Eli Hodapp

"Dad Testing" is Just As Important as Beta Testing

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:20:36 -0600

It’s easy to get insulated in a world of tech savvy individuals, especially in the tight-knit circles of iOS development. I’m going to speak in terms using the word “we” and “us” here because chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re the kind of person who spent their lives at least vaguely dabbling in technology. We grew up with early home computers, then eventually graduated to early portable electronics have a deep history of experience to draw from with UI queues, usage habits, and more. We also, all too often, assume that everyone else has this innate knowledge as well.

I know I’m more than guilty of this, as I’ve desperately tried to give over-the-phone tech support to family members, skipping what seems to be common sense steps to me that throw a massive wrench into the mix. There’s so many good examples of this that it’s hard to even choose one to cite here. Hell, I’ve even hit bumps telling people to “Open Finder” on a Mac. All of us have experienced similar things as we’ve been defaulted into the family role of “computer guy.”

I think my Dad is an almost perfect example of the typical iPad user. He hadn’t synced the device since I initially plugged it in to my parents’ Mac Mini to set it all up, but keeps it near him almost everywhere he goes. When I first gave it to him, the device was incredibly foreign. I had to explain even the most basic things, from tapping with the pad of your finger to the concepts of what apps were and how to switch between them.

He picked up on it all remarkably fast, and the next time I saw him he was flying through web sites in Safari, more involved in his email than I’ve ever seen him, and even had downloaded some apps on his own. Nearly six months later, and he’s absolutely mastered the iPad, or, as close to master as a 58 year old can get who didn’t get involved in using a computer much at all until I bought him one.

What’s so curious about this though, is that while my Dad is an iPad wizard, design cues that harken back to traditional computing are completely lost on him.

I often tell him to get new games I think he’ll like, and it’s just amazing watching him play them. We approach problems in video games in a way that (potentially) over 20 years of playing them have taught us, but not my Dad. He tackles challenges in video games in ways that immediately make sense.

Take Angry Birds, for instance. It was among the first games I loaded on the iPad as soon as I took it out of the box. I didn’t even have to say anything and my Dad was experimenting himself, drawing the slingshot back to fire the birds. Granted, it took multiple retries for him to even beat the first level, but it goes to show just how well that game is designed that someone like my father knows how to play it without a single word.

Recently, I told him to check out Cut The Rope, since he told me he enjoyed some of the other physics-based three-star-earning puzzle games I’d told him to try. Right now when you download Cut The Rope, on its first launch a little new display pops in from the top of the screen. To us, these kind of things are normal. We understand the power of cross promotion, and fully realize that Zepto Labs is utilizing the Cut The Rope install base to push players to Cut The Rope: Experiments.

The issue is, when this news display rolls down, it greys out the rest of the screen. My Dad told me the game was broken, and he couldn’t get it to work. I had no idea what he was talking about, since Cut The Rope always worked for me and I’m not really sure how you could be confused into thinking it was “broken.”

Today I was finally able to see what he was talking about. My Dad didn’t see the news display as “news” at all, he was seeing it as part of the main title screen. The button to play was clearly visible, although slightly darker, and tapping on it did nothing. It took me all of about a half a second to realize what was going on here, and instinctively tapped the “X” on the top corner to close the pop-up, at which case everything went back to normal. But, to my Dad, hitting the “X” never even registered as something to do to “fix” the game.

This brings me to the point I’m trying to make here in that while beta testing your games to make sure they’re bug free is important, I’d argue it’s just as important to “Dad test” your games with someone that more represents your typical iOS user. iOS games and apps, entirely too often, seem to be developed inside of a complete echo chamber where everything makes sense to you. But of course it makes sense, you made it, you show it to the same people, and chances are those people at least have a somewhat similar knowledge base as you.

I’ve seen zillions of threads with iOS developers trying to divine the ingredients of Angry Birds’ success, but really, I think a lot of it has to do with just how intuitive of a game Angry Birds is. That’s something all iOS developers should shoot for, even if you’re not making a game that appeals to the typical “casual” crowd.

So seriously, find some people to “Dad test” your game on. Load it up and hand it to them. See how they try to play it, watch where they fail. See what points they try to tap on, and if something doesn’t do what they expected it to, find out what they thought it would do and why. You might be amazed what you find out.

Homecoming

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:31:01 -0600

I’m taking a break from my typical know-it-all soapboxing on the topic of iOS gaming to ramble on about my drive fro Los Angeles to Chicago. We’ll get back to our regular scheduling programming shortly. Anyway, some not-so-fun circumstances lead me to picking up a Prius and driving back to the Chicago area. I did it in two days, and… It was great.

Before I left, I spent quite a bit of time debating whether I was going to take the familiar southern route across Route 66, or take the potentially significantly more treacherous northern route via I-70 up to Colorado and across through Nebraska on I-80. It is November, after all, and I’ve heard many horror stories of highway closings and endless snow, but, why not? I’m warm-blooded a Chicago native, and my racial trait in an RPG would probably have something to do with winter.

I left Los Angeles at sunrise on Monday morning, and made it outside the city far before rush hour traffic started. The road to Vegas isn’t anything special. Even so early it was easy to spot cars speeding by packed with, well, the exact kind of people you’d imagine if you closed your eyes and thought of who would be racing to Vegas on a Monday morning.

North of Vegas was all new to me. I was surprised by just how quickly the mountains snuck up on me, and it didn’t seem like I was even settling into my Storm of Swords audiobook before I was already passing signs mentioning elevation. Just like seeing the Hoover Dam on the way to Los Angeles, it’s so mind-boggling amazing to me that we have these carefully engineered highways through the mountains. The carefully-carved passes through the northwestern corner of Arizona make you feel like you’re as insignificant as an ant just rolling through something much bigger and older than you could ever hope to be.

Similarly, I find it to be absolutely dumbfounding to think that people took similar paths across these mountains way back when. It sounds corny, but this puts an entirely new perspective on my childhood favorite, The Oregon Trail. I’ve always understood just how far it was, at least on paper, but having seen the terrain first hand… I can’t even imagine the bravery required to pack up shop with your family and belongings and head west. But, I digress.

I found myself stopping at a few of the rest stops along the way through Utah which also all seemed to serve the double purpose of “scenic overlook,” although in the Rocky Mountains what isn’t a scenic overlook? As the sun set in the west, the stars came out brighter than I can ever remember seeing them. I’m not sure I’ve ever spent much time looking at the sky anywhere that’s almost entirely free of light pollution, but if there was ever a thing that made me want to live the life of a hermit in the mountains it’d be to look at those kind of stars. I wish the iPhone camera was capable of capturing anything even close to what it looked like. It was like those post cards you see for sale at planetariums, which I honestly always thought were manipulated or enhanced in some way.

