#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
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.
As part of the ongoing efforts to provide this blog community, and the Brainstorm members, with added value, I am hosting an impromptu Brainstorm event featuring Derek Smart, the veteran game developer and Star Citizen skeptic.
We will be discussing what caused him to go from project backer to public critic, his own development history, including the notorious Battlecruiser 3000 AD, and his latest game, Line of Defense Tactics, on Saturday, November 7th, at 7 PM EST. I’ll also be asking him about some of the controversial statements he has recently made concerning Chris Robert’s record-setting development project. You can register for the event here.
In addition to being entertaining and informative, this should also provide those interested in the upcoming DevGame course with some idea of what the guest speaker aspects of the course will entail, as well as the nature of the Q&A sessions.
A rather interesting situation has presented itself. I was looking up a much-anticipated reprinting of a board-and-counters wargame that is a particular favorite of mine, and in doing so, I reached the conclusion that the publisher was a one-man operation that is desperately in need of the sort of volunteer help that has made Castalia House so successful.
In the interest of paying things forward, both Ender and I have volunteered certain of our services that are needed; we are translating the new rules into two languages and I’m planning to create a weekly blog post at CH dedicated to wargaming to which various wargamers, myself included, will contribute. This weekly post will prominently feature the publisher’s games, particularly the occasional new release. We’re also going to help proofread and playtest the game being reprinted.
I think other wargamers here will be interested in helping out in various capacities, which could even involve petty investment to help cover the initial print runs. These are the sort of hobby businesses that die on the vine without the support of the community, and unfortunately, the sort of men who are inclined to rescue the obscure heritage of the past are almost always the sort of men who have absolutely no ability to build the sort of communities that can sustain them.
If you’re an old Avalon Hill/SPI wargamer and this sounds of interest to you, email me with WARGAME in the subject. I’ll be hosting a Brainstorm concerning this soon; after I email you back, I’ll want you to think about what you might be able to bring to the table. And if we really want to get crazy, if we have the right combination of talents, we could even think about taking some of these games digital.
I found this exchange on Twitter to be mildly amusing.
Vox Day @voxday
#GamerGate Open Source projects are the current target of SJW entryists. They use Codes of Conduct to take control.Stonehead @stonehead
@voxday Could you guys please return to your caves, doing something related to games instead of misogyny? Thanks. #GamerGateVox Day @voxday
@stonehead In addition to the 7 games I designed this year, the 3 games I am developing, and the game dev course I teach? #GamerGate
Speaking of the game dev course, I’ve had to take the time to do some infrastructure-building, get a little further down the road with regards to the games we’re developing, and arrange to make it possible to let people outside this blog know that a modified version of the game development course I taught at the institute in Zürich is going to be available online. That’s why the course did not begin this fall, but will instead begin in January, most likely on January 9th.
In order to make it accessible to everyone from Eastern Europe to the West Coast, the ten online sessions will be on Saturdays, beginning between 12 and 2 PM until 2 to 4 PM EST. Is there a strong preference for a specific start time in that window here? The structure will be about one hour of lecture, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A, followed by 15 minutes of me interviewing an industry expert, and 15 minutes of audience Q&A with the expert.
The price of the course is $199, but VP readers will receive a $49 discount if they sign up before my partners begin offering it to the public. Two people asked if they could contribute for scholarships; to do so, simply buy a course and let me know you want it to go to someone who can’t afford it. If you would like to apply for a scholarship, don’t do so now, but wait until I announce how many are available. I will be supplying several myself. As I previously mentioned, all Annual Brainstorm members are guaranteed a free seat if they want one; I will be sending out an email concerning this later today.
There are 500 seats for this first course, but due to the Institute students as well as a partnership with a technology incubator in a European city, it is possible they will fill up faster than one might expect. (Although based on some of the numbers the city representative was throwing around, I may need to do a completely separate course just for them, which would have the effect of creating more open seats here.) 40 seats are presently reserved for the institute, as many as 50 may be taken up by the Brainstorm members, but if you are interested in taking the course you can reserve a seat now.
Some comments from the previous course participants: