Adventure Game Revival

One of my favorite gaming genres has always been the point and click adventure game. In North America, it’s been tough to point at a game in the last few years that was on par with the offerings from Sierra On-Line and LucasArts in the 90s - both studios that have since been eviscerated.

Europe, on the other hand, has generally been known as a more casual market, and maybe that’s why most of the scant few adventure games of any quality that have emerged in the last few years have come out of Europe. I’d love to throw some attention at FunCom’s masterpiece - The Longest Journey, but it came out eight years ago, and the sequel Dreamfall wasn’t up to par with the original. While it might be premature, I have a very good feeling about an upcoming title from Daedalic called The Whispered World.

The Whispered World follows the adventures of a young clown named Sadwick and his companion Spot through a melancholy world doomed to crumble and fall. The artwork and music are beautiful, and I suspect good things will come of it, but we’ll have to wait until launch I suppose.

Although, perhaps I have reason to hope yet. One of the critical factors that killed off the Adventure Game genre to begin with was the emergence of 3D graphics, and the games that technology ushered in. We’re now seeing a reversal in fortunes as the gaming market reaches out to those who were once outside their domain. That the industry is trying to gain appeal with the masses is one of two things that have changed in favor of adventure games. I suspect as the casual masses explore the new land they’ve found, interactive adventure stories are going to become interesting again.

Secondly, platforms now exist to market games which have niche appeal for reasonably low cost through digital distribution networks. Services like Gametap, Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, and Nintendo Virtual Console has created a space where these freaks can be shown in the daylight, without offending their muscular, brawny siblings. Creating these spaces is important - not just for adventure games - but for the future of the medium. Without these spaces, the story of game development becomes eventually more like the science of creating an addictive drug - increasingly refining only to what is known to work - and less like the exploration of the human psychology that it should be.

Interview with Chris Satchell

This is nearly a week old now, but Gamasutra has a great interview with Chris Satchell (General Manager of XNA) on the XBL Community Games.  It’s nice to see that Microsoft does care about pushing the medium in ways that go beyond graphics capabilities.  Good job folks.

A Week in Cuba

As previously mentioned, I went on vacation last week, and apparently the world does not stop while I’m laying on the beach.

Big news of the last week.  Apparently it was GDC or something.  I wasn’t there, so if you want juicy GDC goodness, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Microsoft

• Microsoft, in a new initiative called Dreamspark is making much of its developer software free to students.  This software includes Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server, XNA Game Studio, XNA Creator’s Club Subscription, and Expression Studio.  That should be plenty of tools for would be game developers to muck about in.  Details are here.
• Microsoft is dropping support for HD-DVD with the discontinuation of the add-on for the Xbox 360.  All remaining units are being cleared at firesale for $50.  I would not be surprised if there was a Blu-ray add-on in the future.
• Microsoft announced during the GDC 2008 Keynote a new service, the so-called Xbox Live Community Games.  Under this service, users can build a game using XNA Game Studio, and then upload it directly to a community portal where the game is democratically reviewed.  The reviewing process is intended to look for infringing or objectionable material.  The best of these games get automatically uploaded to Xbox Live for the masses to enjoy.  No specifics on pricing, or if the developer is getting kickbacks (as one would assume they would if Microsoft is collecting on their work).

Sony
On the Sony side of things, Phil Harrison, one of the founding members of Sony Computer Entertainment, and the president of SCE Worldwide Studios, has submitted his resignation.  Changes in leadership often come with widespread changes across the board, but it depends on the size and momentum of the company in question, and Sony is rather largeish, so I would not anticipate a massive change in the direction of their games.

Australia

Australia is talking about finally getting a new rating that will allow more mature titles to be sold there.  Unfortunately, I doubt this will alleviate the massive delays they usually incur before North American/Japanese release, and release to the land down under.

Electronic Arts

EA is offering to buy Take Two!  I would suggest in reaction to the recent Activision/Vivendi merger, EA is looking to add some more meat to its already colossal frame.  EA’s new CEO John Riccitiello has mentioned that he’s extremely unhappy with the scores EA’s games have been getting of late, so there might be some incentive to own some games that are critically acclaimed (which might have fueled the recent acquisition of Bioware as well).  Take Two is brimming with talent, including the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar), Bioshock (2K Games), and Civilization (Firaxis).  While EA’s initial bid is a bit lower than Take Two is looking for, most analysts are expecting this deal to go through eventually at some price point.