The scenery only gets better as you keep heading through Utah, as the cloudless sky allowed the brightness of the moon to completely illuminate the snowy caps of the nearby mountains. The snow served as this incredible looking border between the giant imposing dark of the side of the mountains, the bright white ridge along the top, then endless stars. I likely spend just as much time looking up out of my sunroof as I did looking forward to watch the road.

I made it to around the Grand Junction area, and it was getting late enough where I needed to make a judgement call of whether or not I was going to summit the mountain I was climbing and head down the other side to Denver, or stop and get a hotel and make my attack in the morning. I looked at the weather, which looked clear, and asked some friends online who were familiar with the route which was the better option. In the end, I decided to go for it, as making it as close as I could to Denver was vital in making my original timeline of getting to Chicago in two days.

It was a little spooky climbing the Rockies at night, increasingly so with each bright blinking sign demanding all trucks immediately chain their tires. I shrugged this off, figuring it was more of a formality than anything else, and kept going with renewed reassurance after checking the weather again. Everything changed at around 10,000 feet. From out of nowhere the roads were covered in snow and ice, the signs warning trucks to equip chains were now brightly accompanied by blinking “Icy Road” signs.

Conditions continually worsened until I got to the point where I was desperately following the only truck I had run into in miles, idling up the mountain alternating between 10 and 20 miles per hour, depending on how straight the road was. I eventually spotted the signs for a rest stop in a few miles, and decided that I couldn’t make it to the next exit that had hotels, at the pace I was traveling I wouldn’t make it there for hours yet.

The truck I was following had a similar idea, and exited with me to what must have been the creepiest rest stop I’ve ever been to in my entire life. It was surprisingly far off the highway, with a barely illuminated parking lot. Home to a single building, it was lit by no more than half a dozen low-wattage buzzing fluorescent light bulbs. The restroom facilities were dirty, barely above freezing, and had a musty and forgotten smell about them that only served to reinforce just how desolate and remote this was.

It was then that I decided that this was the perfect venue to get murdered: A parking lot which couldn’t be more empty, obviously completely disregarded by salt trucks, with more lumens pouring off the stars above than the few street lights. I only had a quarter tank of gas, and thought that if the snow got worse, I could be trapped there for quite some time. Worse yet, I was traveling alone. If something happened to me, no one would be there to tell the tale. The only evidence that anything even went wrong would be my irregular silence on social networks.

Eventually, I figured that I was basically stuck there, and trying to figure out whether it’d be the semi truck that I followed in or the purple PT Cruiser that was already there housing the crazed maniac that was going to come take my life didn’t seem like the best use of time. I bundled up, and fell asleep. I awoke a few hours later, colder than I’ve ever been, and figured that I’d let the car idle for heat and go back to sleep. Strangely enough, I’m not sure why I didn’t do this earlier, as it seems the Prius is an absolute champ at idling with the climate control system on.

The hybrid system cleverly allows the heater to be powered via the car’s battery, with the engine only turning on for a few moments every now and again to keep the battery charge constant. I slept for the next few hours without the gas gauge even budging, making the whole falling asleep without the car on to save gas and waking up nearly dead of hypothermia seem incredibly silly. I woke up at the sign of first light, and headed inside to use the restrooms.

Two men were inside, just sort of hanging out near the sinks. We exchange awkward glances and their conversation came to a stop as I stood there doing my business. I’ve never been more sure that I was going to get murdered as I was in that moment. Hell, if I were ever going to kill someone, that exact restroom would be as close as I could ever imagine (save some Saw-esque elaborate torture chamber) to a perfect venue to do it.

I finished, turned to quickly wash my hands, looking to get the heck out of there. It was then that they finally spoke to me, and asked if I knew if the roads were any better. I explained that I was stuck there after the drive last night, and hoped they’d improved but didn’t know beyond that. It turned out the one man was the driver of the truck I’d followed, and the other was the owner of the PT Cruiser. We exchanged war stories of winter driving, and as I felt more comfortable with them, I admitted that I fully expected one of them to kill me last night.

Hilariously enough, they mentioned the same thing. It turned out all three of us were ridiculously uncomfortable sleeping there, with the truck driver mentioning that he’s slept in a lot of eerie locations but this took the cake. The man from the PT Cruiser explained that he slept inside the rest stop with his sleeping bag, with his car unable to provide adequate heat idling in the cold mountain air. After that, I felt pretty bad about the whole thing, but didn’t have time to feel bad for long before getting back on the road.

The roads were still icy, all of the signs were still blinking, although not making the trek depending on my headlights made the whole thing substantially more workable. It was all downhill from there, so it was just a matter of riding the Prius regenerative brakes while letting the traction control do its thing around corners. After making it what must have been about half way down the mountain, the snow and ice started to subside and the same signs on the other side that were blinking warnings of tire chains now mentioned that there was “bright sunshine ahead.”

Seeing this made me smile— Unaware of whether it was some joke being had by whoever was in charge of administering the electronic signs along the way, having realized that the roads were getting much better, or what. After another ten miles or so the road made a sharp straight turn to the east, and the sunlight was absolutely blinding. After hours of stressful driving, sleeping in the cold, fearing for my life, and experiencing a nearly-as-treacherous road back down, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt such purifying relief being bathed in the sun as I did then.

Through Denver and the tail-end of the Rocky Mountains the highway takes a decidedly boring turn. While day one of the drive had been a fantastic experience of breathtaking mountainsides, stars, and snow, day two centralized around Nebraska and Iowa. The stark contrast between both days was incredible. I could almost tune out entirely in Nebraska with the cruise control on and my knee on the steering wheel the road was so straight. Iowa is equally boring, although a little more familiar.

At some point about half way across Iowa it started getting dark, and then it started to rain. Keeping an eye on the external temperature continually fluctuating from about 35 to 40 degrees, I figured it was high enough above freezing to just power through. After a quick stop at the World’s Biggest Truck Stop to fuel up, I made it across the Mississippi and then the equally non-notable countryside of western Illinois.

I started to get more and more excited as I got closer to home, especially as the exit for each slightly-more-familiar town appeared in my rearview mirror. Getting off the highway in Joliet, I made way for my parents’ house. 20 minutes later, and I was greeting my Dad who was fast asleep in his chair.

It felt good to be home.

