12 ms·

How one man made 22 games in 22 years, mostly from his basement

254 points by code_duck 12y ago

zerr 12y ago
Looks like a one game made 22 times :)
- sebgeelen 12y ago
  A genre is not a game.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    You have to admit they look really similar though. Just google some of the games mentioned: Nethergate, Geneforge and Avernum.
    - kzrdude 12y ago
      They're all good games. And computer game sequels are nothing like movie sequels. Games get the chance to do the same thing better, more conveniently, with better graphics.
    - VLM 12y ago
      All the articles on HN look the same, identical ASCII character set, English prose... I like his games and have spent some money on them over the last 20 years, never regretted it. They are not focused to appeal superficially visually. Someone who solely ranks games by polygon count would be horribly disappointed. Thats just not his market.
      - Kiro 12y ago
        > All the articles on HN look the same, identical ASCII character set, English prose... Not a very good comparison since most games do not look like this, while most written texts do. I'm not saying the games are bad anyway. I'm actually hyped to try them out.
        shultays 12y ago
        But by same logic, aren't all text only games same?
        Kiro 12y ago
        You have a point but I was actually just referring to the visual aspect where I would say the same thing about text games.
- gilgoomesh 12y ago
  You're joking but there's no shame in having a lot of similarity between games when that's what your audience wants. Vogel's games are based on a few different iterations of his in-house RPG game engines and he has remade/updated his most popular Exile/Avernum series in each generation of the game engine so some of them are very nearly the same game. And they're fantastic. Dated looking and punishing but expansive and detailed and intricate.
- reidrac 12y ago
  He has defended in the past his strategy of iterating over the same idea and keep his fan base happy with a solid product. I remember reading a post by Jeff were he mentions that instead of redoing all graphics and art in each new chapter of his series, he prefers adding content in other areas like gameplay and story, and his customers love that.
- pjc50 12y ago
  A popular strategy, as used by big franchises like Madden or Call of Duty.
- Raphmedia 12y ago
  You could say the same thing about a lot of big name games. To me, all WW2 shooters are the same game. All grimdark shooters with sticky cover systems are the same game.
simonh 12y ago
Sean O' Connor is another great indie games developer, with a bit of a more varied repertoire (1). Some of his stuff is now available for iOS - Slay is my favourite. I'm fascinated by these guys. They're great holdouts from the early days of computer games when any kid could develop a game in their bedroom and make a living out of it - and they're still doing it! (1) http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/ http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/
- mrec 12y ago
  Yup. His Critical Mass is possibly my favourite game of all time; more than any other, it really captures the "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master" ideal.
expertonkappa 12y ago
I recently purchased a copy of Escape from the Pit out of curiosity and one thing that struck me was that most of the sound effects seem like they were ripped directly from Infinity Engine games. The Icewind Dale series, to be more precise. I don't think there is any relation between the creator of this franchise and the IE games, does anyone know why this is the case?
- eswat 12y ago
  Not sure about the history behind the sounds in the remake, but I don’t think there was anything nefarious about the coincidence. Using stock audio was and still is very common. There are many sound effects from the original StarCraft – such as Terran buildings lifting off or Terran Academy active sound – that I hear in other games and movies, for example.
  - hkarthik 12y ago
    I still hear sounds from Doom in many modern movies. If I remember right id software was able to open source everything about Doom except the sound effects due to licensing.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Yup. "Doom Doors" is even a page on TVTropes.
- danielbarla 12y ago
  If you're talking about Exile: Escape from the Pit, it predates Icewind Dale by 5 years. I doubt either side would intentionally rip the sounds from another game when there are relatively cheap and safer alternatives available. If you're right, it's probably a case of the same sound pack being bought and used - this type of thing happens all the time with anything related to audio.
  - expertonkappa 12y ago
    The version I had was the re-released version (2012) which I acquired from Steam so I cannot comment on the original game released in 1995. Regardless you are probably right about this, although it would be great if someone could find more information about the original creator of these sound files.
ronyeh 12y ago
Props to Jeff Vogel for surviving (and succeeding) for two decades. I remember enjoying the Exile sharewares back in the 1990s. I'm glad his company's art style hasn't improved that much. :-) Gameplay is king, after all.
kzrdude 12y ago
Jeff Vogel's blog is great. He writes copious amounts about the indie game market and the "war" against free-to-play games.
