Non-fantasy RPGs

I was bummed when I heard Deus Ex Human Revolution was getting bumped to later 2011. So much so that I went to Steam and grabbed a copy of the original. My original copy was for OS9 and there was never an OSX port so this was pretty much my only option :\

I had very different memories of this game. I seemed to recall there being far more branches than there are. The game comes down to very basic choices.

Good/evil

Diplomat/warlord

This is reflected in the level design as well where making diplomatic choices can open backdoors and being violent can close them, though at the end of the day, it's the same missions. Mass Effect has this to some extent as well, though it is more neatly divided into social areas and combat areas, whereas Deus Ex does not separate them at all. You can basically start shooting and blowing up stuff whenever you want.

I'm not sure what I like better.

As I begin planning for a new Black Powder Red Earth campaign, probably to be called Black Powder Grey Skies, I am trying to figure out a smart way to build/track a "branching" narrative from a purely story perspective. I picked up a few of the Bioware GDC lectures on the subject and have gotten some good ideas. We'll see how it progresses.

As much as I enjoy making the Facebook game, I still have my eyes on a high speed FPS multiplayer game and a longer story experience set in the world of BPRE :)

Who is writing these press releases?

Short post, but this has been on my mind...Who is writing these press releases for military themed games that have such great lines as "Report for duty gamers", "New orders received", "Blow up online gaming!", "Incoming!", "Hollywood joins forces with (fill in developer/publisher name)". I mean, really...does anyone think this is cool? Am I missing something? I know these things are hard to write, we slaved over our first one and still I wasn't satisfied...and yet...

In other news, I've played a crap ton of games lately ranging from Demon's Souls to Vanquish to Medal of Honor to the Undead Nightmare expansion pack for Red Dead Redemption. It's been a while since I played so many different games so intensely (currently I'm plowing through Vanquish on Hard and trying to get the max time challenge awards for each level). Demon's Souls had a lot of interesting ideas connecting players/friends/enemies, but ultimately, I was not into the combat, which is a problem when the game is a hack and slash ^_^;

Did anyone else check out MoH or Vanquish? Thoughts?

OK, gotta run. We're trying to get version 1.1 out the door of the Black Powder | Red Earth facebook game ^_^

When I got into this business...

I wanted to make run and gun tactical FPS games for PCs and Macs. I had been playing these games for over 15 years, dating back to late night networked Doom and Marathon death matches all the way to today's team based military shooters like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Killzone.

As of 2010, I've spent the better part of 10 years working, in some form or another, on Black Powder | Red Earth. Making contacts, doing interviews, studying battles, reading hundreds of books and even attending weapons manipulation and tactical courses (until 2004, I had never even shot a rifle). All this research, prep and brainstorming had the effect of breaking down my suspension of disbelief in so much else of what I was playing and watching in theaters. I liked what was there, but I wanted to go further.

In late 2006, myself, Altay and Phil came up with the idea of social gaming in my apartment in Hoboken during one of our monthly meetings on the subject. Taking FPS games and hooking them into a social network where you could build teams out of a known pool of friends and then manage a variety of customized weapon systems and kits for different roles/play styles.

From the gameplay side, we wanted to incorporate some of the key things we felt were lacking in games at the time - namely, shooting through soft cover and getting rid of bunny hoppers!

Inspired by Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the game would be a multiplayer/free-to-play experience and it would allow us to really create something different from the rest of the pack.

Over the next 2 years we made multiple demos using Epic's incredible Unreal 3 tool set and went to GDC to pitch our wares. While the ideas were well received, the concept of a computer only based free-to-play FPS, was not. Honestly, it was heartbreaking.

By this time, Facebook had become a viable platform for alternative free-to-play gaming experiences. We went back to the labs and started cooking.

About one year later, our product launched. We cut it loose and watched to see what people did. I had a lot of ideas and expectations, some of which were right and others which proved to be way off the mark. We tuned and then put some advertising dollars behind it. When we hit our next user benchmark, we turned off the ads and watched what people were doing. What did they enjoy? Where were they spending the most time? How could we streamline the flow to the elements they used the most?