Some other random musings:

It’s pretty crazy just how capable the iPhone is between Siri and the accessibility options that will read tapped text to you. With voice dictation, and my phone reading to me, I was able to do a surprising amount of my TouchArcade responsibilities almost entirely hands-free. The parts that required a keyboard were quickly accomplished by pulling off at a truck stop, firing up the MiFi, and powering away on the ol’ MacBook. If you closely follow TouchArcade, I bet you didn’t even realize I spent the last two days driving across the country aside from my silence on Twitter.
I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the Prius navigation system versus a Tom Tom. There’s things I really like about both. The factory navigation system is integrated incredibly well, and I love how it turns down the music, releases a peaceful chime, then announces your next step. Comparatively, the Tom Tom’s voice prompts always either seemed to loud or too soft, and often just totally imposing. Tom Tom seems better at adapting to your route in real time as you drive. It’ll tell you to turn around when it makes sense to turn around and head back to get back on the highway while the Toyota navigation, oddly enough, seems to take you exiting the highway as you telling it that you want to drive through country roads to find the next onramp. This isn’t always the case, but it seems that the Prius really doesn’t like telling you to just turn around.
The Bluetooth capabilities of the stereo are awesome, and it seems like my tastes in cars are just a Katamari of all of these features I thought were stupid or useless, then I fall in love with them. Previously, I thought wacky back-up radar systems and cameras were idiotic. Now I wouldn’t buy a car without them, similarly, I’ve got to add Bluetooth audio streaming to the mix. Just getting in the car and having it automatically start playing where it left off from the phone in your pocket feels like magic.

Fueling The Freemium Fire

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:46:01 -0500

Earlier this week I posted my feelings on the overall disappointing nature of this year’s GDC Online over at TouchArcade, which seemed to add a considerable amount of fuel to the already blazing arguments taking place in IM windows, IRC channels, and Twitter timelines. After thinking about all this a little more, and watching on the sidelines of way too many of these discussions, I figured I’d toss out some more of my thoughts instead of responding to everyone who has commented individually.

What upsets me the most about this free to play trend isn’t the business model itself, which it seems like entirely too many people flat out don’t understand. Freemium games truly have potential to be just as good as current traditional “premium” titles, and there are already a few stand outs that raise the bar higher than I thought was possible. I almost feel like a broken record at this point endlessly promoting League of Legends, but it is the absolute best example of a free to play game that sacrifices nothing for the sake of free to play monetization. League of Legends is just as fun to play if you never spend a single cent on it as it is if you spend hundreds on it.

Like all things in life, an overall balance is very important in good game design. In a traditional video game sales model, you can plot most titles along a line with “presentation” on one end and “gameplay” on the other. The best games always seem to end up in the middle, taking a very even-handed approach in their development. It’s not hard to come up with examples of games over the course of video game history that stray too far to either side and ultimately suffered for it. We’ve all played games that were sheer eye candy that were closer to tech demos than video games, just like we’ve all played fabulous indie titles that could’ve been so much more if they had more than programmer art and royalty free music.

With the advent of free to play, this gradient of game design has turned into something that resembles a triangle, with “presentation,” “gameplay,” and now “monetization” serving as the end-points. What was so upsetting to me about GDC Online is that it seems that developers are now openly encouraged to build their games as deep into the “monetization” side of the triangle as possible, as it doesn’t matter anymore if you’ve got anything going for the “gameplay” or “presentation” side of things since there’s enough user bases to buy, chart gaming services to employ, and other tricks to exploit to completely negate the need for your “game” to even actually be a game.

The example that seems to get tossed out far too often to dispute this is that arcade games were obviously pay to play, and games had no problem sucking every last quarter out of your pocket. Some argue that these monetization-heavy free to play games are no different, only now, instead of dropping quarters in a coin slot, you’re buying packs of virtual quarters to spend in a similar fashion.

While I totally see the logic path some are taking with this, I really don’t think that this is that great of a counterpoint. Plotting arcade games on the game design triangle I discussed earlier would almost always have them landing somewhere in the middle. Early arcade games, particularly high scoring games, were games that required immense skill and were entirely possible to be beaten in one quarter. Hell, there’s an entire archive of videos on YouTube of people beating all forms of arcade games on one credit.

The spending compulsion also couldn’t be more different. If you were standing in front of that six player X-Men arcade machine, and you died, you’d effortlessly pop another quarter into the machine because you were having so much fun. The arcade machine was giving you something you wanted, and you felt good paying for it.

Now, compare this to the worst offenders in the freemium farming scene. Sure, you can play the games for free and grind away your silly little farm, but they’re all engineered to eventually drive you to in-app purchase. The spending compulsion the player experiences here isn’t a feeling of “Oh this is so much fun!” as they enter their iTunes password. No, instead, it’s a mixture of frustration that things are taking so long, and a desire to somehow sidestep the irritating limitations placed on them.

This just seems backwards to me on so many levels. Growing up, I worked in the family business where I learned life lessons on creating products people wanted to buy, being proud of those products, and satisfying a customer’s needs with them. When you look at a game like We Rule, none of those lessons apply. Ngmoco isn’t offering a quality product that people want to buy, they’re offering a precisely built compulsion loop that preys on unsuspecting gamers like a modern day social skinner box where you put money or time in and the only thing you get out of it is an advanced progress bar.

I don’t even think I’d call that a game. With the endless reskins and clones on top of clones utilizing identical mechanics, they seem more similar to the endless sea of video slot machines at a casino, each with a slightly different theme engineered for one purpose: To separate you from as much of your money as possible. At least casinos are dangling a tangible carrot, and however unlikely it is, you could actually walk away with something instead of access to a slightly more advanced virtual farm that will only exist for as long as the company selling it to you feels like supporting it.

That’s what feels so wrong to me. As a customer in this whole free to play process, you’re often not getting anything out of it. In fact, regardless of whether or not you pay, you often are the product being sold. These monetization schemes are running so deep that it really doesn’t even matter if you ever pay a cent as long as you can be counted as a daily active user. That almost seems to have more value, and makes these games feel even less like games, and more like fly traps filled with victims to be sold to the highest bidder with something vaguely representing a game serving as the bait.

It sounds harsh, but reality sucks sometimes. This is a horrible direction for video game development to be heading, and the worst part is, there really seems to be no consequences to dissuade developers from going down this road. In fact, the most blatant cash grabs somehow inexplicably seem to make the most money, which only encourages delving even deeper into the monetization side of the game development triangle.

It bears repeating though that just because a game is free to play doesn’t mean it needs to be a precisely constructed cash extracting operant conditioning chamber. We’ve heavily praised NimbleBit games on TouchArcade, because the vibe about them makes them feel like actual games— But more importantly, they actually are free to play instead of free to play with a giant asterisk attached to it that ends in “but it’ll be really annoying to actually get anywhere.”

