My latest Outsider Videogames column is up at Paste Magazine.

I review the IGF Pirate Kart, which if you don’t know what it is, well… read my article, I guess!

Vertex Dispenser goes on sale on Steam today for $8.99 for both PC and Mac (after a week the price will bump up to $9.99). Let me be clear: this is a game I dearly love. If you and I have remotely similar taste in games, I think you’ll enjoy it and you should probably just go buy it right now. If you need convincing, watch the somewhat enigmatic trailer for a taste of what it’s about. Then if you’re still not convinced, you can read the rest of this post.

So Vertex Dispenser and I go way back.

I was a judge for IGF 2010. Back in November 2009 I was assigned about a dozen games to play and rate for first round judging. The very first game I judged was Vertex Dispenser, and I was awestruck. It is a game with no grand pretensions: you’re a little robot thing and you’re taking over territory and shooting other robot things. And yet the game manages to resonate with me.  It’s addicting in a “just one more turn” kind of way (though the game is not really turn-based). It’s spare but beautiful, without copying tired indie game aesthetic tropes. It takes RTS elements, strips away the unit management, merges what’s left with pure graph theory, and adds perhaps a dash of tower defense to the mix. It’s a game that at its core is about moving and shooting and grabbing territory, but adds a layer of mathematical puzzle solving that is optional for the casual player but provides immense amounts of depth for those who want it (not unlike the Geo Panel system in Disgaea, in that sense).

The official description is pretty illuminating:

Vertex Dispenser is a fast-paced abstract strategy game with mathematical puzzle elements. Wrestle for control of territory on bizarre geometric worlds. Carefully plan your conquests to maximise the colours of your vertices, capture solid faces to defend them, then eradicate your enemies with a variety of special attacks.

That sounds like the perfect post-E3 palate cleanser, doesn’t it?

I gave the game top marks, but sadly it did not make it past the first round of IGF.

Once judging was over, I contacted its creator, Michael Brough AKA Smestorp. (If you were at GDC this year, you might remember his mind-bending demo of The Sense of Connectedness at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions.) I contacted him to offer encouragement: that I truly believed that Vertex Dispenser should have been a finalist, and that it was absolutely worth continuing to work on despite its failure to place in IGF. I also extended a general offer of help. Turned out he needed testers, so I gave a bunch of feedback myself and then rounded up some people from Boston Indies who were willing guinea pigs. This is how he ended up meeting Arshan Gailus, who would eventually provide the game’s music.

Seeing the game get released today, I can’t help but feel a little bit like a proud godparent or midwife.

Vertex Dispenser is for you if you like strategy games, “bizarre geometric worlds,” or (heaven forbid) solving graph theory problems in real time to boost your power meters.

Vertex Dispenser is for you if you’re getting kinda tired of indie games. If you want to be inspired by an indie game that isn’t a yet-another-throwback platformer, but that also doesn’t self-consciously attempt to “push the medium forward” by including some story about the futility of existence combined with an all-macrame art style or whatever.

Vertex Dispenser is for you if E3 left a sour taste in your mouth and you want to get excited about video games again.

In other words, if you’re reading this, Vertex Dispenser is for you. Get it on Steam, $9.99 (or $8.99 if you’re quick about it!).

I’ve been enjoying this new “Optimistic Indie Developer” meme. You can see a bunch here. Generator available here.

These two strike a bit close to home!

This one, however, is my favorite:

Paging Shane Liesegang…

Spelunky on Facebook. Click to embiggen.

Spelunky would make a great Facebook game.

Stop laughing. I am serious. Well, I am half-serious.

Think about it. Core gameplay happens in short chunks. Most Spelunky runs are maybe 1 to 5 minutes, and a full standard playthrough takes about 20 minutes. There are valuable items, and there’s a huge social motivation to tell your friends about your individual runs. Spelunky for Facebook could be based on the Bejeweled Blitz model: a really fun game you play in short bursts and compete with your friends on a daily/weekly/monthly/all-time leaderboard.

Core Gameplay

Core gameplay of Spelunky would remain completely unchanged from classic Spelunky, but Facebook would provide a framework around the game to allow for competition, sharing of stories, and yes indeed, monetization.

Monetization

At first I was wondering how monetization would work, but I realized that it would be relatively easy.

