Category Archives: Markel!

Every post on this blog goes in this category. It’s how I roll.

Piracy Inception

When we released our very first game, Game Dev Tycoon (for Mac, Windows and Linux) yesterday, we did something unusual and as far as I know unique. We released a cracked version of the game ourselves, minutes after opening our Store.

I uploaded the torrent to the number one torrent sharing site, gave it a description imitating the scene and asked a few friends to help seed it.

Fascinating story about what a game dev learned through intentional piracy of their product, notable at least for this chart:

Over 93.6% of players stole the game. We know this because our game contains some code to send anonymous-usage data to our server.

Rather unfortunately, piracy appears to be a problem with indies just as much as with big-name publishers. And these guys even did the right thing and released the game without DRM. If you wonder why game publishers refuse to abandon DRM as a concept, look no further.

This is also why games are moving towards always-connected and pay-to-play; it avoids this problem altogether. If you don’t like that trend (and you shouldn’t), buy the games you play. Support developers.

Fighting GIFs

An awful lot of my adolescence was spent fighting friends in stages like the ones in this amazingly huge collection of fighting game backgrounds.

The collection is SNK-heavy, but it illustrates the artistry that came from making something that has to sit in the background, yet be memorable. I have a particular fondness for the stages from The Last Blade.

Dealing with constraints does cool things to art.

Trunked

Markel!, , ,

You’re in darkness—
A flash of light cracks through—
Your eyelids open, but you still see only BLACK.

The back of your skull aches, ringing like a churchbell.

Need to… need to get back…But back where?

You’re lying on your side, but strangely in motion.

If this is a hangover, it’s the worst hangover of your life.

I just finished playing a neat little self-contained text adventure called Trunked. It’s definitely a callback to the days of Infocom games, but the difference here is that this one’s entirely generated using HTML. It’s a quick play, so I’d urge you to give it a shot and see what you make of it. I died three times before reaching (an/the?) ending.

More interesting than the game itself is the toolset that was used to create it, which is called Twine and is available for Windows, OS X, and a command-line version that uses Python.

The final output is HTML, and Javascript, and is open-sourced under the GPL (github link). Fancy yourself a game designer? The tools are there, and they are free. :)

(And if you want something that’s a slightly more complicated and graphical open source game creation engine, take a look at LÖVE, a toolset for creating games using Lua.)