On a side note, Take Two is the current owner of one of my favorite IPs of all time, the Tex Murphy series.  This series was created by Access Software (later renamed to Indie Built) in the 90s.  Microsoft acquired them for the Links Golf series, and then sold the company to Take-Two who then shut it down.  While a revival is not likely at EA, it’s marginally more likely than at the parent who shut them down in the first place.

EA has a habit of killing great teams by using simple business math.  If you have everyone using the same tools and processes, costs are lower.  Unfortunately, this slows down and breaks the dynamic that produced the great team in the first place.  This is something you can do with teams that are having trouble realizing their full potential, perhaps due to infrastructural problems, but when you acquire a really solid team, it’s important that you just leave them alone to do their thing.  Riccitiello seems to be aware of this, so perhaps Take Two’s properties are not going to join the legacies of Westwood, Bullfrog, and Origin.

Havok

Havok is free, to which I say, OMGWTFBBQ.  Well, okay, it’s only free on the PC, but as of May 2008, you at home will be able to download your very own copy of Havok Complete (which includes the Physics and Animation packages).  This is a non-commercial license, but it allows hobbyists to get their hands dirty with the most widely used physics engine in the PC gaming space, which is good for companies looking to hire people who know Havok already.  This theoretically lays some groundwork for Havok’s more specialized products for behavioral animation, deformable solids, and cloth rendering.

And that’s all that happened this week, I’ll be posting on a more semi-regular basis now.

Steamworks

Valve has announced a new design platform for PC game design called Steamworks, available free of charge. The suite of tools seems to focus on easing some production-level issues rather than design issues. This includes smoothing delivery of the game through Steam’s retail channel, as well as providing certain frameworks to improve a game so delivered, notably in the multi-player arena.

Most notably in my opinion is the inclusion of hooks for getting play data back from the users once they’ve been launched.  This type of data gathering immensely helps developers get information about how the players are playing their game, and thus to take this data back and use it to improve designs for future titles.

All of this of course depends on the utilization of Steam as the delivery channel, something very few large studios would want to commit exclusively to.  I’ve asked Jason Holtman how well Steamworks would interface with XNA, as these two technologies seem to me to be functionally, if not technically, complementary.  If I hear back from him, I’ll update this page.

XNA 2.0 Beta Released

Read the press release here.

Exciting things:

• Convert between Windows and Xbox 360 projects
• Build content separately from game code
• Networking Support on Xbox and Windows using Live
• Improved Integration
• Other stuff!

Download it here. Go make games. Dream Build Play is happening again! Go sign-up.

New XNA Release

The XNA Team is proud to announce the availability of XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh.  This release is an update to the 1.0 product which contains improved functionality along with new features.

Some of these new features include Bitmap-based fonts, 3D Audio, Windows Vista Support, and the long awaited ability to share binaries with other users without having to share the source code as well!

As always, if you want to share your work with other Xbox 360 users, you still need a Creator’s Club Membership.

Check out the “What’s New” section of the product documentation for full details.

Xbox Live Arcade and XNA

In 2000, Microsoft announced it was going to release a new console gaming system to compete against Nintendo and Sony. At the time, I thought they were out of their minds. Microsoft was at the time, a company I had known only to produce an operating system that, while nearly ubiquitous, was merely okay from a quality standpoint, and an office suite which ran on said platform. I was also perhaps somewhat bitter at them for acquiring Access Software the year before; a move which ended the Tex Murphy series of games, much to my dismay. It was certainly not clear that Microsoft was the type of company who had their hand on the pulse of the game industry. Several years later, I think it’s safe to say that I can retract that position. Microsoft managed to leverage DirectX on their new system, thus making it much easier to develop for the XBox than any other of the systems available at the time. They also leveled the mighty cash war-chest at numerous other high-profile companies (Rare, Bungie), and managed to bring out on the Xbox some of the best received launch titles since Mario. Far from a lucky start, Halo 2 is, years later, still the best selling console game ever (although Gears of War, another Microsoft exclusive, is giving it a run for its money).