Items in Spelunky are intrinsically valuable and qualitatively differentiated, far more so than in most Facebook games. For example, the difference between a pistol and a shotgun in a Mafia Wars clone is basically one of attack power. In Spelunky, the pistol and the shotgun do have different damage values but they also interact with the physical simulation in unique ways: bullet spread, recoil, and range come to mind. And I can’t even recall playing a Facebook game with items as varied as the jetpack, the pickaxe, and the rope.

If you’ve ever played Spelunky at any length, think about a situation where I tap you on the shoulder while you’re playing and offer you a shotgun on your next run for the low low price of a dime. You might actually pay me that dime.

The intrinsic value of items in Spelunky also makes them prime gift fodder. The fact that many items are skill-based could add another dimension to gift-giving. “Hey Jane, here’s a teleporter. I thought you could use some practice — they’re pretty useful once you figure out how they work! Some tips: _____”

If I were designing Spelunky for Facebook, I would only allow item purchases or gifts to be applied at the beginning of a run. I would also limit it to one item used at a time. (Maybe two?) One of the great things about items in Spelunky is that while starting with an item like the shotgun does give the  player a distinct advantage, having such an item does not by any means ensure the player will do better. While being able to buy a shotgun on demand would probably make the game trivial, simply making it so that a player will start with the shotgun doesn’t guarantee anything.

I would also add some kind of inventory system where you can accumulate items that you buy or are gifted, to deploy or regift as desired. I would probably allow players the option of putting an item away in their inventory when in-game acquisition occurs. For example, if you’re playing and you come across a cape, but you hate playing with the cape, you can store it in your inventory and give it away to a friend.

Virality

Spelunky Wall Post

If you’ve been following me for more than a couple years you might recall that I once hacked Spelunky to automatically post my in-game exploits to Twitter. What excites me most about this whole silly idea is the prospect of doing something similar on Facebook. It would involve writing some rather tricky code to track not just events that occur, but the context in which they happened. Having worked on a primitive version of this system for SpelunkyTweet, I can say that it’s not a trivial problem but also not capital-H Hard.

One issue that I have with Facebook games is that when they ask me to post about something that just happened on my wall, the event is trivial. Most of the time, I don’t give a crap. Oh yay, I reached level 21. Nobody cares. But if the game could synthesize a short, funny, unique narrative based on the success or failure of my problem-solving attempts and the context in which they occur… that would be awesome. I would post those all the time, because they’d be interesting to my friends.

Imagine a generated wall post like, “I can’t believe it. Nine levels deep into the cave, full health, I’m lucky enough to get a shotgun… and then I fall to my death. Butterfingers can be brutal.” I would be all over that. I would probably limit the moments that in-game wall post requests appear to moments when the player is not at any immediate risk. The post logic would be something like:

• If a notable thing happens
  • Generate a wall post
  • If within the next 60 seconds the player is not moving and no enemies are on the screen
    • Pop up the wall post request
    • Else, throw away the wall post

Wall post requests would always appear following player death. There would probably also be some way for the player to request a wall post manually.

Leaderboard

I’m not going to bother describing the leaderboard system in detail. I see it working along the lines of the one in Bejeweled Blitz, which you can check out for yourself. You can compete against friends and worldwide for daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time best runs.

Conclusion

Someone needs to make this. Derek? Please?

Okay team. Word’s come on down from high: inexplicably we are realigning our resources and focusing on the, um, burgeoning Xbox Live Indie Games market. Our analysts have determined that XBLIG is a hit-driven business. Well by god then we’re going to need to come up with a hit game.

Market analysis time, you know the drill! Jenkins, load up that PowerPoint deck and give it to me straight.

Yes sir. Top 10 best selling Xbox Live Indie Games at the moment:

1. I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1
2. Baby Maker Extreme
3. The Impossible Game
4. Avatar Ninja
5. Try Not to Fart
6. Avatar Paintball
7. Super Avatar World
8. How Smart Are You? IQ Test
9. Zombie Estate
10. Avatar Racedrome

Four avatar games (4, 6, 7, 10). Two zombie games (1, 9). Two games whose primary appeal is to a nine-year-old boy’s sense of humor (2, 5). Two games that position themselves as a direct challenge to the talents of the player (3, 8). And those are simply categorized by primary characteristics. Several games share many of the other characteristsics.

