Archive for April, 2006
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
I want to talk a bit about IP in games, and also relay a funny story from when I went around California last year trying to work out exactly what to do with Determinance.
At that stage (September – November ’05), we finally had a game which was starting to look like what I had originally envisaged: a flying freeform multiplayer sword-fighting game. It was pretty rough back then, but it was at least starting to be what we wanted.
After we had a very positive reaction at the Independent Games Conference (GarageGames’ yearly Eugene OR-based indie meet), I knew Determinance was going to go somewhere: I just wasn’t sure where.
I travelled down to LA to have a couple of meetings with industry people. I met up with one guy, whose name I won’t divulge, and he started talking about IP: he thought we should get the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon license for Determinance.
I guess when someone brings you a flying sword-fighting game, and you think that IP is the only way to sell a game, that license makes sense. I had never even considered getting IP for Determinance: we would have to re-do so much art, shoe-horn in the license, and so on. In fact, prior to that meeting I had been IP-naive: I had always thought that if a game had license X, it had been designed from the ground up to be license X. And if a movie had game license Y, I presumed it had been written to be game-license-Y film. But of course, that’s not what happens. When someone has a serviceable game or film script, the producer will try and find an IP to match it to. A couple (and I mean literally a couple) of script or menu-graphic changes later and you have Doom The Movie or Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Game. Everyone who wants to know who the hell wrote a Doom film script without hell spawn need only know one thing: no one wrote a Doom film script.
Anyway, IP sells stuff. To the fans of a game, it’s pretty horrific to realise that the film of your favorite N64 epic wasn’t designed with loving care from day one to be a hundred-minute tribute, but to all the people who are deciding which film to watch tonight and have vaguely heard of Blast Corps (or whatever), it’s merely a reason to select one action film over another.
To get back to the point slightly, my LA contact told me that, with a viable IP, banks would be willing to lend money, publishers would come to the table, and I’d get to meet actresses. Long story short is that we want to make games in a different way, one in which bank loans are a last resort, not a goal.
My LA contact, however, had tried something pretty legendary with IP involving a huge, huge, huge game series, which I’ll call Ram Raiders here (it’s not Ram Raiders). My guy wanted to make Ram Raiders 3, but couldn’t afford the license. So he took all the CG movies from Ram Raiders 1 and 2 and spliced them together to form a movie trailer. He got some actor to do a voice-over (“This November, if you thought it was over… it’s not over”. You know, standard movie trailer stuff), and then got permission from the publishers of Ram Raiders to start taking it around Hollywood looking for potential studios. His plan was that if he got the movie signed, he’d very easily be able to get the rights to the game too.
Unfortunately, his plan back-fired when the IP holders sold the Ram Raiders game-IP to someone else. When he rang them up distraught they told him, “Hey, it’s cool, we kept the movie rights for you.” Annoying at the time I guess, but a good story.
I’ll finish off by telling you that, during that same trip, I took Determinance to show EA. I walked in through a giant corridor completely covered with The Sims posters, and sat at an EA Sports Developer’s desk. When one of their senior producers saw Determinance, he just basically looked like I’d bought a pet rat or something and I was asking him to tell me whether he liked its haircut. EA does *not* know what to do with freeform flying sword-fighting games.
Ian
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Sunday, April 30th, 2006
After the slight poking of a finger in his general direction, New Games Journalism luminary Kieron Gillen, has acknowledged our bleeding-edge blog, calling it “charming”…perhaps not the adjective we had been anticipating.
It’s certainly nice (actually, “nice” doesn’t really do it – it’s pretty awesome) to be called “very interesting” by a man of his evident stature (especially coming off the back of a “looks promising!” by Mr Mark Healey of Ragdoll Kung Fu fame earlier in the week), however he did bring up a particularly salient issue:
“Anyway – Deliverance. Let’s hope it works.”
Those of you who have been following the project since its outset know of the difficulties we’ve experienced trying to attach the Deliverance IP. A flying sword-fighting title with Burt Reynolds as the central character, swiping the limbs from redneck adversaries as he gleefully skips across the surfaces of forgotten worlds was foremost in our minds at the concept stage. As Mr Reynolds was sadly unavailable, we had to abandon key gameplay adjuncts such as the duelling banjos mini-game, and pursue a more abstract path.
The more of the PR for this game I experience, the more I feel like I’m playing electronic Chinese whispers across the world while being tossed on a roaring sea of information. Onwards!
