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In case you are still on the fence about going to PAX East, we will have a booth there showing off Retro/Grade. We try to provide cool swag, so here’s a preview of some cool stickers we got. These kiss cut stickers were printed courtesy of Sticker Mule.
The fine folks at Fire Hose Games were kind enough to give me a preview build of their super cool new game, Slam Bolt Scappers, and I figured I’d just let you know how awesome it is! If you haven’t heard of it, it’s like Tetris combined with Super Smash Bros. Sounds fun? It is! Slam Bolt Scrappers’ fast paced and exciting gameplay makes it great for parties, but I’m really enjoying the single player campaign as well. When it comes out on March 15th, definitely check it out!
I’d like to thank everyone at IndieCade for putting on an amazing event! There were fantastic talks, great games playable for free, and an exciting awards show. It was a massive undertaking, but a very small team of dedicated individuals organized an amazing festival. In particular, I’d like to thank Stephanie Barish, Celia Pearce, Sam Roberts, and Ivona Edry, but every person involved did a terrific job making IndieCade such an informative and fun event.
It was an amazing honor to be a finalist alongside so many amazing games. We are thrilled that Retro/Grade won the Audience Award this year. On top of being an extremely prestigious accolade, the trophies are the best I’ve ever seen! All of the trophies were completely unique robots created out of found objects. Here is a picture of ours!
Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone who came out to IndieCade’s Game Walk and played Retro/Grade. Hopefully you enjoyed the game, but as the designer, it is extremely helpful to watch people play. I figured out ways to improve the game based on seeing what people had trouble with while playing.
In summary, thank you to everyone who was involved with IndieCade as well as who came to IndieCade. I can’t wait until next year!
Felicia Day from all things fantastic such as The Guild and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog stopped by at IndieCade Now, all I have to do is meet Neil Patrick Harris and release Retro/Grade, and my life will be complete!
Have you ever wondered what Matt and other respected indie developers would chat about around a virtual water cooler? Now you can find out here!
When purchasing a DVD, do you choose one based on length? How about books? If length is a factor in choosing DVDs or books, you probably choose the shorter. I’ve never heard of anyone decide against seeing a movie or reading a book because it’s too short, but plenty of people pass on movies and books because they are too long.
However, it seems like the opposite holds true in games. A lot of reviewers mention that a game is “short” in their reviews as a negative thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Similar to movies and books, long games often have a lot of “filler” content that isn’t as good as the rest of the game, and they are unable to keep the excitement throughout.
Here’s an example. Lost Odyssey was the last long game I played. It took me over 40 hours, which is about standard for a JRPG. There are some amazing things about Lost Odyssey. Lost Odyssey is the most emotionally engaging game I’ve ever played. The story took a common video game contrivance – the player never dies, and transformed it into a touching story about the fragility of human life and the pain of loss. The plot was a bit slow to pick up, but about 10 hours in, I was completely hooked.
So it sounds like Lost Odyssey was great, right? Well, not exactly… Towards the end, game ended up dragging on and on and on. Nothing in that last 3/4ths of the game came close to being as compelling as the beginning. It seemed like they said all they had to say storywise well before the end, and the end was filled with grinding against the same enemies, which wasn’t much fun. Although I was super enthusiastic about Lost Odyssey at the beginning, it transformed into something I just wanted to get over with.
Lost Odyssey would have been one of my favorite games had they trimmed it down and kept the good stuff and removed a lot of a filler. One might argue that JRPGs are supposed to be long, but my favorite JRPG (and favorite game ever actually) Panzer Dragoon Saga. You can beat the game in a bit more than 10 hours and do all the sidequests in more like 15 or 20 hours. Every second of that game is totally awesome though, so I’d rather play through it 2 or 3 times than a 40 hour RPG with a lot of filler.
Similar to a good book or movie, games can be replayed. Every time you watch a movie, it’s the same. With a games, you can take a different path or try something new like a higher difficulty. You can do speed runs, compete for a high score, or collect all the achievements. If a game is great, you’ll want to play again. If it’s too long, then you will really only want the experience of playing through it once.