As November rolls in, we are prepping to launch version 2 of the game. Highly optimized to meet player desires and hopefully exceed it, we're learning a whole lot about how to make money in the free-to-play space. The graphic novel, like all things, is taking longer than expected to hit our quality marks, but what we have is solid and still engaging, even 6 months after I closed the book on issue 1 (and 2 for that matter).

We are so far from where we started it's hard to even remember the days when we first landed in Astoria, with our crew. Looking forward to 2011, there's a lot of options. I'm not sure which way we will go, but I'm sure it will be an interesting ride :)

Hell of a year...

Satoshi Kon. Blue skies...

More Reading Lists

Since people have asked, I figured I would take a few minutes to reference the material I used to design the world of BPRE.

The inception for what would become BPRE happened in a hotel bar in Philadelphia, PA in 2002. It was there that I met a man who would become a good friend until his death in May 2010. It was at this meeting that I first heard about DynCorp, a company that, among other things, provided special operations contractors to the US Government to assist in operations throughout Afghanistan.

We discussed what the environment was like that he worked in and some of the challenges they faced. This conversation would eventually inspire everything that BPRE would become over the next 8 years.

For me, whenever I am creating any fiction, I always start with a world. If people are a product of their environment, it stands to reason you need to design an environment before you can understand the people that would live there. The first titles that had a huge impact on the world the player would be walked through were:

Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner

Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

Blade Runner stands as “the” dystopian future city upon which all others are judged (though I like Otomo’s rendering of Neo-Tokyo in Akira a bit more). Looking at the thoughtfulness and care layered by Ridley Scott and his production team and applying that to trends in current urban sprawl gave birth to our concept of the city of New Basra. Part Basra, part Dubai - New Basra is a city being torn apart by oppositional and sometimes overlapping interests, where people are swept along by events of rather than driving them.

A place rife with conflicts is perfect for the kind of game we wanted to meet, now to figure out who was who and what were their motivations.

Being as the setting of the world was the Middle East, with an overwhelmingly Moslem population, I needed to expand my narrow understanding of Islam and it's history. A book I found very lucid and helpful was:

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

The book gave me a great overview and taught me a whole lot I never really understood about Islam and it’s branches. From here, I started a deep dive into the entities I had identified as the main players in the story, specifically the Saudis, the various branches within the Shia Iraqi populace and the Iranians.

The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency

Iran's Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities: The Threat in the Northern Gulf (Praeger Security International)

The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection

Inside The Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia

The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower

Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition

After reading all of these books and conducting dozens of interviews, it became clear to me, I did not have a deep enough understanding of how the Middle East and Central Asia, as we know them, even came to be. I found, what seems to be considered, the two authoratative works on the subject and read them.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Kodansha Globe)

These books are exhaustive. I normally read fiction/non-fiction at about 800 pages a week. These books took me almost a month to read each, and I was taking notes the entire time! If you want an understanding of how we got to where we are today, these books are a must, but YMMV :)

Throughout the process I had also been reading any books I could get my hands on about special mission units fighting insurgents, terrorists, nacro-cartels, revolutionaries, etc. The stand outs that I found to be the most helpful when designing our specific game were:

Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team

Warfare by Other Means: South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s

Task Force Black

WAR DOG: Fighting Other People's Wars -The Modern Mercenary in Combat

There were tons of others detailing brutal and painful struggles, such as Sean Naylor’s “Not a Good Day to Die” but the material in that, and other great books, did not ultimately have much of an impact on this specific project.

OK, that’s a long list of stuff to check out if you are interested. Hope you find this informative.

August

Just completed the screenplay for issue 2 of the BPRE comic. It seems to take me around 60 days to crank out 30 pages or so of story. We'll see if issue 3 takes as long. There were a few minor edits made to the story to suit some stuff we needed to change in the Facebook game, where the story arc is approaching its conclusion as well.

I've had to add + cut a few things from the story in the interest of making the game, well, a game and not a purely narrative experience(that's why we decided to make a graphic novel as well). These changes were also partially driven by the results of a recent group chat among the players, where I found out users had a slightly different take of the world where the story/events were unfolding. I had originally pictured New Basra as a totally non-permissive environment where the characters would be operating in a completely clandestine manner. The users saw it more like modern day Iraq or civil war Beirut, where there were non-permissive, semi-permissive and permissive areas. At the end of the day, I decided to run with that and build from there.