- lentil_soup 12y ago
  http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.de/ http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.de/
pdkl95 12y ago
ZUN (太田順也)[1] may only be on the 14th game in his "Touhou Project" series of danmaku[2] games, he that does include drawing all the art, composting the music (apx a CD worth per-game?), etc. When you add in the fighting game variants, experimental puzzle games, etc, that he released in the spare time between the main-series games, you end up with one of the most project histories that I've ever seen. The scale of the impact his games have had is shocking. Fans of ZUN's work are so widespread, you've probably seen some of the art, covers[3], or some of the fan works that it inspired. If you were near any amount of Anime fandom in the last decade, then you've seen a lot of stuff based on ZUN's work. That said, a lot of people haven't actually played his original games, which are very impressive. They may seem impossible[4] at first, but they have a certain meditative quality once you get past the initial shock, and can be (in my opinion) surprisingly effective at tricking the player into a "flow"-style mental state. [1] http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Team_Shanghai_Alice http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Team_Shanghai_Alice [2] http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Danmaku http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Danmaku [3] For example, the youtube suggestions for this well-known cover of Bad Apple ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEUeWnV73U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEUeWnV73U ) is full of people being creative with jsut that one song. Some of are surprisingly talented ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr7uwOp0Yck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr7uwOp0Yck ) [4] Just don't play it on "lunatic" difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eJxaXWLlWx8#t=77 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eJ...
- Joona 12y ago
  Touhou is amazing. I don't really care for the games, but the community around it is huge and creative. ZUN's music is great, but the community also creates their own versions, in so many different genres.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- davexunit 12y ago
  I'm one of those people that don't care much for the fandom, but love the games. Perfect Cherry Blossom is probably my #2 shmup of all time, just after Ikaruga.
PSeitz 12y ago
"I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes." This goes to blizzard
- eswat 12y ago
  …and most of the industry I think. It’s very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists because developers have been getting paranoid about players not experiencing their game they want them to experience it.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists Minecraft? The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be. It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
    - vinceguidry 12y ago
      Emergence is a weird concept. I've played a lot of Minecraft and I wouldn't consider it to have a whole lot of emergence. It's certainly open-ended, but once you learn all the gameplay mechanics, the game gets a bit flat. You have to keep yourself interested in it somehow via community or huge building projects or whatever. It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence. The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay. The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you. There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development. Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents. It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.
Aissen 12y ago
Single page URL: http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev-how-one-man-made-22-games-in-22-years-mostly-from-his-basement/view-all/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev-how...
pacoverdi 12y ago
"At the same time, when I was young and just getting started and didn’t know what I was doing, I had a freeness and a looseness and an energy that I don’t really have anymore. I didn’t know how anything I was doing would turn out, so I just threw everything in there, and through some weird alchemy, it worked. A lot of it was just, by modern game design standards, broken." This totally resonates with me (replacing "game" with some other domain). I feel like I'm 100 times better at programming than in my early days but unfortunately also 100 times slower. I'm probably too much aware of what can possibly go wrong with every line of code I write (or maybe it is just getting older and/or losing interest).
normloman 12y ago
So envious of this dude, even though I never want to be an indie developer (I can't even program). He gets to work the way he choses, on something he cares about. I commute to a shitty open office where I write bullshit that my boss approves. I'm sure his life isn't all glamorous, and his success didn't come easily. But still.
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  He was one of my original inspirations to become an indie developer. Still working on the successful indie developer part. The grass is always greener -- the nice thing about going in to a shitty office is getting paid. I love the freedom I have right now, but the struggle to make it sustainable is incredibly stressful. I don't know anything, any more. I don't know whether what I'm making is any good. There's a million ways that it's not as good as what's in my head. I don't know if I should've devoted more time to a different project, etc. etc.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Unfortunately this is the darkside of chasing one's passion.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Take some consulting work? Limit that to a couple of days a week to preserve your time for your own projects?
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Thanks for this article, I really needed this! Jeff Vogel was a great inspiration to me, but somehow I'd forgotten about him. I turned 39 today. I have two kids, a mortgage, and luckily a tolerant wife with a good job. I started working on my own indie games in May 2014. Before that I was making 6 figures. This year I'm going to struggle to make 40k. If you count business expenses, that's closer to 20k. I'm in the trough right now.
- tarr11 12y ago
  Post a link. I'm looking for a new indie game right now...
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    I'll be demo'ing a new version of Neon Jack at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in a week and a half. Currently, the best place for new info is the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NeonJackGame https://www.facebook.com/NeonJackGame You can get an old build of the game off my website (http://www.shinyfish.com/neonjack/ http://www.shinyfish.com/neonjack/), but frankly it's a bit crap. I'd wait for the GDC build.
    - Gbits 12y ago
      Jabavu, put me on your contact list. I wrote this story on Jeff; VentureBeat cares about indie games, and I'd be glad to take a look at yours. I can never make any promises - everything has to compete for limited bandwidth - but I'm always glad to look over something new (and preferably good). Contact info here: http://venturebeat.com/author/heather-newman http://venturebeat.com/author/heather-newman
      - JabavuAdams 12y ago
        Thanks! I followed you on Twitter, but the email address (domain) linked to from your VB profile page seems to be to a place holder site. Is it valid?
agentultra 12y ago
> It’s terrifying. I counted more than 100 indie games on show there. The video game industry does not need 100 games a year total. Let alone your roguelike 2D platformer puzzle-stealth game. I don't know if this is true. It seems like it is though. It's what keeps game development a hobby for me. I'm decades too late to the scene now with hundreds of games being released every couple of months. That's a lot of pressure if you're going to try and make a living off of it with a mortgage, retirement savings, kids, and the whole nine yards.
- gagege 12y ago
  Yeah, if you want to make a modest living, let's say $40k+, it seems like you have to make accessible games and pray that one of them is a decent hit with the general population. If you make deeper games with a slow-growing fan base, it probably needs to start as a hobby for the first ten or more years.
lordnacho 12y ago
I don't get how he can be that productive. Just the non-programming things like creating artwork and deciding on game mechanics and plotlines sound like they could occupy someone for years. Now throw in the game engine programming.
- gagege 12y ago
  From some of his comments it sounds like he hires contractors.
  - matt_morgan 12y ago
    He also does a lot of rewrites ... takes older hits and revises them for modern systems.
wonders_cease 12y ago
I spent so much time during high school playing Exile 3. I had forgotten about it and this article made me really excited to learn that the game designer/developer is still going strong. I have got to look into all his released games and see what I've missed
CodexArcanum 12y ago
> I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes. This is something I notice as a GM in tabletop games as well, and I think it's the same phenomenon. There is a tension between creators and consumers in that the former wants to provide a specific experience but the latter cannot help but to experience things their own way. Every experienced GM knows that players lay to waste the best plans. They miss clues and items that they needed to progress, while finding unexpected workarounds to problems that should have been more challenging. They have too little power sometimes, but then find a few good treasures or spells and suddenly have far too much power. Dealing with this tension usually drives towards one of two solutions: either control the experience so tightly that deviation is impossible (railroading) or try desperately to roll with the changes and keep things interesting. Video games seem to largely take the former solution, probably because it's the easiest way. But talk to gamers, and while they'll fondly remember a good story or a good game they played, it is the moments of accident where the whole thing derailed that really gets people excited and talking. Gamers like being a little too powerful, going places they weren't supposed to be. Sadly, game designers have gotten very good at conducting their railroads, but have done very little to master the improvisational artform of letting players do what they want, of feeling free and powerful but still keeping a gentle hand on the steering wheel.
- Swizec 12y ago