The one negative thing people have to say about the recently released Limbo is that it’s too short. The developers admitted they threw away about 70% of what they created because it didn’t fit in with their vision. Would Limbo have been a better game if it were over 3 times as long? I say no. Limbo as a game has a very strong artistic vision, and to add content that isn’t as good as the rest of the game just to pad the game length would be doing the game a disservice.
It is the job of the editor in both literature and film to chop out the dull stuff to ensure tension is maintained throughout. Why don’t we trust game developers with the same responsibility?
-Matt
PS. Many other game developers feel this way, and we decided to all blog on the subject at the same time. If you are interested in reading how more developers feel about this, check out all the links:
We have been really busy working on Retro/Grade, so I haven’t had much time to update the blog or the Retro/Grade website. We’ve redone pretty much every asset since our last batch of screenshots and videos, so the game is looking really sharp. We are working on putting together cool new stuff for our websites, so stay tuned.
Additionally, in our ongoing effort to be “hip” and “with it” we have created a company twitter: http://twitter.com/24CaretGames
I will try really hard to update it more frequently than I do the blog.
… is both supporting them and storing them.
24 Caret Games currently has 6 guitar peripherals and will probably get more before the game is done. We bought actual guitar stands in order to store them because we were tripping over the whammy bars otherwise.
Well, I know I mentioned I wasn’t going to post anything for a while, but I thought of some funny stuff that is appropriate for a developer blog. Although Retro/Grade is fully playable with a gamepad, it also supports guitar controllers for those who prefer to try a more unique take on our reverse shoot ‘em up gameplay. However (especially for the public PC demo), providing guitar compatibility was a very difficult process. In order to support all the guitars, I had to test each model out and figure out how DirectInput mapped the controls, which varied based on the model and platform. We supported controllers for Wii, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, which ended up being a lot of different controllers to test. (Here’s the list of what we ended up supporting) Since we are an indie shop and don’t have the resources to purchase a ton of guitar controllers, I concocted a plan that actually worked quite well. I bought a guitar at the Sherman Oaks Best Buy, which is very close to our office, plugged it into my PC, and got all the information I needed from it. Then the next day, I returned it and repeated the process. I did this for over a week. Not once did I get any resistance from the customer service desk, so I’d like to thank them all for (perhaps unwillingly) helping me make the public demo the most fun to the largest audience of people. I tried to do it at different times of the day, but I definitely got the same clerk more than once, but maybe they didn’t notice, or they just plain didn’t care.
Anyway, the indie saga continues! As you may be aware, 4 new guitar controllers just came on the market. From Activision, there is the Guitar Hero 5 controller. For the Beatles: Rock Band, they released the entire signature instrumentation from the Beatles: the Gretsch Duo-Jet, the Rickenbacker 325, and the Höfner bass – the latter is only available in the $249.99 bundle. Anyway, the explosion of music game peripherals and the possible difficulties of supporting them must have attacked my subconscious because this morning I had a nightmare relating to this.
Basically, in the nightmare, I was at a store, and I was trying out the new Höfner bass controller and playing The Beatles: Rock Band. The controls were all different, and the bass controller had different knobs and sliders as well as a completely different thing instead of a strum bar. It was like a rotating disk with a little dimple for your thumb to turn it. I was worried how on earth I’d support it and concerned about the cost of the bundle in order to get the hardware to test it out. Anyway, that may seem like a tame nightmare to some, but boy did I ever wake up anxious!
-Matt
PS. For those keeping score, Band Hero has a bundle that will probably come with some sort of guitar. Who knows if it’ll be yet another model! It appears that Lego Rock Band is bundleless, so although having a guitar made out of Legos would be sweet, it doesn’t appear to be in the cards. I haven’t been paying attention to the 3rd party peripheral manufacturers, but there are a ton more that I’ve never tried that I am crossing my fingers hoping they have feature parity with the name brands.
The awesome dudes next to us at the IGF, Hemisphere Games, have released their heavily nominated (and Direct2Drive award winning) indie game Osmos to much critical acclaim. They even said it was a better Katamari on the “Listen Up” podcast, and you can’t get much of a better recommendation than that as far as I’m concerned. Check it out! It’ll make the wait for Retro/Grade seem shorter! (Retro/Grade will be worth the wait. I promise!)
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