#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I thought it went reasonably well, all things considered. There are a few things we can streamline and improve, but not a bad start.
I’ll have the information about the homework assignment here later.
If you want to sign up for the last nine sessions, feel free to do so. I’ll send you the slides to help you catch up.
I have to say, I, for one, am really enjoying what Task Force Wargames has been doing over at Castalia. Reading Alex’s post on the old Avalon Hill game, Air Assault on Crete, is the first time I have ever wanted to play that game. The unusual zone control rules sound fascinating, and frankly, superior to the norm.
This game is hard. Very hard. Part of why it is hard is because it is rules heavy even for a wargame, but it is doubly so because it is so different from most war games I’ve played. This difficulty is a bit asymmetrical, as many of the special rules apply only to the German player (such as conveys, paratrooper drift and air power) but you’ll find in the options of the advanced game plenty of fiddly bits to keep the Allied player scratching their head and checking the rulebook. You also can’t bring with you any mechanical assumptions you may have based on other similar wargames because so many of those assumptions would be wrong in the case of Air Assault on Crete.
In several games, fog of war rules may be limited or optional, but I can’t imagine the Allies having a chance in this without the facedown setup. The Germans have to land, take and hold at least one of the three air bases at Maleme, Heraklion and Retimo. In the basic game, the Allies win by preventing this (an almost impossible task). In the advanced game, the Allied player wins by putting up a decent fight and successfully evacuating a sizable portion of their forces. The fog of war effect is continuous throughout the game, in that any Allied units that are not adjacent to German forces or actively being targeted by German bombardment are kept face down. This allows the Allied player to mask his strength and shuffle non-combat units to evac points, but can sometimes be a bit of a hassle, as one will constantly be checking their piles for AA units and defensive artillery anytime anything happens.
This sort of thing isn’t for everyone, or even very many gamers, let alone normal readers, but it is illustrate of the depth to which we intend the Castalia posts to increasingly go. If Wargame Wednesdays aren’t your cup of tea, one of the other days will be. And the newly discovered HP Lovecraft letter that Jeffro posted which mentions A. Merritt’s work is intriguing for any fan of the writer.
In barely tangential news, I am having a great time reading through the Domains of War rules that I acquired as part of the Sinister Stone of Sakkara kickstarter that I backed last year. If they’d been around when I was in junior high, I probably would have played a lot more RPGs. Forget role-playing as an adventurer wandering through caves and dungeons, it’s a lot more interesting to role-play military campaigns and battles.
That is the question we should be asking ourselves regularly, advises Mike Cernovich:
Luck rules our lives, although we can increase our odds of winning – of getting lucky – by taking more spins of the wheel. Thus you must stay busy.
Your life is the sum total of your activities and the people in your life. Be useful to other people. Find ways to meet market demands. Be good to your friends. When is the last time you emailed a friend to say, “How can I help you?”
People are doing poorly at being useful as they believe simply being around a person adds value to their lives. Yet many people are vampires.
Too many people are out for themselves, trying to extract as much value from others as they can.
That’s one way to live, but it doesn’t work for me.
I find ways to be useful to other people, and it works for me.
Instead of wondering why people don’t reach out to you or old friends fall away, why not stop working angles on people, being a manipulator, and simply saying, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Too many of us practice a warped secular churchianity, where we congratulate ourselves for donating a modicum of money here and there to savages we don’t know in lieu of helping our friends and allies.
But you’re not a better person for helping the stranger and ignoring your neighbor. You’re a worse person, you’re a performance artist. As Jesus himself said, even the tax collectors love those who love them and even the pagans greet their own people.
Now what does it say about you if your own behavior doesn’t even rise to their level?
Just as only the strong can turn the other cheek, only those who help their own first can help others.
This is not a criticism; the readers of Vox Popoli are well-known across the Internet for their strength of support. You not only support me, but you support my allies and you support each other. But it is a reminder, to me, if no one else, that instead of waiting for others to ask if they need our help, we should proactively go to our friends and ask if there is anything we can do.
In that vein, I know there are a number of people here who would very much like to attend the Dev Game course, but cannot afford to do so. Perhaps you lost your job. Perhaps your kids need braces. Perhaps you’re a young man who probably shouldn’t be reading here in the first place, but wants to get into game development.
So, in the interest of following Mike’s lead, I’d like to offer seven free course passes to readers who would have signed up for Dev Game if they’d had the ability to do so. Write me an email today with DG in the subject and a one-paragraph description of what you’d like to do in the game industry; I will select the seven I believe will most benefit from the course and send them registration links.
And be sure you can actually attend on Saturdays before emailing me.
UPDATE: A donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, has made 10 additional seats available for those who cannot afford it. So, if you would like to utilize one of those seats, let me know.
