pandering zombie games.

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What the hell happened around the 55 minute mark, oh my god :D There's like 5 minutes of everybody screaming at once about farts.

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On the topic of visual presence of UI, I think its validity depends on the type of game. I haven't played Mark of the Ninja, but if it's the sort of game where it's imperative that you keep tabs on how much health you have or how much you are in sight, specifically in an arcady way, a formal bit of UI is fine. Preferably integrated nicely into the design, of course.

If the game is less about arcade minutiae and more about a sense of presence in a world (Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls), I feel an interface can be disruptive to the experience. I'm not against it on a principal level, but I do enjoy it when a game offers a clean 'Dark Corners of the Earth' view of the world, unbarred by visual clutter.

I found it interesting when Chris mentioned that the familiar 'bloodlust' effect is UI as well. That made me think; yes, it is UI, but it's still of a different sort. Like Vimes wrote, more integrated in the gaming world rather than an abstract visual element. As such, I encourage those solutions.

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There's an odd parallel to the minimalist UI discussion this episode compared to the showing vs. telling anecdote in the book podcast, I think, and their position on both is pretty internally consistent. Some effects are just really hard to show, and a hardline stance on trying to show it in-world can be much more disruptive than simply telling us through the UI.

There are some things we can sort of cheat by showing a subjective view of the world—like the bloodlust effect you're mentioning, Rodi—and like you I'm not sure if that should be lumped in with UI. It would be like an unreliable narrator in a book, or some particularly tight third-person limited passages. Still others, like Far Cry 2, actually benefit from having these concerns swim in and out of view as necessary. The malaria mechanic would be far less effective if we had advance warning when the attacks were coming on, and works because it only really needs to tell you when you're almost out of pills.

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What the hell happened around the 55 minute mark, oh my god :D There's like 5 minutes of everybody screaming at once about farts.

Video Games happened.

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I think you guys were a bit too harsh on the xbla and xbox indie games. The current xbox interface actually makes it harder to buy xbla games than previous interfaces,and you do have to really look to even find the indie games section, but you can definitely sort by most recent and most downloaded and so on just like steam.

I spend almost all my xbox money on xbla or xblig.

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On a completely different topic, being the mention of character aging in a persistent game world at 12:50 or so:

(Pulls a dusty tome from a high shelf. As he blows away the cobwebs, you see the word "CompuServe" stamped upon the spine in a very mid-eighties font.)

5.7.1. Age

As in 'real' life, the character has a finite life span. The exact time of

a character's death is determined by the Fates at the instant it is born. As

the character approaches a natural death it will exhibit the various aspects

of aging. An average player can expect to last for about fifteen thousand

battle rounds.* It is rumored that high-level magic users can actually cheat

the Fates and prolong their lives, but only if they are very high level.

* The battle round is the standard unit of time measure in this simulation and is analogous to

a "turn." The usual duration of a battle round is twelve seconds, but this can vary, depending

on the particular command being performed. For example, a fight command will take four

seconds longer than a movement command.

Island of Kesmai was one of the first commercial MMORPGs, on a pay-by-the-minute online service. And from the beginning, they had limited character lifespans. Roughly fifty hours based on the manual, though I remember more like 200 hours of game time. Death from old age was permadeath. In later years they introduced youth potions and an Underworld from which you could be reborn, but in my day it was a brutal reality.

The DayZ discussions reminded me of the old old days of online gaming, in a way. The worlds were fairly brutal and unforgiving; you needed help, but establishing trust was not easy. With an IoK character in old age, you needed to find someone to hold all of your possessions while you rolled a new character. You might even make a deal where you'd allow them to kill you repeatedly for experience, in exchange for payment to your next incarnation; of course, at any point they could just loot your corpse and run off. Being active and valued within the community was an absolute necessity. I did a lot of Knight quest escorts and helped map the Axe Glacier; others acted as money transfer between lands, did research on weapon effectiveness, assisted in emergency corpse runs, etc.

Now if only I had the free time to get good at DayZ...

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I just finished watching the stream, and was looking for a place to comment about it, I suppose this is it?

1. It was great, and I'm glad it exists.

I fired up Xcom via steam and played for a bit, but my squad was just not as enthusiastic about hunting down aliens as Carl Winslow and the Shumi(?) twins.

I last played the CD version on a 386 my dad put together from buying parts at "computer fairs". It's crazy being able to load it up out of thin air and have it run flawlessly (in a window, hidden behind an Illustrator document, each time my boss walks by... just kidding, I'm a model employee).

I'm surprised at how functional the interface is, despite first glance. I suppose having just watched J.P. navigate through almost every menu made things easier than if I was jumping in cold.

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Greenlight is dope! I can't see a downside personally. I've already discovered about 50 games that I would never have a clue of otherwise. I concede the point about the "spoilers" that could happen from people getting looks at early games, but that seems to be up to the developers to overcome. I don't see it as a huge problem personally. I also like the idea that Valve is charging the 100 bucks because, I don't know if you guys were on greenlight first day or not, but people had no idea what to make of it. It did make for some funny moments, like people posting MSPaint images and saying its a game. One guy even posted box art from Need For Speed Underground lobbying for the game to come to Steam. While this may be fun to wade through, I don't want greenlight to be wasting my time and the price of admission pretty much solved that problem. Before Greenlight how many people knew what Slenderman was?

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I know Slenderman! I've been watching MarbleHornets for as long as it's existed. Although I don't like it nearly as much as I used to. Funnily enough, I have yet to try any of the Slender games.

My number one annoyance with Greenlight is the people commenting. "This game is clearly an alpha, don't bother posting until it's further along. Voting NO." Valve explicitly stated that alphas would be acceptable submissions. Greenlight is meant to be both a tool to get on Steam and a tool to get more feedback for your project.

The best solution (and I don't know why they haven't done it, yet) is to allow developers to submit as an alpha, so there's no confusion. Even separate the alphas from the betas from the finished products.

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I agree with pretty much all of the greenlight stuff, except for the example of Amnesia. Amnesia existed in the public mind as basically a spoiler-ific gameplay clip on a website for almost 7 months, and most of its hype was built off of that alone, rather than Frictional's reputation from the Penumbra games. If instead of "pre-order it here on our website" it was upvote us on greenlight I think it would have gotten enough attention to get through the submission process.

A lot of times I think people are overestimating what they lose if they show off a more detailed segment of an in progress game, and sometimes underestimating what they can gain if they go "ok, we're going to spoil you a bit here, but this shit is cool right?" Besides Amnesia, Limbo comes to mind, as well as Fez to a lesser extent; all premiered with some spoilerish gameplay and then just sat there building hype forever.

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