  Which is why nobody plays single-player FPS games anymore and everyone loves GTA even in single-player mode. Being hand-held from one cutscene to the next is not playing a video game.
  - eropple 12y ago
    > Being hand-held from one cutscene to the next is not playing a video game. Of course it is, and it's tremendously arrogant to claim otherwise. This attempt at reduction via definitionalism is the same disease that infects people who get frothy at Twine. (Which isn't my thing, I don't generally enough visual novels either, but I'm not so arrogant as to project my preferences onto the entire classification of "video game.")
CodexArcanum 12y ago
I've tried to play Vogel's games lately (I own them all on steam) but I just don't have the time and focus like I used to for enjoying them. It makes me sad. I played the Exile series over a few years in high school, long hours of my summer spent in his amazing world. I think maybe I can't recapture that magical feeling of the first time I played them, so the newer ones just don't seem the same to me. I wish Blades of Avernum had done better. Blades of Exile was one of my favorite games. There were some community scenarios that were just so amazingly good. I think if I'd had some way to port them over as well it would have worked out a lot better.
- eropple 12y ago
  The Avernum games play pretty well on my iPad. If you're having focus troubles, I'd try them there.
- eridius 12y ago
  I have the same problem. The Exile series were some of my favorite games growing up (especially Exile III). But I haven't been able to really focus on Avernum. I keep telling myself to play through it, but it just doesn't feel the same. I have to assume it's because I personally have changed, and if I were introduced to Exile today I'd probably have some choice words about the UI. But the nostalgia factor is really high.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    I played the original on my 486-DX2 and loved it. Countless hours I played that. I just picked up the demo of the remake (Avernum: Escape from the Pit) on my Windows tablet, and it works perfectly. It's not made for touch in any way, but the touch mostly just works. There are only a handful of situations where I wish the controls were improved, but the UI, while not modern, works just fine. Try the remake. The demo is free.
    - eridius 12y ago
      I actually bought Avernum: Escape from the Pit on both my iPad and on Steam. And I still haven't put more than an hour into it (on either platform). Really, I think the biggest difference is just that I don't have as much time to play games as I did growing up, and there are exponentially more games now that demand my attention than there were back then.
silverbax88 12y ago
I think (actually, I hope) the best business advice from the article is that Vogel just basically built games he wanted to play. I guess it's fortunate that his desires aligned with enough people that there was a market, but I do love the idea that you have a vision for something you would use and build it. Of course, I'm sure there are many cases where this isn't true, but I sure like the concept.
- visakanv 12y ago
  I like to believe that if you have discerning, evolving taste, and you seek to fulfill it, over a long enough time with enough iteration you will make things that other people want, too. Maybe the timeframe for some things is far too long for an individual to be successful at (especially large, complex, technical problems). But for simpler things like games and books and such– I think if you dedicate yourself to it, there should be some people who appreciate it. Especially considering that there are billions of people in the world, and more of them are getting connected everyday. If YOU really, REALLY like something, it's practically a guarantee that somebody else does, too. I'm kinda naively optimistic, though.
mkramlich 12y ago
I've made more than that and spread over a longer period of time, and probably at a higher average frequency as well. It definitely helps if its a passion and hobby, not just for money. Though a few of my own were commercial/public and did sell.
onan_barbarian 12y ago
I have a guarded respect for Jeff Vogel's games, but having played the Avernum series quite a bit, I'd say part of the trick here is being closer to "making the same game 22 times" (or the same 4 games 5.5 times each). Certainly Avernum feels like a rogue-like with a better story, better UI and a more solid gameplay mechanic. However, it never really rose much beyond that for me. I'm glad he's doing what he's doing and doing well at it, but this is a very conservative approach to making games and IMO rather redundant with commercial game development. If I just want to trek around a big, semi-open world and do the same damn thing over and over building a character, there's a half-dozen Bethesda games that let me do it in 3D or approximately 3000 Roguelikes. Generally the effort of playing an indie game to me is only rewarded when they show me something I haven't seen before - and there's real possibility in these kind of lo-fi games for emergent behaviors and cool gameplay that isn't being strangled by the huge content pipeline of a commercial game (where anything that happens has to be brilliantly animated and at least reasonably voiced by someone, making it unlikely that too many emergent 'surprises' can happen).
colin_mccabe 12y ago
Exile was great. Good to see Vogel is still out there making games.