At the end of the day, I lucked out, and the majority of the material worked within the reader's/player's understanding of reality as written. Win :-D

I spent last week working on the first round of BPRE Facebook ads, scheduled to drop this Tuesday. These are not the viral video pieces I wanted to do, but budget restrictions being what they are, we don't have $30,000 to make the piece I wanted to LOL Maybe next year.

There's a lot in the works for BPRE, including a new mode, which we have code named Task Force, that everyone on the team is pretty excited about. I'm down at Ft Bragg in 20 days shooting new content for this, so stay tuned, more on that in weeks to come.

I got SC2 in my hands at one of the midnight releases on Monday evening. Unfortunately, by the time it had installed I had passed out. Yes, I am getting old. Yesterday, I finally got to fire it up and put some time against it. On one level, it's exactly what I thought it would be. A sharper looking Starcraft. On another level, after about 4 hours in the game, I'm not sure I will ever play it again. Not because it's bad, but it just hasn't hooked me.

The story and characters seem to be the same from dozens of other RT strat games I've played in the past decade. We're fighting bad guys and here comes some alien relics that could shift the balance of power, forever. You have the opportunist, the estranged rebel, the honorable commander, blah blah blah. It's just not pulitzer winning stuff I crave (yes, I realize that is a ridiculous expectation).

Then there's the gameplay...

After playing Company of Heroes, the combat in SCII seems kind of lame. SCII's control, like SC, is at a high level and distributed across resource harvesting, combat, infrastructure and tech trees rather than getting too detailed with any one specifically. After using complex squad tactics in CoH, I feel their absence in this experience. Then again, I stopped playing CoH specifically because the SP missions took forever and I found the tech tree, capabilities of the vehicle units and level of micro management to be such a pain in the ass. And with Red Dead Redemption in the other room, looming at 80% completion, it's hard to get excited about ordering little guys around the board to kill Germans/Zerg.

I always harken back to Syndicate. There were 4 guys to keep track of and I could do pretty elaborate things with them. It's probably still my favorite RTS. Then again, I got my Xbox out again and started playing Mercenaries - which is probably as close to Syndicate as anyone has gotten in the past 10 years LOL

Pre-orders for the rest of the year are now limited to Vanquish and Medal of Honor. I killed my Crysis 2 pre-order when it appeared it would trade North Koreans for PMC troops. Sigh. How original.

You would think bringing in RK Morgan would allow something a little more creative, but then again his last 3 books have barely held my attention. I liked him better when he was limited to 300 pages and shit was balls to the wall all the time(ie Broken Angels and Market Forces).

OK, I'm just crying now. Have a better one :)

Cat Shit One - Japanese release July 17, 2010

I have been chatting on and off with the director of the Cat Shit One Animated series, Mr Sasahara Kazuya and it looks like CS1 has a hard launch date.

The launch pad is here.

There is a trailer that has been mirrored here. The plan for now is to release episode 1, which is all that has been produced, on youtube only. The videos are region locked, for some insane reason, by the producer, IDA.

It is no secret I have been giddy with anticipation for this one. Studio Anima, who provided the creative horse power to bring this series to life, have a long track record of incredible work, producing models, sets, textures and canned animation pieces for a variety of huge game titles(notably Metal Gear Solid 4).

I'm hoping there is some sort of blu-ray disc release of this ASAP because I want a copy with deluxe art books, action figures, etc. Keep your fingers crossed ^_^

John Zinn

A few hours after Mr Jones passed, I received news that my good friend, John Zinn had died in Aman Jordan. John was a long time friend and collaborator on a number of projects including, Black Powder | Red Earth. Throughout the garage years, John was supportive offering insights, advice and hands on training to help us get off the ground.

I will always remember him showing up to my apartment in January in shorts because he was sick of it being cold outside. It was also 20F at the time!! Or how he couldn't wait to get his teeth into one of the local restaurants (Indian, Chinese, Thai) because, "I'm sick of eating goat for every meal."

When Echelon finally formed, after years of working out of my Hoboken apartments, he took time to do mo-cap, brain storming and interviews. He also took time to give me, a first time company president, insights and advice to navigate some of the challenges he had experienced as a leader of his own companies (Indigen Armor, AmorLine and Defense Venture Group).