At the end of the day, the free to play business model is just another tool on the game developer’s utility belt. There’s nothing inherently “evil” about the whole thing, it’s just all in how you use it. It’s just incredibly disheartening how easy this tool can be used in a bad way, doubly so that the financial rewards make it so worthwhile.

Use iTunes Description Text to Actually Describe Your Game

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:17:37 -0500

One of the main questions I get asked by developers (and overhear at conferences) is, “How do I get on TouchArcade?” I’m not entirely sure there’s really any magic recipe for TouchArcade coverage. At the end of the day we’re just on the lookout for cool games that we enjoy and which we think others will enjoy as well. There are a zillion iOS dev blogs out there already that have exhaustively covered what makes a compelling game, so I’m not going to spend time on that today. What I do want to discuss is how to describe your game when contacting the media and when writing your iTunes description text.

I’m not exaggerating when I say we get tons of email via our ‘tips’ line. Regardless, I make it a point to read every email we get, even though I rarely have time to personally respond to most. Similarly, part of what I do every day involves combing through the AppShopper RSS feeds for all the new games that have been released, looking at screenshots, and reading the accompanying description text.

Back in the infancy of the App Store, I had time to download and play nearly every game that was released. These days, we deal with such a large volume of daily releases that we must use an initial filter of only pursuing games that look or sound like they might be interesting. This isn’t to say that we don’t still play a massive amount of games, but even with our expanded staff, we lack the bandwidth for the same kind of “let’s play EVERY game that came out today” mentality that we used to have.

What does this initial filter generally consist of? Checking out forum posts, reading email, reading iTunes text, checking out screenshots, and watching trailers. If something looks even remotely cool, I’ll post it in the groupware that we use internally. From there, someone will play it, and if it we like it, they will potentially review it. However, unless the screenshots (and/or trailer) of the game look really impressive, I’ll usually rely on whatever text accompanies said media.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that seems to only be getting worse as the App Store continues to thrive: developers absolutely love to describe their game in the most vague of terms imaginable. The purpose of your iTunes text and press release emails is explain what your game is, what you do in it, and why I should download it. If you’re not doing that, you might as well leave it blank.

Imagine this text as something similar to a resume that you’d send a potential employer. You wouldn’t send a page full of fluff about how you’re the hardest worker you know and your friends all like you. No, you’d compile a highly compact listing of your qualifications and experience in an easy to parse format, focusing on carefully selecting words to powerfully convey just how qualified/experienced you are. Your game’s description should be no different, and each word should be chosen with equal importance.

It’s impossible for me to guess the number of emails and iTunes descriptions I’ve seen which are 100% fluff, save the potential existence of a bulleted list that might indicate how many levels are included. I really don’t know what went wrong in the culture of the App Store to lead people to believe that the best way to sell your game is by focusing on how ‘addictively polished’ it is, but I assure you, it is not the way to proceed.

I cannot stress enough that it’s not at all abnormal for me to see either emails or iTunes text which amounts to the following (which tells me absolutely nothing about the game):

”_________ is an incredibly fun and addictive game that features simple and intuitive gameplay that’s easy to pick up and play but difficult to master. This unique and innovative title is highly polished and is impossible to put down!”

In the interest of time and privacy, I’ll just touch on words and phrases most poor descriptions share:

Fun - One of the main purposes of video games existing is for players to have fun. As unbelievable as it is by today’s standards, even the goal behind basic ancient video game Pong (and others) was to have ‘fun’. I enjoy video games because they’re fun. You really don’t need to tell anyone that your game is fun, anyone searching for a game to play assumes it’s going to be fun. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a game, and you’ve got much bigger issues to deal with than your iTunes text.

Polished - I assume that as part of the development cycle of your game, you’ve gone through and tweaked every interface element that you can. You’ve tightened up the graphics as much as you can and you have balanced the game to the point that you’re prepared to unleash it to the world. If you haven’t done this, you shouldn’t be releasing your game yet.

Addictive/Addicting - I’ve never been able to figure out why this has caught on in such a big way in the iOS world. It’s hard to pick a word that has a more negative connotation to describe your game. I’ve actually discussed this at length with non-gamers I know, and very few people seem to see addictiveness as something that is ever positive. It also does nothing to describe your game, other than likening playing it to, say, smoking cigarettes— And really, when was the last time you heard someone say, “I just love how addictive these cigarettes are!”?

Unique, Innovative, and similar - Again, this should go without saying. I would hope your game is unique or innovative in some way. How else do you ever expect it to sell on the flooded market of the App Store? Instead of mentioning how unique and innovative it is, focus on why it’s unique or innovative.

Easy to play but difficult to master and other cliches - It’s safe to assume that most well-made games feature a difficulty curve that makes it very easy to jump into with a challenge that gradually increases alongside progression. What would be noteworthy and worth mentioning is if your game didn’t have this, as that would be more than a little odd.

Generic positive adjectives - There’s a lot I haven’t specifically mentioned here, but generic positive adjectives make up for a lot of filler in game descriptions. Just imagine, for every “cool,” “amazing,” and/or “fantastic” you chop out you could potentially shove a more descriptive word to further convey what your game is about. Think of this as a creative writing exercise like you were setting the scene in a story. “The oppressive heat drained every ounce of their strength” tells so much more than “It’s so hot out that they didn’t do much” in the same amount of words.

In three sentences or less, you should be able to describe the goal of your game, how it’s played, and give the reader an idea of one compelling reason there is to download it. I’m all for getting into more detail as well. Try to open your description with what amounts to a thesis statement of sorts. The quick accessibility of information on the Internet has made people much less willing to pay attention to things they don’t find interesting. With the sheer amount of games on the App Store, if you don’t grab players instantly with what you actually do in your game and why it is good, it is all too simple to just hit ‘back’ and look at the next game.

Similarly, when I’m going through my inbox, if you send me an email that tells me absolutely nothing about your game, I just hit the arrow key and move on to the next email. You might have had the coolest game ever, and, dare I say it, the next Angry Birds… But unless you can convey that in a clear and concise manner, you’re likely doomed to be lost amongst the hundreds of thousands of other ‘addictively polished fun gems’ on the App Store.

A Messenger Pigeon to the Majic Jungle

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:55:00 -0500

I wrote an article on TouchArcade today regarding free to play revenue overtaking paid game revenue on the App Store. Somewhat unsurprisingly, this news has stirred a significant reaction both from the vocal minority of people who despise everything to do with free to play and developers looking to dabble in the payment model for future projects. David Frampton posted some thoughts on his blog earlier and with comments disabled I’ve resorted to this LiveJournal-esque long-form blog response instead of blasting this into the ether across about 42 separate tweets.