254 points by code_duck 12y ago

zerr 12y ago

Looks like a one game made 22 times :)

sebgeelen 12y ago
A genre is not a game.
- Kiro 12y ago
  You have to admit they look really similar though. Just google some of the games mentioned: Nethergate, Geneforge and Avernum.
  - kzrdude 12y ago
    They're all good games. And computer game sequels are nothing like movie sequels. Games get the chance to do the same thing better, more conveniently, with better graphics.
  - VLM 12y ago
    All the articles on HN look the same, identical ASCII character set, English prose... I like his games and have spent some money on them over the last 20 years, never regretted it. They are not focused to appeal superficially visually. Someone who solely ranks games by polygon count would be horribly disappointed. Thats just not his market.
    - Kiro 12y ago
      > All the articles on HN look the same, identical ASCII character set, English prose... Not a very good comparison since most games do not look like this, while most written texts do. I'm not saying the games are bad anyway. I'm actually hyped to try them out.
      - shultays 12y ago
        But by same logic, aren't all text only games same?
        Kiro 12y ago
        You have a point but I was actually just referring to the visual aspect where I would say the same thing about text games.
gilgoomesh 12y ago
You're joking but there's no shame in having a lot of similarity between games when that's what your audience wants. Vogel's games are based on a few different iterations of his in-house RPG game engines and he has remade/updated his most popular Exile/Avernum series in each generation of the game engine so some of them are very nearly the same game. And they're fantastic. Dated looking and punishing but expansive and detailed and intricate.
reidrac 12y ago
He has defended in the past his strategy of iterating over the same idea and keep his fan base happy with a solid product. I remember reading a post by Jeff were he mentions that instead of redoing all graphics and art in each new chapter of his series, he prefers adding content in other areas like gameplay and story, and his customers love that.
pjc50 12y ago
A popular strategy, as used by big franchises like Madden or Call of Duty.
Raphmedia 12y ago
You could say the same thing about a lot of big name games. To me, all WW2 shooters are the same game. All grimdark shooters with sticky cover systems are the same game.

simonh 12y ago

Sean O' Connor is another great indie games developer, with a bit of a more varied repertoire (1). Some of his stuff is now available for iOS - Slay is my favourite. I'm fascinated by these guys. They're great holdouts from the early days of computer games when any kid could develop a game in their bedroom and make a living out of it - and they're still doing it! (1) http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/ http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/

mrec 12y ago
Yup. His Critical Mass is possibly my favourite game of all time; more than any other, it really captures the "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master" ideal.

expertonkappa 12y ago

I recently purchased a copy of Escape from the Pit out of curiosity and one thing that struck me was that most of the sound effects seem like they were ripped directly from Infinity Engine games. The Icewind Dale series, to be more precise. I don't think there is any relation between the creator of this franchise and the IE games, does anyone know why this is the case?

eswat 12y ago
Not sure about the history behind the sounds in the remake, but I don’t think there was anything nefarious about the coincidence. Using stock audio was and still is very common. There are many sound effects from the original StarCraft – such as Terran buildings lifting off or Terran Academy active sound – that I hear in other games and movies, for example.
- hkarthik 12y ago
  I still hear sounds from Doom in many modern movies. If I remember right id software was able to open source everything about Doom except the sound effects due to licensing.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Yup. "Doom Doors" is even a page on TVTropes.
danielbarla 12y ago
If you're talking about Exile: Escape from the Pit, it predates Icewind Dale by 5 years. I doubt either side would intentionally rip the sounds from another game when there are relatively cheap and safer alternatives available. If you're right, it's probably a case of the same sound pack being bought and used - this type of thing happens all the time with anything related to audio.
- expertonkappa 12y ago
  The version I had was the re-released version (2012) which I acquired from Steam so I cannot comment on the original game released in 1995. Regardless you are probably right about this, although it would be great if someone could find more information about the original creator of these sound files.

ronyeh 12y ago

Props to Jeff Vogel for surviving (and succeeding) for two decades. I remember enjoying the Exile sharewares back in the 1990s. I'm glad his company's art style hasn't improved that much. :-) Gameplay is king, after all.

kzrdude 12y ago

Jeff Vogel's blog is great. He writes copious amounts about the indie game market and the "war" against free-to-play games.

lentil_soup 12y ago
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.de/ http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.de/

pdkl95 12y ago

ZUN (太田順也)[1] may only be on the 14th game in his "Touhou Project" series of danmaku[2] games, he that does include drawing all the art, composting the music (apx a CD worth per-game?), etc. When you add in the fighting game variants, experimental puzzle games, etc, that he released in the spare time between the main-series games, you end up with one of the most project histories that I've ever seen. The scale of the impact his games have had is shocking. Fans of ZUN's work are so widespread, you've probably seen some of the art, covers[3], or some of the fan works that it inspired. If you were near any amount of Anime fandom in the last decade, then you've seen a lot of stuff based on ZUN's work. That said, a lot of people haven't actually played his original games, which are very impressive. They may seem impossible[4] at first, but they have a certain meditative quality once you get past the initial shock, and can be (in my opinion) surprisingly effective at tricking the player into a "flow"-style mental state. [1] http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Team_Shanghai_Alice http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Team_Shanghai_Alice [2] http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Danmaku http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Danmaku [3] For example, the youtube suggestions for this well-known cover of Bad Apple ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEUeWnV73U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEUeWnV73U ) is full of people being creative with jsut that one song. Some of are surprisingly talented ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr7uwOp0Yck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr7uwOp0Yck ) [4] Just don't play it on "lunatic" difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eJxaXWLlWx8#t=77 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eJ...

Joona 12y ago
Touhou is amazing. I don't really care for the games, but the community around it is huge and creative. ZUN's music is great, but the community also creates their own versions, in so many different genres.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
davexunit 12y ago
I'm one of those people that don't care much for the fandom, but love the games. Perfect Cherry Blossom is probably my #2 shmup of all time, just after Ikaruga.

PSeitz 12y ago

"I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes." This goes to blizzard

eswat 12y ago
…and most of the industry I think. It’s very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists because developers have been getting paranoid about players not experiencing their game they want them to experience it.
- pjc50 12y ago
  very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists Minecraft? The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be. It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    Emergence is a weird concept. I've played a lot of Minecraft and I wouldn't consider it to have a whole lot of emergence. It's certainly open-ended, but once you learn all the gameplay mechanics, the game gets a bit flat. You have to keep yourself interested in it somehow via community or huge building projects or whatever. It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence. The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay. The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you. There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development. Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents. It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.

Aissen 12y ago

Single page URL: http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev-how-one-man-made-22-games-in-22-years-mostly-from-his-basement/view-all/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev-how...

pacoverdi 12y ago

"At the same time, when I was young and just getting started and didn’t know what I was doing, I had a freeness and a looseness and an energy that I don’t really have anymore. I didn’t know how anything I was doing would turn out, so I just threw everything in there, and through some weird alchemy, it worked. A lot of it was just, by modern game design standards, broken." This totally resonates with me (replacing "game" with some other domain). I feel like I'm 100 times better at programming than in my early days but unfortunately also 100 times slower. I'm probably too much aware of what can possibly go wrong with every line of code I write (or maybe it is just getting older and/or losing interest).

normloman 12y ago

So envious of this dude, even though I never want to be an indie developer (I can't even program). He gets to work the way he choses, on something he cares about. I commute to a shitty open office where I write bullshit that my boss approves. I'm sure his life isn't all glamorous, and his success didn't come easily. But still.

JabavuAdams 12y ago
He was one of my original inspirations to become an indie developer. Still working on the successful indie developer part. The grass is always greener -- the nice thing about going in to a shitty office is getting paid. I love the freedom I have right now, but the struggle to make it sustainable is incredibly stressful. I don't know anything, any more. I don't know whether what I'm making is any good. There's a million ways that it's not as good as what's in my head. I don't know if I should've devoted more time to a different project, etc. etc.
- mathattack 12y ago
  Unfortunately this is the darkside of chasing one's passion.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Take some consulting work? Limit that to a couple of days a week to preserve your time for your own projects?