Paul
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Saturday, April 29th, 2006
Due to the draft and the May Day bank holiday we may not get too much posted this weekend. I’ll try and get an article about IP in games up tomorrow though.
Ian
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Thursday, April 27th, 2006
Marketing appears to have done its job today. Then it appeared to go a bit crazy. Either way, development, which is my job, better look busy so as not to fall behind.
Some newcomers may be confused as to what we mean by freeform sword-fighting. Indeed, Marketing itself is worried people may think that we mean it’s a bit like Grand Theft Auto 3. What freeform sword-fighting in fact means, is that you can move your sword anywhere you want and angle it however you want. People who were paying attention in 1997 then tend to say something along the lines of, “Like Die By The Sword?”, and we usually reply, “No”.
You use the mouse to control the sword, and a modifier key with the mouse to control the angle: it’s a little bit like DBTS’ system, but much more in-depth and much easier to learn. DBTS was, by the way, completely legendary.
Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots of Omroth swinging his sword around. When we release the full trailer video it’ll be much easier to see how it works (I think Paul has some kind of stunt lined up to do with that).
Ian
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Thursday, April 27th, 2006
“The toilet is a common locus which unites all humanity. This means that all humans will be able to play our game together, and enjoy a level playing-field.”
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Thursday, April 27th, 2006
Despite their previous coverage of my egomaniacal tirade on Music4Games about Determinance’s soundtrack, so-hip-it-hurts and actually readable games blog Joystiq also neglected to include a mention of this wonderous opus amongst their recent flurry of posting.
It’s ok, we understand that hot news from the true gaming underground has to take second place when you have vital industry developments surrounding “the word ‘pee pee’“, and funny Ebay auctions to report.
Posted in PR trials and tribulations | 6 Comments »
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
When I was mailing people to let them know that we had started a blog last night, I sent an email over to games journalism icon Kieron Gillen, who has been complimentary and expressed interest in our game in the past. Imagine my horror to discover that instead of snuffling at his inbox for further sweet truffles of indie gaming information, Mr Killen was busy degrading himself through the medium of Singstar and the imbibing of the Devil’s liquor.
We ask the following question: how will he help us save PC gaming this way?
There is no answer to the question.
Posted in PR trials and tribulations | 5 Comments »
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
Enormous cavern of gaming news Blue’s News has linked up our fabulous blog, calling our outlook on our release schedule “amusing”. In a good way.
Posted in PR trials and tribulations | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
A common question is how modable DT is; and it’s a strong aspect of ours so I’ll address it briefly here.
Determinance, being based on the Torque engine, is already highly modable. It ships with all of the standard Torque tools, including an extremely easy to use in-built mission editor and gui editor. New characters are very easy to add through Milkshape or Max (or any other software with a dts exporter), and level buildings or objects can be made in Quark, Hammer, or anything with a dif exporter (huge amounts of info on GarageGames.com).
On to the Determinance-specific stuff. Putting cloth on exported player models is simply a matter of tying verts to a special node in your modelling program of choice. New weapons are also just a case of using a dts-exporting program and then fiddling with a collision box for a couple of minutes.
Animation is where it gets a bit more exciting. Determinance’s in-built animation tool looks like this:
You can grab any part of the body and drag it using the mouse (IK under the hood here)
Or you can select any joint in the skeleton and rotate it for fine tuning:
We also have the face editor for coming up with expressions:
And here’s something which took twelve seconds:
The point of all the imagery being that anyone can make new attacking, flying, showing off, feinting, whatever poses for DT characters in very little time. And you can import a model with a completely different skeleton (like a creature with 5 legs) and completely modifiy the entire freeform fighting engine to be all based around him flipping his tail (or something). Now that does require some work, but it’s all there.
Finally is the game mode system. We have a very easy to get into, very flexible system which allows you to play around with making your own game modes.
Ian
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Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
As our main site is in a bit of flux at the moment, I’ll post some information so that people know what’s going on with Determinance. Here’s our schedule:
Code freeze on June 1st, start final testing
Release July 1st
Just in case you need some context for this:
Determinance time in devlopment: 2.5 YEARS
Number of release dates not met: ~30
Confidence level we will meet this release date: MEDIUM
Confidence level we will be released by August: VERY HIGH to EXTREME
We have never had a release confidence level above “self-deceiving” before, so you can take it from me that both Medium and Extreme are significant levels of confidence.
Ian
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
