Will Wright and Brian Eno

Whilst I was working down in California this summer, I had the opportunity to see a facinating talk/conversation between Will Wright and Brian Eno. This talk, hosted by the Long Now Foundation, was one of those times in your life where much of what they say haunted your mind on the train-ride home, and you would spend days thinking about it. Certainly an interesting experience. And now, due to the magic of the internet and FORA.tv, you too can share in that pleasure.

Enjoy,

View Will Wright and Brian Eno on FORA.tv

Cheap Marketing through ARGs!

I always thought it would be a neat idea to create additional content for a game by way of Alternate Reality Game type materials, and use it as a profit center. For example, frequently AAA games will release Art Books as a premium buy for people who are really hardcore about a product (Blizzard does this frequently). I think it would be significantly more interesting if such books were sold over Amazon.com or eBay under the pretense of being integrated into the storyline. Clearly this isn’t possible in all games, but in a significant number it would be.

Imagine, for example, one made a game based on the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft. If the designers of the game were to include part of their story bible, as well as some art work or concept sketches into a book, and call it the Necronomicon, sell it on eBay under some pretense of finding the thing somewhere, and leak the existence of such a book to the gaming press.

Well that’d be kinda cool.

This stealth-marketing ploy could even be possible pre-release to drum up a few bucks. The caveat there would be that the publishing channels one would have to go through would be less conventional, such as Lulu.com. Even so, this isn’t necessarly a bad thing, and in fact opens this up as a possible revenue channel for Indie game designers as well.

And here at GhostRazor, we’re all about the little guy.

Of gears and valves

I came up with a neat game mechanic that I thought would work well in a First-person shooter. This mechanic would would in any setting of a FPS, but the one I had in mind was a Steampunk game. I think the Steampunk genre is under-served in todays marketplace. Many people are perhaps not aware of the genre, while at the same time I think there’s an intrinsic appeal to the whole Steampunk concept. My intuition on this is fueled by the popularity of works such as LXG, Van Helsing, and even such oddities as Steampunk Starwars which recently drew the attention of notable bloggers on Boing Boing and Wired’s Table of Malcontents.

In most FPSs, there are a series of various weapons you can aquire. Typically there are pistols, and shotguns, and machine guns, some type of rocket launcher, etc. Defining these as known weapons makes the artists life easy, as well as the game designer, as the tools the player has at hand are always known within a certain range, and levels can be planned accordingly. What I propose is to instead of finding weapons, find parts, and build your weapons. You might find, for example, some type of stock, which would have slots you could put other parts into (a mundane example would be a barrel, some type of ammunition container, and a trigger mechanism). The parts you use to build the weapon would result in different properties, range, damage, etc. The individual pieces would have to be animated by an artist, and programmatically joined on the fly. One might also have special parts which are rare or hard to find, or have different types of technologies which might give bonuses when interfaced together, or penalties when interfaced with alternate types. Another mechanism which might be interesting is to have the parts wear out, so that the player is not continually using one weapon, but is forced to rebuild and try different tactics (I’m not sure whether this would be fun or not though).

In a Steampunk setting, this could result in all manner of strange, steam-powered, gear whirring weapons and systems. A System Shock type game could be reborn, but in a Difference Engine-like world with characters such as Charles Babbage and Lord Byron. I think a game thus designed could be very beautiful, and a lot of fun to play. The mechanism itself though would easily work in a futuristic or modern setting as well.

Things to do in the future perhaps.

Update: I told you so!

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