JabavuAdams 12y ago

Thanks for this article, I really needed this! Jeff Vogel was a great inspiration to me, but somehow I'd forgotten about him. I turned 39 today. I have two kids, a mortgage, and luckily a tolerant wife with a good job. I started working on my own indie games in May 2014. Before that I was making 6 figures. This year I'm going to struggle to make 40k. If you count business expenses, that's closer to 20k. I'm in the trough right now.

tarr11 12y ago
Post a link. I'm looking for a new indie game right now...
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  I'll be demo'ing a new version of Neon Jack at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in a week and a half. Currently, the best place for new info is the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NeonJackGame https://www.facebook.com/NeonJackGame You can get an old build of the game off my website (http://www.shinyfish.com/neonjack/ http://www.shinyfish.com/neonjack/), but frankly it's a bit crap. I'd wait for the GDC build.
  - Gbits 12y ago
    Jabavu, put me on your contact list. I wrote this story on Jeff; VentureBeat cares about indie games, and I'd be glad to take a look at yours. I can never make any promises - everything has to compete for limited bandwidth - but I'm always glad to look over something new (and preferably good). Contact info here: http://venturebeat.com/author/heather-newman http://venturebeat.com/author/heather-newman
    - JabavuAdams 12y ago
      Thanks! I followed you on Twitter, but the email address (domain) linked to from your VB profile page seems to be to a place holder site. Is it valid?

agentultra 12y ago

> It’s terrifying. I counted more than 100 indie games on show there. The video game industry does not need 100 games a year total. Let alone your roguelike 2D platformer puzzle-stealth game. I don't know if this is true. It seems like it is though. It's what keeps game development a hobby for me. I'm decades too late to the scene now with hundreds of games being released every couple of months. That's a lot of pressure if you're going to try and make a living off of it with a mortgage, retirement savings, kids, and the whole nine yards.

gagege 12y ago
Yeah, if you want to make a modest living, let's say $40k+, it seems like you have to make accessible games and pray that one of them is a decent hit with the general population. If you make deeper games with a slow-growing fan base, it probably needs to start as a hobby for the first ten or more years.

lordnacho 12y ago

I don't get how he can be that productive. Just the non-programming things like creating artwork and deciding on game mechanics and plotlines sound like they could occupy someone for years. Now throw in the game engine programming.

gagege 12y ago
From some of his comments it sounds like he hires contractors.
- matt_morgan 12y ago
  He also does a lot of rewrites ... takes older hits and revises them for modern systems.

wonders_cease 12y ago

I spent so much time during high school playing Exile 3. I had forgotten about it and this article made me really excited to learn that the game designer/developer is still going strong. I have got to look into all his released games and see what I've missed

CodexArcanum 12y ago

> I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes. This is something I notice as a GM in tabletop games as well, and I think it's the same phenomenon. There is a tension between creators and consumers in that the former wants to provide a specific experience but the latter cannot help but to experience things their own way. Every experienced GM knows that players lay to waste the best plans. They miss clues and items that they needed to progress, while finding unexpected workarounds to problems that should have been more challenging. They have too little power sometimes, but then find a few good treasures or spells and suddenly have far too much power. Dealing with this tension usually drives towards one of two solutions: either control the experience so tightly that deviation is impossible (railroading) or try desperately to roll with the changes and keep things interesting. Video games seem to largely take the former solution, probably because it's the easiest way. But talk to gamers, and while they'll fondly remember a good story or a good game they played, it is the moments of accident where the whole thing derailed that really gets people excited and talking. Gamers like being a little too powerful, going places they weren't supposed to be. Sadly, game designers have gotten very good at conducting their railroads, but have done very little to master the improvisational artform of letting players do what they want, of feeling free and powerful but still keeping a gentle hand on the steering wheel.

Swizec 12y ago
Which is why nobody plays single-player FPS games anymore and everyone loves GTA even in single-player mode. Being hand-held from one cutscene to the next is not playing a video game.
- eropple 12y ago
  > Being hand-held from one cutscene to the next is not playing a video game. Of course it is, and it's tremendously arrogant to claim otherwise. This attempt at reduction via definitionalism is the same disease that infects people who get frothy at Twine. (Which isn't my thing, I don't generally enough visual novels either, but I'm not so arrogant as to project my preferences onto the entire classification of "video game.")