All right, I finally got the Dev Game emails sent out with the registration links. If you signed up but did not receive an email tonight, please email me right away and I will send it to you.
You don’t need anything except a mike setup and perhaps something with which to take notes.
VD, any reference to the GT incident that you are talking about? I
tried looking it up, but it is hard to search for, apparently, for
someone that isn’t already familiar with the story.
It’s a matter of public record:
Contracts; pleading; prevention of performance of condition precedent; repudiation and right to terminate; implied duty of good faith and fair dealing. Tortious interference with contractual relations. Alleged breach of agreement granting defendant rights relating to two software video games. Motion to dismiss (CPLR 3211(a)(7)). Standards for pleading breach of contract. The court upheld a breach claim. The court rejected an argument that plaintiff had failed to comply with a condition precedent because defendant had allegedly prevented the performance of the condition. The court dismissed a claim for repudiation of the entire agreement since under it defendant had had an unconditional right to terminate, which it did, and thus could be liable only through that date, there being no provision for acceleration of future payments. The court ruled that a fair reading of the contract indicated that defendant had an implied duty of good faith to assist, or not interfere with, plaintiff’s entering into bundling arrangements with computer manufacturers. A third claim was thus upheld. The court found that plaintiff had set forth only conclusory allegations regarding interference with prospective contractual relations and thus dismissed that claim. Fenris Wolf Ltd. v. GT Interactive Software Corp., Index No. 601206/99, 10/15/99 (Cozier, J.)
We were working on a groundbreaking SF 3D shooter with AI-driven squadplay called Rebel Moon Revolution that was signed to GT Interactive. We’d had a huge success with Rebel Moon Rising thanks to bundling deals with IBM and Intel; GT used to joke that we were the only developer who had ever sent THEM checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
(This is why I’m never bothered by people claiming I’m a failure. My most spectacularly stupid moves, the mistakes I would most like to have back, have usually been related to my failure to properly exploit either opportunity or success. We gave GT a percentage of our revenue to handle the tech support; it turned out to be the most expensive tech support in computer game history. Idiotic.)
However, GT lost their crown jewels to Activision and soon came under financial pressure due to their funding practically every type of shooter EXCEPT the one that we pitched them twice: a WWII shooter. No one, they explained, would be interested in THAT. No wonder they went out of business.
In the summer of 1998, they went weirdly silent after we delivered a milestone that should have been routinely approved and paid. I got a phone call from our producer, who was very upset and told me that the milestone was not going to be approved. When I asked what was wrong with it, he said, “nothing”. Then he told me it would never be approved, and that they were terminating many development contracts, pretty much everything that wasn’t due to ship before the end of the year.
I’d heard rumors that this might be in the works; Sega of Japan had recently shut down Sega of America, and with it our Dreamcast launch title, an SF RPG that we were developing with Julian LeFay of Daggerfall fame, so I wasn’t exactly shocked. I asked when we could expect the termination notice, which was due within 30 days of a milestone rejection according to the contract, and was shocked when he said, “yeah, that’s the thing, they’re not going to terminate.”
You see, what GT was doing was trying to get back the money it had already paid out to its developers by refusing to release their claim on the IP unless the developer returned a substantial percentage of the advance it had already earned via milestones. This meant that the developers couldn’t take their projects elsewhere; we had good relationships with Microsoft at the time and would almost surely have gone there. Unlike other developers, we resisted their legal pressure, filed a lawsuit, beat them in the initial rounds of court, and ultimately forced a settlement in the place of the simple letter of termination they should have sent us.
The victory came at a serious cost, though. The legal process takes a long time, and by the time GT offered us a settlement worth taking, our entire team was already dispersed throughout the industry in the jobs we’d helped them find. My partner and I were so burned out and disenchanted that we both left the industry for several years. It was a substantial victory, but a Pyrrhic one; we would have been much better off in the long term just signing up with Microsoft and letting them deal with the legal complications such an action would have created.
We’ve got over 1,500 questions for the trivia game, but I would like at least another 1,000 and we’re particularly short of a) classic arcade games and b) early console games, including Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision.
Please send them in .xls or .ods format in the following format:
[difficulty][question number][question][answer][multiple choice options][correct multiple choice answer]
For example:
[easy][1][On which planet is the game set?][Chiron][1=Hermes;2=Vesta;3=Chiron;4=Eunomia][3]
[easy][2][How many factions were added in Alien Crossfire?][7][1=5;2=6;3=7;4=8][3]
And so forth, where each set of brackets [] indicates a spreadsheet cell.
We need 10 questions per game, 4 Easy, 3 Medium, 2 Hard, 1 Expert. Easy
questions should be obvious; anyone who has played the game should be able to get
them right. No trick questions!
