ApathyWorks now has a new Facebook page! Please Like it!
Between that page and this blog, I'll be showing off new Cute Things art in advance of the PC release!
Also, part of me died when I had to capitalize the word "Like." Wait, there I go again.
Comments (0)More info on the facelift that the PC version of Cute Things Dying Violently is getting in a bit. But first, here's some YouTube videos of a very funny dude playing through my game and commenting on it all the while.
Part 1:
More after the jump.
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The following is from an email I wrote to my brother when he asked me for my opinions on Dear Esther. He didn't respond to the email, but Tweeted at me very briefly: "Apparently, you emailed me a review for your website."
That's a good idea. Here's my review, with tons of spoilers, so please beware.
Okay, first: it's beautiful. It's very beautiful. It's the most beautiful game I've played, until the next one. I think it's because I used to be a level designer that I look at this and just see a collection of pixels, shaders, and lighting choices, so that a good chunk of it is largely lost on me.
Since I can appreciate the beauty without really giving a damn about it, let's move on to the story: we've all heard it before. I learned the title of the game and immediately thought, "$10 says Esther is dead." Which she is, of course, killed in a car accident in the south of England. The narrator wants to blame the offending driver for being drunk, the offending driver blames birds that flew in front of his car, but whatever, Esther is dead. And the narrator is now walking around this island in the Outer Hebrides, reading snippets of letters that he wrote to her, presumably after her death.
The whole thing reeks of "level designer who can't model and writer who can't program decide to make a game without models or programming." You only have those two components: a very pretty world and a narrator reading bits of exposition... randomly, it turns out. If you leave a level designer to his own devices, what does he do? He makes something pretty. If you leave a writer to his own devices, what does he do? Write about death, apparently. And unfailingly, it seems: I've already played a shit ton of indie games that have practically this exact same plot. Oh, and the plot is a ripoff of a Ken Follett book from 1975: family gets into a car accident in England, horrible results, family goes to live in exile on an island off the coast of Scotland and become shepherds. So my patience is a bit thin.
And I really hate how game design writers always go for purple prose. I only forgave it in Amnesia because the backstory itself was fascinating, as opposed to the line delivery. Out of all the spoken lines in Dear Esther, only one caught me off guard in a way that impressed me. "Fire, or soil?" Took me a second to figure out that the narrator was debating cremating Esther or burying her. That I like.
Since it's a guy just wandering around, talking to himself, the whole thing plays on ambiguity. Except that I figured out the "twist" (Esther is dead) within moments of starting the game. We live in a post-M Night Shyamalan world, where anyone who isn't blind and has read a book or watched a movie recently knows that writers shouldn't use ambiguity to hide a twist, because it's been done to death at this point, and every other movie or book or game is experienced with the notion that you should be on the lookout for the inevitable twist! I'd rather assume that there isn't one and then come across one that was hidden in plain sight, like Bioshock's Would You Kindly? zinger.
And since the twist is about death, let's talk about death. Or, rather: why don't game designers ever write about small ideas? Or at least smaller ideas, like love? Jonathan Blow spent all of Braid disguising an anti nuclear proliferation theme as a squabble between a couple. Points for delivery, no marks for my interest in it. Oh gee, you don't like nuclear weapons? Nobody likes nuclear weapons, welcome to 1949.
The result of all this sturm und drang over Big Ideas is that I'd just really like to play a story-driven indie game that I can't hang the adjective "pretentious" from. Make me care about characters, make me care about smaller, more relatable themes. Maybe try your hand at good poetry instead of purple prose. Stop doing this "big ideas + twist!" bullshit.
In the end, though, it appears I'm the only guy who doesn't like Dear Esther. Which, it turns out, I'm fine with. It's a beautiful game that tries something new and attempts to be meaningful. Just because it didn't float with me doesn't mean you shouldn't try it. In fact, I've been hectoring everyone to give it a whirl, seeing as how I appear to be in the extreme minority. Support indies!
Comments (1)What to do? I've accomplished a ton of work on the PC version of Cute Things Dying Violently, none of which is photogenic, really. So what should I blog about instead? How 'bout the fact that I'm going through the Uncharted series backwards, and just finished Uncharted 2. Which, for my money, is a far better game than it's threequel.
Oh wait, I already reviewed Uncharted 2.
Alright, back to CTDV. I hope to have something to show soon.
Comments (0)I spent MLK weekend dogsitting a canine that was fond of pooping six times a day and howling at 3am and waking the neighbors. As a thank you/apology, the owners bought me a PS3 for my troubles. So, hey, here's an Uncharted 3 mini-review!