John was a down to earth man. Smart, thoughtful and considerate of any given topic, John was also willing to listen to what people had to say before he formed an opinion or response. Everywhere he went, John impressed and shattered preconceptions of what a former Navy SEAL would be like.

I was told that the circumstances around his death are being identified as an accident. However I have read comments from intelligence officials in Jordan that lead me to believe otherwise. I will likely never know how my friend died, but he will never be far from my thoughts or heart.

John leaves behind a wonderful wife, two daughters and a son. My heart goes out to them.

True to form, there will be no flowery burial or religious ceremony for John. I would ask that any readers that can afford to, make a donation in John's name to the Wounded Warrior Project. John protected our freedom from the day he could enlist. Please give something to help those that have come back.

www.woundedwarriorproject.org

Thank you.

My cat, Mr. Jones.

Today I lost a good friend. He went out, sleeping comfotably in a patch of sun on his favorite blanket on our bed. I tried to bring him back for a few minutes, speed dialed the vet and finally let him go. After holding him for a good ten minutes, somewhere between choked up and mauled, my wife came home. We both came apart at the seams for a while after that.

We wrapped him in a blanket with his favorite things and then brought him to the funeral home. It's so much more personal when you have to carry the body in your hands and then drive your departed to their final place.

When we brought him to the cremation/internment building, we took one last minute to say goodbye. Knowing that it was my last time with him, I let my hands find familiar places and memories come crashing down. I had cried my heart out so many times in those hours, I didn't think there was anything left. But somehow there was more. I cried myself dry yesterday. I've only felt such severe grief 2-3 times in my life.

It's a testament to how much I loved that little guy.

I will never forget you Jones. You were blood. Goodbye old friend.

Note. I spewed this out yesterday on my phone while I was between locations. I needed to get it out. I took some time to rewrite a few parts and put myself back into the story if you will.

Rather than muddling my last post with jabber...

For the first time in a long time, I've been playing lots and lots of video games. Mass Effect 2(enjoyed), Battlefield : Bad Company 2(love the multiplayer - when it works), God of War 3(fun but not the magnum opus the gaming press led me to believe).

ME2 was my first Bioware game. Well the first that I actually played through. I'm not big into the fantasy stuff and I was not a fan of the first ME at all. But ME2 struck a chord with me. I didn't love it in the way that I loved FFVII or Chrono Trigger, but there was definitely a Deus Ex flavor to the game that I really enjoyed. I like the little branches that make my character me, but then again, I never really cared for the characters in the way that I did in FFVII or Chrono Trigger. That might be the nature of the beast though...

There was a really cool video piece on GameTrailers.com where Dave Jaffe, a game journalist(no idea what his name is) and one of the BioWare founders discuss the two ways of selling of story in game. It comes down to: are you playing someone else(Snake, Kratos, Master Chief) or are you playing you(Mass Effect, The Sims, etc.)? Is it a roller coaster or is it a whole theme park? A lot to think about in their comments.

As usual also hitting the theaters a lot.

Shutter Island is probably the darkest thing I have seen in years. It's "twist" ending manages to not undermine the rest of the film, something few twist endings ever seem to pull off for me. The soundtrack is brooding, dark and catastrophic...a perfect match for the film. I purchased it within minutes of leaving the theater. The imagery and performances in this movie are unmatched by anything else I have seen in 2010. I will be buying this day 1 on Blu-Ray.

Green Zone was a movie I was looking forward to and while I enjoyed the texture and artistry of the film, the story veers into opposing traffic and collides head on with nonsense. If you haven't seen the movie, it essentially takes a real event(the US invasion of Iraq), overlays a totally fictional conspiracy on top of it and then presents this conspiracy as though it were a real historical narrative.

This one bothered me.

I'll explain...

The idea of merging reality and fiction is at the heart of many great stories dating back to before Shakespeare. However, when entertainment is presented as truth...is this a responsible act??? Is it a film makers responsibility to tell stories that are truthful or are they just producing entertainment? I'm on the fence on this one, especially with this movie. I'll let you know if I come down one way or another...