What I think is so curious about this “debate” (for lack of a better way to put it) is that so often people bring up “premium” versus “freemium” focusing on the payment model instead of the gameplay experience offered. In these types of arguments “premium” is often completely interchangeable with the word “good.” Conversely, “freemium” is almost always seen as “bad.”

As I write this, I’ve got iTunes in the background looking at the top 200 paid games, all of which by this line of logic are “premium” games from a pricing perspective… But how many of these premiumly priced games offer premium gameplay? I don’t want to name names, but it’s not hard to point out the shocking amount of junk in the top 200, and I’m not sure a single fixed up-front cost makes them anything that I’d ever define as being “premium.”

I still think developers are figuring out the best way to do free to play on the App Store, as few companies outside of NimbleBit have been able to provide a compelling iOS freemium experience without the same time sinks and pay walls that have done little but speed the adoption of “freemium” as a synonym for “bad.” However, looking to the world of Mac and PC games, there’s quite a few shining examples of freemium games that offer premium experiences.

In the MMO space, both Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online are offering massive, incredibly comprehensive and deep gameplay experiences with all the features and functionality required for a awesome MMORPG monetized through optional microtransactions. Team Fortress 2 offers some of the best FPS action available on Steam, now entirely for free, monetized through buying entirely optional hats of all things.

Personally, I’ve spent more time playing League of Legends lately than any other game in my spare time, including full-priced “premium” console games that have since either been left untouched or unfinished. Looking at my purchase history, I’ve spent under $20 on League of Legends, and most of that was on completely optional cosmetic skins I didn’t even need.

Anyway, I know the whole paid versus free to play argument is a favorite among many developers and gamers. I’m just looking forward to more people realizing that free to play is just another pricing model and just because it’s been completely abused by early adopters with the farming games we all love to hate, doesn’t mean it should be completely dismissed.

In my eyes, a game can be “premium” regardless of how players pay for it. Being free just opens more doors, provides promotional flexibility that is nowhere to be found in traditional paid sales, and gets more people playing (and enjoying) your games.

Ha! I’ve got no comments either, enjoy blogging at me… MAJIC DAVE!!!

My 1000 Word Post on the iPad.

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:12:00 -0600

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Yeah, I don’t know, the iPad seems like it’s pretty cool!

Hi, How Are You

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:17:00 -0500

It’s usually not hard to pick the games we write about on Touch Arcade. All it basically comes down to is finding games we like, either from the App Store or from the many prerelease games that get emailed to us. I’d really love to tell a story of some insane selection process, but there really isn’t one. The good games almost always clearly stand out from the pack, and it often doesn’t take much more than a few minutes of playing a game to determine that it’s cool enough to be worth spending more time on.

When Hi, How Are You hit the App Store, I grabbed it because the art style instantly caught my eye. It’s no secret that I am unnaturally drawn to strange games, especially after basically starting the Enviro-Bear 2010 revolution on Touch Arcade. Completely unaware of Daniel Johnston at the time, I played through the first few levels of the game trying to figure out if this was some clever parody of something else, or some other joke that was just going completely over my head— Especially with the opening of the game featuring very strong satanic overtones in a really strange almost comical art style.

Not really sure what to think of the game, I moved on to the other news of the day including the fantastic Baseball Superstars 2010, an Alive 4 Ever update, and Texas Tea, a game by a developer I met at GDC. By the time the terrible Family Guy game came out the next day, Hi, How Are You was already getting lost in the game clutter on my iPhone.

And there it sat for the next week or so, until I reached the point where the games I was installing were getting pushed off the last page of my iPhone, requiring a full device purge of things I’d either written about or played and didn’t like. (I’d love to say I’m more organized than this, but I’m really not.) When I made it to the screen with Hi, How Are You on it, the split second delete or keep decision eventually turned in to me powering through the rest of the game in one sitting.

Still not really sure what to think of the game, I decided to do some research on its development to turn up some kind of clue to explain what exactly it was that I just played through. A quick Google search later and I found myself falling head first down a Daniel Johnston rabbit hole that I wasn’t even aware existed.

Photo by Ray Pena

Now 48 years old, Daniel Johnston (above, center) has lived an absolutely amazing life documented in the movie The Devil and Daniel Johnston (available on iTunes and Netflix) which I somehow just had to watch after reading his Wikipedia article, even though it was about 3:00 AM by the time I made this discovery.

As I watched in amazement, it quickly became apparent that Hi, How Are You was Daniel Johnston’s life of art and music concentrated in to an iPhone game. An even stranger discovery out of all this was finding that Johnston doesn’t even have a cell phone, much less an iPhone. In fact, he doesn’t even have a phone. If you want to get in touch with him, you call his parents who live nearby.

The theme of the Hi, How Are You game, along with most of the music (which I also bought an embarrassing amount of during this whole Daniel Johnston discovery period) he created in his life was wrought with the obvious evidence of his intense bipolar disorder along with other serious issues in his life.

I wasn’t alone in being completely blown away by the works of Daniel Johnston. An immense number of bands and artists were influenced by Johnston, including Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain.

Photo by Kevin Mazur

What is beyond eerie is I remember this photo of Kurt Cobain and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers from all of the various memorials following Cobain’s death. His T-Shirt had absolutely no meaning to me, and I doubt I even noticed it at the time. But there is the Hi, How Are You frog, as clear as day.

Throughout everything I read about Johnston, all he ever wanted was to share and have others experience the music and art that he created. He started his career (if you’d even call it that) passing out cassette tapes he recorded to anyone willing to listen to them. The amazing part? Throughout most of his life he didn’t have access to equipment to duplicate these tapes, so each tape was recorded live and few were ever the same.

In a way, Hi, How Are You felt like one of these cassette tapes being passed off to me.

I try not to spend too much time thinking about it because it gets a little weird, but the things that the various iPhone sites pick up on can make the difference between a game gaining a foot hold in the wild west that is the App Store and becoming an iPhone development success story or falling in to obscurity amongst the tens of thousands of other games on the platform.

While I’m just picking out games that I think are cool, on the other end of the App Store is a developer sitting there with their fingers crossed hoping someone notices their game, that it gets featured, or something else to validate the immense time (and often monetary) investment in the project.

Hi, How Are You is the first iPhone game I found myself writing about not only because I thought it was fun, but because I wanted to do my small part in helping to fulfill Daniel’s dreams of sharing his art and music— A strange feeling to have over an iPhone game, as so many of them only serve as enjoyable distractions while waiting in line somewhere.

