I’ve had to take a break on the article-writing to immerse myself in my work.  Theory is fun, speccing can be rewarding, and hooking up is good, but sometimes I’ve found myself missing real hands-on gameplay programming.

A friend of mine has been creating a Rogue-alike as a side-project labor of love for the past few years, and recently it went from sporadic updates to a full-on development flurry.  This of course made me very jealous, as tile-based engines allow for amazing freedom in creation…  There are few limits and implentation is a breeze.  It’s all about the gameplay.

The game is Dungeonmans, and he releases updates openly as an in-progress effort…  It obviously revels in its old-school presentation…  although the graphics are getting better by the day.   He’s created an overworld and NPC quest system as well as invested a great sense of humor within, so in some ways it outpaces similar indie dungeon-crawlers already.  It even can gather play stats that get collected at the home base for analysis and high scores.

Recently he made the codebase available to a few of us, and we’ve all been diving in and having a blast.  I’ve been working on a trap system recently, and I gotta say it’s the most fun I’ve had with development since Heretic II.  It’s been a while since I’ve worked on something past midnight without even noticing.

It’s not Diablo III, but fun doesn’t have to be developed in 3D by hundreds of people…   Check it out.

I should talk a bit about my experiences with the academic group that made up Joystick101 and the local groups around it.  As I reached 2004 and was just finishing up X-Men Legends, I was getting pretty burned out on the industry…  11 years of making varieties of shooters at Raven was entertaining, but was growing into a somewhat single-note affair.  Around then, Nathan McKenzie, an incredible gameplay programmer I had been fortunate to poach from a college back in (I think) 1996 was acquainted with a lot of the game academics around the University of Wisconsin.  After an awesome run completing Soldier of Fortune in 2000, Nathan had taken a couple of years off and did something of a journey of self-discovery…  He came back to work on Quake 4 in (I think) 2003 with a lot of academic knowledge and a pretty unique view on games. 

Anyway, Nathan introduced me to the UW academics that had been studying games…  something I had no idea existed.  They were an incredibly interesting group, including Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkeuhler, Alice Robison and notably Professor Jim Gee.  Every week a group of them, including a number of other graduate students in departments such as Education, Linguistics and English, would gather in a game wonderland known as Room 130.  Every week these folks would gather and play a new game, observe and talk about them.  These were not the hardcore gamers that I had grown accustomed to interacting with, although they loved games with an equal fervor.

 Coming from a fairly practical point of view on games and development over the previous 11 years, I felt refreshed.  I didn’t ultimately “switch” to an academic perspective as much as Nathan did (he’s doing awesome, more power to him!), but my eyes opened a bit, knowing that there were more angles to look at games than I had realized…  Not everyone was searching for that 20-levels-8-weapons-12-enemies magic formula that seemed so common out there.  It was just what I needed to help me explore other genres and places. 

So, to the Room 130 folk, my thanks.

This article was the first one written for the website Joystick101.  I actually wrote it because I wanted to get into GDC in 2004…  This was a few months before I left Raven, so it was natural that they couldn’t pay for me to go that year.  My compatriot Nathan McKenzie (also at Raven during that time) and I both wanted in, and we knew some of the folks who started the website (including Kurt Squire, who is now well-known in game academic circles).  After we each did an article (sadly the original postings were erased as Joystick101 got relaunched in early 2007), and with some other credentials, we were able to travel to San Jose on our own dime and have an incredibly educational (and enjoyable) week at GDC.

 It was interesting posting to that crowd…  It was a group that was pretty academic-heavy, so getting content from a developer was a rather novel thing.  As a result, I kept this first article rather general.

Play Appraisal 1: Observations of a Developer