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 ^_^