Busy month

The BPRE beta is entering month 2. It's amazing how much we've learned and adjusted our initial product to suit life in the great outdoors. Among the various optimizations, UI adjustments, feature tweaks and art changes, there has been one sweeping change that we're still working through. When we did the mission outline and shoot back in July of 2009, it was based on a treatment of a BPRE graphic novel that was near finished draft. We did paper prototypes, designed and produced templates, hooked them up to the app and then let people play with them...

Fast forward to November and MW2. MW2 was an interesting turning point for me as a creator on several levels.

First, it was an amazing roller coaster ride that delivered a level of fidelity and polish, previously unseen in "war" game.

Second, despite great voice acting and graphics, it was one of the most disappointing narratives I've ever experienced. Not to mention, it seemed like every time you turn around in the game someone else was picking up the slack(getting punched out, having ceiling fall on me, someone else catching the bad guy I couldn't seem to catch, grabbing my hand as I missed a jump onto a rope ladder, etc.) or I was outright getting killed. That is, of course, when the developers weren't busy bringing characters back from the dead and undermining all the dramatic sacrifice from the CoDMW single player experience.

After playing MW2(and last year's MGS4), the last thing I wanted was yet another twist ending where the player is betrayed by command or some other war is bad preachy thing.

So I sat down and started over and produced a totally different story, same world and still based on real world operations, but with a whole new spin.

One month later, when the team read the draft, everyone got very excited. From the narrative side, we were suddenly in much darker territory with protagonists who were driving the story rather than being driven by it - aka a "Snow Crash" vs "Neuromancer" approach. The new narrative has more potential for diversity in terms of gameplay in a social network environment(ie it's not jsut shooting people - not that there's anythign wrong with that).

We started thinking and talking about BPRE in terms of a modern warfare RPG rather than as a modern warfare FPS/action game...

Fast forward two months and Echelon is knee deep in beta .9999999

Our target is far different than when we started, but we're going with it. The creative process is mercurial and it needs to be controlled but it should not be walled in either. Sometimes, you need to re-write and re-shoot. Sometimes you have to work with what you have. Sometimes, it's a little of both.

Armed with a better understanding of what we have in our hands, we're prepping to do a shoot for the next mass of content in about 4 weeks with the latest iteration of the comic series, driving the mission but not the details. It's an exciting time.

Black Powder | Red Earth beta

Released

Once you install send me an email or PM on facebook so I can activate your account. We're still improving functionality and optimizing load times, etc. If you do play, do me a favor and send us some feedback or post in the discussion boards.

Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell

I almost forgot, the new Hayaino Daisuki has landed after almost 2 years ^O^

CD in DVD case with 20 page booklet including 4 page Scratch Trigger Era comic book by Jon Chang, Mark Gilson and Stan Sakai!

New Limited Edition HD Shirt

Kyoto Caffeine Machine Shirt

And finally a new GridLink shirt

27 February, 2010

We're in beta 3 of facebook Black Powder | Red Earth rpg. We're planning on releasing chapter 2 as part of beta 4 later this week. If all goes well, we will probably open it up and release chapter 3 a few days after that. I just did a new pass on the art to make sure everything was up to snuff and the color tuning was just what we wanted.

It has been a humbling and illuminating experience producing this game. We'll continue to release content for it throughout the year and potentially prototype some gameplay that could be explored further in a 3D actualization of the game. All the push to get the facebook game baked and out of the oven has pushed my work on the comic book to the side, but maybe for the best.

I had the opportunity to interview an individual who was able to sit me down, run through my scenario, give a few pointers and then design a realistic chain of events around the premise. It's given a lot of new ideas that can be exploited in the RPG down the line. Speaking of the premise have you seen:

In other news, just finished Mass Effect 2, which I vastly preferred to ME, which I honestly got sick of within 2 hours of playtime. ME2 reminds me a lot of Deus Ex (note DEx is easily one of my top 5 games of all time, up there with Syndicate, Mercenaries and Radiant Silvergun).

Also got a chance to see "Shutter Island" this week. I picked up the soundtrack as soon as I got home. While browsing I added Clint Mansell's "Moon". I've been a fan since I heard his work in "The Fountain". Both are killer for solemn moody atmosphere. Been switching between those and the Rosenfeld demos as my soundtrack to this week's creative apocalypse.