If you own an iPhone, give Hi, How Are You a shot and If you have time, watch The Devil and Daniel Johnston. While I can’t say for certain that they will have the same effect on you, I don’t like thinking that if it wasn’t for randomly stumbling across this video game I would have never discovered Daniel Johnston.

It really makes me wonder what else I’m missing.

In the paper (again) today.

Thu, 28 May 2009 11:26:00 -0500

The Naperville Sun ran an article today based on their Twitter feedback earlier in the week from the following tweet:

I responded and got published in the newspaper:

On Twitter, Eli Hodapp (@hodapp) wrote: “I am texting or using Twitter while driving, walking and doing most other things. A phone with QWERTY makes it very easy.”

When I asked if he ever had a close call, he responded, “No, I exceed the brain power requirements to do two things at once. ;) I can type without looking, that helps too.”

Complete Article: “Pull over before you read this”

The article mentions an impending text messaging while driving ban that already passed the state Senate and is on the way to the House which I wasn’t aware of. Can you really blame me though? Illinois politics is nothing but theatrics and corruption. Always has been, always will be. While waiting for a phone call this afternoon I fired off an email to the Naperville Sun about all this.

Don’t you think this “texting ban” is a little ridiculous and just creating legislation for the sake of creating legislation? I admit it’s been quite a while since I took Driver’s Ed so my recollection of the rules of the road might be a little foggy, but isn’t it already illegal to drive while distracted? Why do we need to define what distractions are banned?

So they pass a law to ban texting while driving, what about passing a law against sending morse code from your HAM radio? How about a law against playing Tetris a your Gameboy while driving? These should be common sense things you’re not supposed to do if they’re distracting you to the point that you’re not operating your vehicle in a safe manner. If Illinois legislators feel it’s prudent to waste their time creating common sense laws, I anxiously await much needed legislation requiring consumers to give milk that is approaching its expiration date a sniff test before pouring it on their cereal.

How many Illinois residents are out of a job, are without healthcare, or are in numerous other perilous situations because of the state of the economy? This is honestly the best way our elected representatives have found to spend their time? Creating common sense nanny laws?

I guess I can’t say I’m surprised.

Nanny laws are the best. Thankfully Illinois is a virtual utopia and there’s quite literally nothing else for our state legislators to do aside from things like this.

…Oh wait.

How do I make my video vertical like Zen Bound!?

Mon, 18 May 2009 18:20:00 -0500

I’ve already gone over the importance of producing a high quality trailer for your iPhone game in my previous post, iPhone Developer PSA. If you’re new here, I’d check that out first just so I can completely hammer in to your brain how important things like this are if you want to have any success at all in advertising your iPhone game.

Anyway, on with the show.

A problem I recently ran in to when shooting a video of an iPhone game with my camcorder is figuring out the best way to capture games that are played in portrait mode. Landscape games are easy to shoot and look fantastic on YouTube in both standard and high definition, however, once you flip your iPhone 90 degrees you’re faced with black bars of doom that do nothing but waste valuable screen real estate that can be used for other, more interesting content. The first example I saw of this was on the Zen Bound site, although I’m sure there are many more instances where people have employed this technique that I’m unaware of.

Notice how they’re able to have the video in the left column without a single pixel of wasted space? Looks pretty awesome, doesn’t it? I looked around on Google for any tutorial on how do do this without much luck. Most results either were poorly worded Yahoo Answers questions, or involved Windows Movie Maker on some level and of course none mentioned how to embed the video. So, I give you, an abbreviated guide on how to make a vertical embedded movie look as nice as the Zen Bound site.

Step 1: Shoot the Video

This obviously goes without saying, but it never hurts to state the obvious I suppose. Shoot your video of whatever you’re capturing with your camera sideways, shocking I know. If you’re using a screen capture program, make sure you’re using a decent vertical aspect ratio.

Notice how I am holding my camera SIDEWAYS!

Step 2: Import and Edit Video

Use whatever program you usually work with for importing and editing your video. Keep in mind that at this point everything will be rotated to the side so feel free to tilt your head if you need to. I used iMovie, but either iterations of Final Cut obviously will work just as well.

Whatever you do make sure the awesome music you include with your video isn’t something licensed since YouTube is policed like crazy for musical copyrights.

Step 3: Export Video

At this point, we just want to get the video out of the application used to edit it. We will be compressing the video later, so save it as whatever format you feel comfortable working with. To do this in iMovie ‘09, go to the “Share” menu, then select “Export using Quicktime…”

I saved the movie as an uncompressed .avi, which will create an absolutely massive file at full quality without any compression. If you don’t have tons of free drive space or don’t mind waiting for things to encode choose something else.

I went in to the settings and turned everything up all the way, but you can save it however you want to.

Step 4: Open Video in Quicktime

Find the video, open it, and make sure it all looks OK. When you open it, it will still obviously be sideways. To rotate the video, go to the “Window” menu, then select “Show Movie Properties” or hit Fruit+J.

The properties window will appear, click the row in the table for “Video Track” and there will be a row of buttons towards the bottom to flip and rotate the video. Click clockwise or counterclockwise depending on which way you were holding your camera.

The video should instantly rotate and you can close this window.

You should be looking at something like this now.

Step 5: Export and Compress Video

In Quicktime, go to the “File” menu then select “Export” or use the key combo which is Fruit+E.

Now, I am exporting my video as MPEG-4 because I like the H.264 codec. Click “Options…” to get to the export settings.

Again, all of the video codecs and compression settings can be changed to whatever you want, the important part is to set the “Image Size” to “Custom” and specify your width and height. My video was 1080i, so I’m swapping the width and height here to be 1080 by 1920. Once you’ve figured out what you want your bitrate to be and how you want to compress your sound, hit OK and wait for it to do its thing.

Step 6: Upload to YouTube

Upload your video to YouTube like you normally would, grab a sandwich while you wait for it to process, make sure it all looks OK.

Step 7: Embed Video

Alright, so we’ve got our video uploaded to YouTube with massive black bars on each side of it. Thankfully, the YouTube player is smart enough to disregard these black bars when you’re embedding it. Grab your embed code off YouTube and manually edit the width and height to match the aspect ratio of your video. For this video, I’m using 485x885. If you get small black bars just decrease the dimension that the bars are appearing on until they go away completely!

And there you have it, a video hosted on YouTube rotated 90 degrees! If you want to get fancy, you can be like the NimbleBit guys and frame your embedded video in an iPhone.