CodexArcanum 12y ago

I've tried to play Vogel's games lately (I own them all on steam) but I just don't have the time and focus like I used to for enjoying them. It makes me sad. I played the Exile series over a few years in high school, long hours of my summer spent in his amazing world. I think maybe I can't recapture that magical feeling of the first time I played them, so the newer ones just don't seem the same to me. I wish Blades of Avernum had done better. Blades of Exile was one of my favorite games. There were some community scenarios that were just so amazingly good. I think if I'd had some way to port them over as well it would have worked out a lot better.

eropple 12y ago
The Avernum games play pretty well on my iPad. If you're having focus troubles, I'd try them there.
eridius 12y ago
I have the same problem. The Exile series were some of my favorite games growing up (especially Exile III). But I haven't been able to really focus on Avernum. I keep telling myself to play through it, but it just doesn't feel the same. I have to assume it's because I personally have changed, and if I were introduced to Exile today I'd probably have some choice words about the UI. But the nostalgia factor is really high.
- freehunter 12y ago
  I played the original on my 486-DX2 and loved it. Countless hours I played that. I just picked up the demo of the remake (Avernum: Escape from the Pit) on my Windows tablet, and it works perfectly. It's not made for touch in any way, but the touch mostly just works. There are only a handful of situations where I wish the controls were improved, but the UI, while not modern, works just fine. Try the remake. The demo is free.
  - eridius 12y ago
    I actually bought Avernum: Escape from the Pit on both my iPad and on Steam. And I still haven't put more than an hour into it (on either platform). Really, I think the biggest difference is just that I don't have as much time to play games as I did growing up, and there are exponentially more games now that demand my attention than there were back then.

silverbax88 12y ago

I think (actually, I hope) the best business advice from the article is that Vogel just basically built games he wanted to play. I guess it's fortunate that his desires aligned with enough people that there was a market, but I do love the idea that you have a vision for something you would use and build it. Of course, I'm sure there are many cases where this isn't true, but I sure like the concept.

visakanv 12y ago
I like to believe that if you have discerning, evolving taste, and you seek to fulfill it, over a long enough time with enough iteration you will make things that other people want, too. Maybe the timeframe for some things is far too long for an individual to be successful at (especially large, complex, technical problems). But for simpler things like games and books and such– I think if you dedicate yourself to it, there should be some people who appreciate it. Especially considering that there are billions of people in the world, and more of them are getting connected everyday. If YOU really, REALLY like something, it's practically a guarantee that somebody else does, too. I'm kinda naively optimistic, though.

mkramlich 12y ago

I've made more than that and spread over a longer period of time, and probably at a higher average frequency as well. It definitely helps if its a passion and hobby, not just for money. Though a few of my own were commercial/public and did sell.

onan_barbarian 12y ago

I have a guarded respect for Jeff Vogel's games, but having played the Avernum series quite a bit, I'd say part of the trick here is being closer to "making the same game 22 times" (or the same 4 games 5.5 times each). Certainly Avernum feels like a rogue-like with a better story, better UI and a more solid gameplay mechanic. However, it never really rose much beyond that for me. I'm glad he's doing what he's doing and doing well at it, but this is a very conservative approach to making games and IMO rather redundant with commercial game development. If I just want to trek around a big, semi-open world and do the same damn thing over and over building a character, there's a half-dozen Bethesda games that let me do it in 3D or approximately 3000 Roguelikes. Generally the effort of playing an indie game to me is only rewarded when they show me something I haven't seen before - and there's real possibility in these kind of lo-fi games for emergent behaviors and cool gameplay that isn't being strangled by the huge content pipeline of a commercial game (where anything that happens has to be brilliantly animated and at least reasonably voiced by someone, making it unlikely that too many emergent 'surprises' can happen).

colin_mccabe 12y ago

Exile was great. Good to see Vogel is still out there making games.