Xbox Live

Having earned my respect, after years of delivering a continuously high-quality gaming experience, It is interesting to see what they’re doing now with the 360 and Xbox Live. The Xbox live environment itself has several things that are worth the admission price right off the bat, but Acheivement Points are definitely the drug that sells itself. Microsoft has essentially issued an edict whereby all 360 games and all XLA games have set amounts of points which can be earned by doing things in the game, both on and offline. Some of these tasks are trivialities which are earned easily during normal game play, others are only granted to the most dedicated players. This system has in effect created a standardized system of gamer cred. There have always been those folks who have to get every last bloody note in Banjo-Kazooie, who have to beat every level without losing a life. This has always been relegated I think to the very hardcore, or very obsessed. Even so, there’s never been a facility to show off to your friends how bad ass you are, until this point. Given the popularity of the system, I’m very surprised that Nintendo and Sony have not decided to provide competing point systems, in effect handing Microsoft control of the de facto standard for gamer reputation. What this means is that when a gamer has a choice over which system to buy a game for, all other things being equal, the 360 is the system of choice, as no other system will earn you the publicly accessible respect for completing parts of the game.I think the real draw of Xbox live will not come to a head for another year or so though. There is a slowly growing network of collaborative technologies emerging. This network hasn’t quite coalesced yet, but will firm up by the end of 2007, and I predict by the end of 2008 that some exciting things will be come to fruition.

XNA’s Not an Acronym

The first part of that network is XNA. The Microsoft XNA Framework is a set of tools and runtime environment designed to aid in video game development and deployment. The framework allows independent developers to design both 2D and 3D games from the ground up, and deploy them in both Windows and on the Xbox 360 with minimal code changes. The framework simplifies many aspects of game design, and has a steadily growing community of users. Some issues exist (for example, in order to distribute games you develop for the 360, you presently are required to distribute the entire source code and the user must recompile it), and is seriously lacking documentation for the more advanced functions. Nevertheless, XNA provides a solid beginning to Indie and Homebrew console development on a scale never seen before. Better yet, XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Framework are free to download, although deploying onto an Xbox 360 requires a Creator’s Club Membership, which has an annual fee of $99 (a modest fee).

Torque X

There are several extremely inexpensive tools which have emerged to integrate with XNA. The suite of choice at the moment is GarageGames‘ Torque X. Torque X is a fully functional Game Engine for both 2D and 3D games. The engine is designed to integrate seamlessly with XNA, as well as several other tools offered by GarageGames, such as the Torque Game Engine (the technology behind such big-name hits as Tribes) and the 2D Game Editor Tools included in the Torque Game Builder. The TGB is extremely inexpensive ($100 for Indies, $400 for Commerical), as is the TGE ($150/$750). GarageGames also offers inexpensive content packages to allow you to get your game up and running without waiting for costly art and sound assets to be created.With these tools in hand, the barriers to entry for game development on the 360 have dropped away substantially, making the 360 the platform of choice for independent games developers. The ultra-high end, cutting edge games still lay in the domain of large developers with massive budgets, but for the first time we have the ability to inject fresh independent creativity into the console environment. The only remaining problem is publishing.

XBox Live Arcade

Enter Xbox Live Arcade. XLA is a feature of the XBox Live system whereby gamers can pay to download titles from the system, in a manner similar to Valve’s Steam. The titles offered tend to be smaller, non-feature length games, or ports of older games. Overall, I’m not particularly impressed with the offerings so far (Although there are some tasty ports, such as Alien Hominid and Worms HD, as well as a couple of new gems such as Wik: Fable of Souls and Settlers of Catan). Microsoft is unwilling to allow just anybody to put their games up on XLA, and rightly so. After all, XLA is a platform for Microsoft to make money as well, and it’s a brand for them: They want that brand to be known for its quality. There are a rigorous set of standards a game needs to meet to be considered for introduction on XLA. But those standards don’t necessarily require you to be a big name studio. Microsoft’s DreamBuildPlay initiative is proof positive of this. They want to encourage people to use these tools, and are in a position to take risks with regard to publishing titles over XLA, because the overhead for them to do this is substantially less than traditional publishing channels. In the next two years, once developers have had a chance to play with the tools, and the XLA ecosystem really gets developed, I think you’ll start to see some really neat titles on XLA that are new, dynamic ideas, and aren’t published anywhere else.If Microsoft plays its cards right, it has the opportunity to turn Live Arcade into a fountainhead of high-quality, fresh, and creative gaming, and at little to no expense to itself. At the same time, they can endear themselves to the independent crowd, a group largely bulldozed over by the Juggernaut in the last two decades, and re-market themselves as a dynamic, edgy organization along the likes of Apple and Google (you know, the way they used to be known in the 90s).

Now if they would just open a Microsoft Games Studio in Toronto…