Great Expectations

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:34:00 -0500

Something that I’ve been noticing more and more as I get deeper in to the iPhone “scene” is the increasingly unrealistic expectations in what some gamers come to demand for their money when buying something from the App Store. I realize this could entirely just be the extremely vocal minority, but a shocking number of people all seem to be looking for the same thing: A phenomenal gaming experience at a rock bottom price supported via free updates for the foreseeable future. If this really is what the market as a whole is looking for, I really don’t know how the current state of the App Store economy is sustainable.

Just for fun, let’s throw out some numbers. Say your average game development company is employing a team of three people for an iPhone game, one artist, and two programmers. These three guys all are making a $40,000 a year salary which is hilariously low especially if this imaginary game company is in any major metropolitan area. Costs for raw salary alone for this team to work on a game amounts to $10,000 a month. This isn’t taking in to account any benefits they have, the cost of the computers and software they’re using, the electricity to power them, rent for the office they’re working out of, taxes or anything else you have to pay for to run a business.

Your average iPhone game seems to be in development for 2-3 months, so for bare payroll alone we’re looking at $25,000 invested for our hypothetical game. It has almost become expected for a game to launch at a “promotional” price, and it seems the gaming community as a whole demands this price be as close to 99¢ as possible. At that price point, after Apple’s take, they need to sell just under 36,000 copies to break even for salary alone.

What am I getting at here with all this scary financial talk? Well, earlier today a review for Pixel Mine’s Underworlds was published on Touch Arcade. I really enjoyed the game, I’m even casually working on my second play through in my spare time currently which is really pretty rare for me. I’m proud of my review in that I felt that I provided a detailed analysis of the game while mentioning some of the flaws and providing a conclusion that even though the game wasn’t perfect, it still was a really fun hack and slash RPG.

It didn’t take long for this comment to come rolling in-

“The art and sound design of Underworlds is top notch”

Compared to what? 1993 Lands of Lore on the PC? This game looks extremely cheap and hammered together quick and dirty. A commenter already mentioned the lack of story.

What does it take here to get a good review? Eye-Candy only?

The iPhone has shown that it is capable of showing a lot more than shabby conversions. I for one would love to see this idiocy end and game companies start to finally put real polished games on this platform. What does it take? I mean seriously. The iphone is becoming a 99 Cent platform with anything that looks remotely better being called “polished”.

Yeah right polished. With a 16 year old dirty rag.

I’m probably taking this way too seriously, and should probably just write the comment off as flame bait. Regardless, he does raise an interesting point. Have our expectations been compromised because of the sheer amount of shovelware on the platform? With gamers clamoring for more and more titles at rock bottom prices, I really can’t blame developers for churning out endless 99¢ apps. And really, grading on a curve in a sea of games which range from terrible to mediocre, games like Underworlds do stand out as something I would call “fantastic” in comparison.

But how does Underworlds rate against DS, PSP, or other “real” handheld console games? Pretty poorly, but the same can be said for nearly any iPhone game I can think of. I really don’t think it’s a fair comparison at all to make. DS games are generally bankrolled by publishers who throw out buckets full of money to finance a decently sized development team working on a reasonable schedule for the project. When they’re finished, their product sells for at minimum $29.99, but often anywhere between that and $39.99. Given an average price of $35, selling the same amount of units that the previously mentioned imaginary iPhone game company has to sell to break even, the competing DS game grosses $1,260,000.

Obviously with physical media distribution, Nintendo licensing fees, the publisher’s cut, and everything else what the developer actually sees is a fraction of that amount but even so, given the massive disparity in the realistic financials between a DS and iPhone game… How can an iPhone developer ever afford to provide a DS-like experience unless gamers as a whole begin to accept that better games won’t come out of a market where developers need to price cheaper than any other platform in history to remain competitive?

They really can’t.

iPhone Developer PSA

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:05:00 -0500

Not too long ago Ian Marsh made an interesting post on the NimbleBit blog about always being prepared to be contacted by Apple marketing. Ian chooses to take a proactive approach towards the prospect of being featured by Apple and offers fellow developers a list of things required of them should they be lucky enough to get chosen. After thinking about this for a few days I figured I’d offer developers a list of things they should have ready to provide the iPhone blogs since it’s a lot easier to get on Touch Arcade than it is to be one in one of the three rotating banners on the top of the App Store.

The absolute best thing you can do is create your own video for your game. Outside of the emulator in the SDK, there is quite literally no good way to get video of an iPhone game. Arn makes all the Touch Arcade videos using his top-end HD camera, and even the best ones still look terrible in comparison to the worst emulator screen capture videos. Don’t believe me? Compare the following videos-

The difference is absolutely night and day. The official video is surrounded by the company logo with a background motif that matches the NimbleBit web site. It shows off the title screen, a couple short burger orders, and the creation of a sky burger. The second video includes 30 seconds of narration and blog plugs while you stare at the game’s menu among other things.

Instead of talking over videos on Touch Arcade we use an audio line in to capture high quality game audio, but the fact remains, when we make videos we’re only taking a minute or two of early gameplay. If your game starts out slow but ramps up to being totally awesome, chances are that isn’t going to get caught on our videos. (Largely because we just don’t have time to shoot 2 hours of gameplay video and crop the cool parts together.) Furthermore, all iPhone videos are usually done in the dark to eliminate screen glare, so all that space NimbleBit is using to make you stare at their logo is completely wasted. The vibrant colors are also lost as the cameras the videos are shot with desperately try to figure out how to color balance a bright LCD in a dark room.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a well produced video is worth a million. There’s a great post on how to create dramatic iPhone videos on the atebits blog which I highly recommend all iPhone developers read and follow. Using SimFinger, Snapz Pro X, and the video editing application of your choice, you could end up with something like this-

I realize Birdhouse isn’t a game, but the point remains, the video is phenomenal. I think the app itself is stupid since I don’t take Twitter anywhere near seriously enough to need to save tweet drafts for later, but I bought it anyway. Such is the power of good advertising. Would Birdhouse be making its way around the Twittersphere if the only promotional materials they had consisted of some dude taking video with a digital camera with the lights off in his bathroom? (It’s a rhetorical question, the answer is of course not.)

When I play games I’m writing reviews for, I’m taking screenshots constantly. I’ll usually end up with a hundred or more screenshots and from there we’ll use maybe a half dozen if that. With the lag between taking screenshots on the iPhone, I often either miss really cool parts or don’t get them as well as I could have. Replaying to grab screenshots usually is fairly futile since I generally always am running in to the same issues of having screenshots which range from decent to mediocre compared to what’s actually happening in game.