I should clarify that I know full well the worth of bloggers who review popular games months after everyone has already beaten them, and that I mostly do this to organize my thoughts on good and bad design choices.
Things I Liked
Things I Didn't Like
Why, hello there. I'm back from the warm glow of spending Christmas and New Years at hearth and home in Rhode Island. That means that I've returned to my usual city of stubby, unadorned concrete boxes posing as buildings, host to a quixotic collection of ugly white people under severe delusions of grandeur.
One must soldier on.
Or not, since it's time again to arglbargl about Xbox Live Indie Games. For a change, instead of describing its latest indignities through the lens of Cute Things Dying Violently, let's instead focus on Scott Tykoski, a bonafide developer at Stardock who decided to go slumming in XBLIG with the Christmas-themed Elfsquad 7.
Poor Scott recently tweeted that Elfsquad 7 had only sold 600 copies on XBLIG (at $1 a copy) since its release, which is dispiriting for a number of reasons. But since my opinion on how viable XBLIG is as a market should be pretty well-known at this point, I'll only focus on one reason in particular: Elfsquad 7 got lots of good press. Joystiq, Kotaku, Indiegames.com, Gamasutra, and plenty of other sites quickly took note of the professional developer and his game. Lots of people paid attention. And still... 600 sales.
So, we're looking at XBLIG as a market that is even now becoming more resistant to good press, one of the most reliable levers of ensuring (or at least boosting) commercial success in pretty much any market. XBLIG doesn't have many saving graces left for those interested in earning money from it, and one of those few remaining graces is either quickly receding or is now entirely gone.
And Scott's not my only data point. Cursed Loot (formerly Epic Dungeon) was the best-selling game of the XBLIG Winter Uprising that occurred a year ago. According to its creator, Eyehook Games, the title sold 3,800 copies (at $1 a copy) on its first day on the market last December. And that was before that game (and the other Winter Uprising games) got featured prominently on the Xbox Live Dashboard. By comparison, CTDV (I lied, I am talking about it), a game I'd wager was similarly popular, sold 700 copies (at $1 a copy) on its first day of sales about 9 months after the Winter Uprising concluded, and only 800 copies on its best day, when the Summer Uprising ad went up on the Xbox Dashboard.
Two games, both popular and well-received, both backed by prominent Uprisings and similar levels of advertisement from Microsoft... yet one exhibited far slower sales than the other, just nine months later.
There could be many other reasons for that, including purchasing habits of different customer bases (CTDV seems to have sold as well as Cursed Loot over all, indicating that the long tail of purchases has made up for lower initial sales), but I can't help but think that the marked difference of 3,800 sales versus 800 sales is from rapidly-declining market interest. Fewer customers are interested in XBLIG as a whole, and the market is contracting to the point where even consistent good press is losing its relevance.
One final example: the creator of the recently-released twin stick shooter P-3 admitted in the App Hub forums that his game only sold 21 copies (at $1 a copy) on its first day on the XBLIG market. His conversion rate of trial downloads to purchases was 5%, which is... saddening. And I can't help but compare that with my own crappy geography game, which sold 60 copies on its first day of sales back in June 2010. As a genre, twin stick shooters are far more popular than edutainment, so once again I find myself wondering just how much the market has contracted.
Comments (0)Or at least they pretend to. For long enough to humor me, anyway.
First up, an article on Supply and Demand on Xbox Live Indie Games that I posted way back in September has made its way to Gamasutra, where it was yesterday's Featured blog post. Nice!
Secondly, Tim Hurley over at Gear-Fish roused himself from his stupor long enough to review Cute Things Dying Violently. (Tim, it's been out for about four months now.)
Finally, Tim also snuck a few interview questions my way. I hold forth on the usual game dev subjects like upgrading CTDV, future games to be made, and platform preference, but Tim also threw a curveball my way regarding cooking. That was a really fun one to answer.
Comments (1)Bad news, nobody. Someone hacked my Xbox Live account and spent $120 of my hard-earned money on games I don't get to play. While Microsoft is investigating the intrusion (and taking their sweet time in doing so), they've shut down my Xbox Live account, which means I can't use it to test out updates to Cute Things Dying Violently. Which means the desperately-needed Xbox patch for it is on hold.
Great.
In far better news, Kairi Vice of IndieGamerChick has been featuring Xbox Live Indie Games developers on her blog while she recuperates from a medical issue. The series is called "Tales From the Dev Side", and Tuesday saw the publishing of Ian Stocker's (Soulcaster I and II, Escape Goat) article on pricing, while yesterday I had the privilege of seeing my article go live. It's about making your game stand out, which is important no matter what market you're releasing it in, but has a few special ideas just for XBLIG.
I hereby demand that you read it. Twice.
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