Please also provide the following information, either in the spreadsheet or in the email to which it is attached:
Game name
Platform(s)
Genre: (action, adventure, strategy, rpg, sim)
Decade: (1980, 1990, 2000, 2010)
Year
Developer
Publisher
Designer name (if known)
Your name (for the credits)
If you know an old school game well, send in the questions!
The Church of Star Citizen has lost a brother:
Its always going to be hard leaving a cult that I helped to build – But it was time to do it.
Not only has the game changed, but so has the community. Its hard to watch the transition between “tech savvy people with a bit of money to invest in a fun project” into “hypemachine! – you are not valid unless you invest, and subsequently don’t complain”
It is a shame that CR has not been able to admit to himself that he couldn’t handle this, and I promise – this is the same goddamn problem every single one of us have, role delegation, letting someone else take over, when we don’t have the time/skills to do it anymore.
So, assets are getting done, redone, changed, people jump off, new guys come in, hype online, the name that shouldn’t be mentioned, grey market crashing, 2.0 another disappointment, this feels like a DEMO cd from the front of a magazine in the damn 90’s… AAAARRRH……
Silence. . . .I had had enough. This project’s direction is lost within itself.
I had tried to sell my stuff, so that CIG could keep the money I had donated, but, I couldn’t even get half of what I had invested. So, I decided to just mail CIG and ask them for my money back. And they gave it to me.
We will see. But certainly events do seem to be following the direction Derek Smart predicted. Which is not at all to say that he is responsible for them going that way.
I just backed an excellent RPG Kickstarter called Lairs & Encounters by Autarch. It’s only $600 away from lift-off, so if you’re any sort of gamer, take my advice, throw in, and put them over the top.
Lairs & Encounters is the ultimate supplement for fantasy RPG sandbox campaigns. Designed for use with the Adventurer Conqueror King System™ (ACKS™), it is readily compatible with other fantasy role-playing games built on the same core rules. In Lairs & Encounters you will find:
- More than 135 ready-to-play monstrous lairs – that’s at least one lair listing for every possible monster lair mentioned in the Adventurer Conqueror King System. The lair listings are designed to be used both as dynamic points of interest that can be discovered while wandering through the wilderness and as obstacles to a would-be ruler’s attempt to secure land for a domain.
- New subsystems for sandbox play, including rules for populating 6-mile hexes with lairs based on the terrain and extent of settlements in the region, and rules for searching for lairs in the wilderness factoring in terrain density, aerial reconnaissance, splitting up to cover more ground (never split the party!), and more.
- Additional mechanics for monsters, including ability scores for monsters, proficiencies for monsters, and young monsters.
- A complete system for taming and training monsters, with details on the lifespan, roles, tricks, trained and untrained value, supply cost, training period, and the trainability modifier of every monster in the game.
- A complete system for creating your own unique monsters. In the ACKS Player’s Companion we gave you mechanics to create balanced new character classes and new spells; now we bring our same rigorous attention to balance and customization to monsters.
It’s roleplaying with a wargame flavor. Reminds me a bit of fantasy Traveller.
Even before I was doing it, even before #GamerGate, Doug TenNapel, the creator of Earthworm Jim, was standing strong against them:
For more than a decade, the comics, cartoons, animations, and video games of Doug TenNapel have been entertaining millions. Yet a single opinion that swam against the tide of progressive opinion caused him to be subject to years of attacks from an all-too-familiar mob of online public shamers.
TenNapel has a long and accomplished career in entertainment. He’s the man behind Earthworm Jim, a 1990s smash-hit video game that spawned a cartoon series and a toy franchise. He has written an episode for the popular animated series’ Adventure Time and acted as a guest animator for Spongebob. His most recent creation is Armikrog, a point-and-click puzzle game created with stop-motion animation.
Despite his obvious talents, there’s a niggling aspect of TenNapel that continues to cause him problems: he’s a Christian Conservative. In addition to his other creations, he’s the series writer and executive producer for VeggieTales in the House, an animated series popular with Christian families. He has also designed the cover art for a number of Christian rock bands.
In the liberal, progressive world of arts and entertainment, it was only a matter of time before such an unfashionable background got him into trouble.
If you want to support Doug, his new game, Armikrog, is 50 percent off on Steam for the next two hours. VFM, if you’re on Twitter, tweet the article.
I should probably also mention that in the new year, we will have some exciting news to announce concerning Mr. TenNapel and Castalia House.
I realize that most of you who are already interested in the course have already signed up, but I thought you might be interested in seeing this anyhow. And if you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here. As those who were at the most recent Brainstorm can testify, it will be substantive and you will learn a lot about the game industry.