Just like a video, if you can supply some totally awesome screenshots of your game filled with action, you need to snag them. Even after spending hours on a game, I’m still nowhere near as familiar with it as the people who created the game. What I think makes for a cool screenshot could be insignificant compared to some massive boss encounter which might be really hard for someone who is actually playing the game to accurately capture. If you’re recording a video of your game in an emulator, you can go frame by frame and grab the ultimate screenshots. I don’t have that luxury!

As a developer, you have an immense amount of control in what gets published. If you provide us a wicked video and some ridiculously cool screenshots, of course we’ll throw them up. If you’re not providing these materials to review and news sites, I must ask the question- Why trust someone else to capture videos and screenshots hoping they make your game look good when you have the power yourself to make sure the visual accompaniment to whatever press coverage you can generate looks great?

Don’t be scared of sending out review copies. There’s a lot of downtime in between when your game is submitted to the App Store and when it gets approved. Ideally, you want review sites to have your game in their hands and being played and written about so when it drops on the App Store they can publish the review at the same time. There’s no better time to generate lots of buzz about your game than the day it hits the App Store. Not sending out review copies of the version which was submitted to Apple is really a wasted opportunity because good reviews won’t pop up until a few days later.

Everything I write about I play through thoroughly. I might spend a couple days playing, then a couple days writing and revising before I put my review up to be published. That is nothing but wasted time and lost publicity when this all could have been done before your game went live.

My dream email from a developer on a game they’re releasing would include a link to a well produced video captured from the emulator, a zip file full of amazing screenshots, a brief description on what the game is about, a good explanation of what makes it stand out in the crowd to be worth my time to look at, and finally a link to download the pre-release copy. This makes my job easy, it makes your game look good since you largely control what media gets posted with my review. (Since presumably the video and screenshots you sent are so good we don’t need to bother to take any.)

There’s a symbiotic relationship to be had between developers and the authors of iPhone sites. By providing these things you’re making it easier to write about your game, and by producing an amazing press kit you’re guaranteed to generate more interest than simply sending out a form letter with promo codes.

If you don’t have my UDID, and you’ve decided to heed my advice, drop me an email.

Sync in Progress...

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:31:00 -0500

There has been a serious lack of activity around here for the past month, mostly because I’ve been using Twitter a lot more which made re-posting stupid links and images here seem fairly redundant but also because I’ve spent the last month writing for Touch Arcade. (Actually, longer than that. I’m just going off when my first review was published.)

Getting involved in the iPhone gaming scene and the tight knit circle of App Store developers has been a pretty interesting experience. There is a remarkable amount of people out there who have pulled amazingly innovative and highly refined gaming experiences out of thin air who have seen massive financial success from coding apps in their underwear. Unfortunately, for every iShoot selling hundreds of thousands of copies and every NimbleBit home office to real office story there are thousands of developers who miss the boat for one reason or another.

I think the biggest mistake far too many of these “developers” seem to make is the gross misunderstanding in thinking the combination of a $99 SDK and an Objective-C book from Amazon is all that’s required for a golden ticket aboard the iPhone millionaires cruise liner. Sure, that’s all you need to get started, but what they don’t sell on Amazon is innovative ideas and the talent required to turn those ideas in to games people will pay money for. It’s downright tragic the sheer number of people who just don’t understand this.

Sure, you might get lucky and be the next iFart, but the success of flash in the pan crapware isn’t something that can be planned or predicted. Most importantly, these overnight sensations don’t create sustainable income to fund future projects.

Another thing that I don’t think a lot of people seem to get is that it isn’t review or news sites that make your App Store offerings successful. Sure, I can write up a glowing review on Touch Arcade, but even with our massive readership it’s still small potatoes compared to the number of people who own iPhones and iPod Touches. How do you captivate that audience?

By producing a good product.

Truly great games create word of mouth that spreads like wildfire, your game starts climbing in the App Store sales rankings, and before you know it you’re being featured by Apple. According to quite a few developers I’ve talked to, once you gain some street cred by releasing one great game, it just gets easier.

So, aside from dealing with people who don’t understand this, working with Arn and Blake on Touch Arcade has been tons of fun. It takes up much more of my free time than I originally anticipated, but I really have a hard time complaining about doing something I love.

We’re talking about doing some new stuff on the site which I probably shouldn’t divulge here… But needless to say, it will be awesome, and I really look forward to being a part of it.

Rollin' on d20's.

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I love how accessible Dungeons & Dragons is. I’ve been playing a 3.5 edition game every Friday from 10 PM to 2 AM at Comic Connections in downtown Oswego. 3.5 is much more complicated than 4th edition but even so, it’s such a welcome change from my days of PC and console gaming.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast hosting LANgasm with all my friends back when LAN parties were still relevant. At our prime we were hosting monthly 40-80 man events at the Hampton Inn in Aurora, IL. I met some amazing people who are still close friends of mine to this day, but LAN parties had such a high cost of entry that it was hard to bring anyone who wasn’t already an avid PC gamer in to the LAN party scene.

You needed a PC capable of running whatever games were popular at the time. Most PC games also had CD key schemes which required everyone to have their own copy to play multiplayer so you’re easily looking at thousands of dollars that each person had to invest to come and play.

Broadband internet market penetration, people getting bored of Counter-Strike, and the crew of guys I ran LANgasm with all entering different stages of their lives killed off our LAN party. Some of us moved on to console gaming, since the XBOX 360 offered such a complete online experience… But even then, you’re looking at hundreds of dollars for the system, and at games coming in at $50-60 a pop. It’s neither cheap nor easy to get new people involved.

What do you need to play Dungeons & Dragons? Some people to play with, as well as the ability to read/write and perform basic calculations-That’s it. I obviously can’t speak for all groups, but everyone I know at the comic shop in Oswego as well as the group I play 4th Edition with are extremely friendly to anyone with even a remote interest in the game.

You can borrow books and dice from anyone at the table, character sheet PDFs are free online, and you really don’t even know how to play to have a great time. Everyone likes new players, and until you get a handle on the rules there is nothing wrong with telling the DM what you want to do and ask what you need to roll to do it.

I really can’t believe how much fun I’ve had playing Dungeons & Dragons lately. It’s awesome to have a hobby that you can get new people involved in when all that is required of them is the desire to learn the game and the availability to meet with the rest of the people who play.

If you’re in the Oswego/Naperville IL area and are even remotely interested in playing… Let me know!

Topple 2 - Triangles make for cruel mistresses.

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:02:00 -0500

Say hello to my first review published on Touch Arcade.

Video

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:23:22 -0500

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Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:35:04 -0500

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Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:45:40 -0500

Video

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:41:23 -0500

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:40:27 -0500

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:45:24 -0500