Sir, in my opinion, if we want a hit game on XBLIG, it needs to contain avatars, zombies, puerile humor, and some kind of macho posturing.

Thanks Jenkins. Who’s here with the presentation from the research group? Ah, Peabody, excellent. What have you got for us?

Sir, we’ve played through every one of the top 10 XBLIG games. We lost three good researchers, but I believe you will find what we gained in intel is well worth the cost. Sir, it appears that Try Not To Fart is simply masquerading as a game about farting. Our research shows that Try Not To Fart is actually a dating simulator. The game’s story stars a male protagonist and begins at his first date with a young woman, through the first kiss, up through marriage and the couple having their first child. The humor comes from the juxtaposition of important life events with a series of quick time events where you must successfully not fart during these interactions.

However, the the humor appears to be a clever decoy. What actually happens as you play the game, particularly if you play it well, is you are treated to a movie where a gamer geek somewhat successfully navigates a relationship with an attractive woman.

Sir, it is our opinion that the true draw of Try Not To Fart is that it is an instructional video which allows a 12-year-old boy to learn about dating while being able to save face if his peers find it installed on his Xbox. “It’s not a dating game! It’s a game about FARTING, which all of us young whippersnappers know is hilarious and awesome.” Try Not To Fart is made by Silver Dollar Games, who have many dating-related titles on Xbox Live Indie Games, including one called Don’t B Nervous Talking 2 Girls. This game is an overt instructional program which is heavily mocked on the internet, yet is the 2nd-best-selling title in the “role playing” category on XBLIG. We believe that Silver Dollar learned their lesson, and decided to create a covert dating instructor with Try Not To Fart. The strategy appears successful.

Excellent work as always, Peabody. Send flowers to the families of your departed researchers.

Gentlemen, it appears we have our formula for a hit game. We’re going to have to create a stealth dating simulator with avatars, zombies, and poopie humor that positions itself as a direct challenge to the masculinity of the player.

Wait. I’ve got it.

Don’t Poop On Your Zombie Girlfriend Or She’ll Leave Your Avatar For Me Instead!1!

[applause, standing ovation]

Now now. Thank you. Thank you. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Here’s a 3-minute video review I made of Blendo Games’ Flotilla (Win/XBLIG). It’s a turn-based strategy game of small-scale space ship battles with a metagame that most resembles Strange Adventures in Infinite Space.

Download the demo or purchase the game for $10 on Windows or Xbox Live Indie Games!

What follows is the notes I took on Corvus Elrod’s panel discussion on indie obstacles at LOGIN 2010. Any mistakes are my own!

–

Corvus Elrod, moderator: We have four panelists who are extraordinary in their own right. Andrew Stern of Stumptown Game Machine, released Touch Pets Dogs and also worked on Facade. Charles Berube has released an extraordinary number of quality Flash games, storytelling games, shmups, sidescrollers. Dylan Fitterer produced Audiosurf, available on Steam and on the Zune. Brian Green kept Meridian 59 alive for 9 years, bought the rights to an MMO that was being shut down and kept it alive for almost a decade.

CE: Andrew, what are some obstacles you’ve faced?

AS: one obstacle is the idea of staying indie in the first place. Actually my studio is in the process of being acquired so that’s an obstacle I’ve failed to overcome. There’s a whole host of challenges trying to make indie games. I began in the industry at PF Magic working on Dogz, Catz, in the 1990s. I learned how to develop games in a small startup kind of environment, and in 2000 I quit and went indie, self-funded, it was an ecstatic experience. Developing indie games and watching your bank account drift downward is an emotional roller coaster. One big obstacle for me was how to be able to fit indie dev into your life. I did a blend of consulting work as well as my own indie work. How you pay the rent is important.

CE: How does being acquired present challenges?

AS: One of the reasons we went along with the idea of being acquired was that it would give more resources to the group to build more stuff. Now the group is going to have to grow. I’m a designer/programmer DIY person. The idea of managing a team and being more hands-off is going to be a big adjustment for me. It remains to be seen how much freedom I’ll have although you definitely lose freedom once you start taking funding. It comes down to the relationship you have with the people who are funding you. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to keep going in that indie mode.

CE: Brian, you’ve done development under non-indie positions at 3DO.

BG: It was different from being indie, although when I was at 3DO I was on a small team of one or two people. Since we were such a small team we were kind of ignored, but there’s still the hierarchy and the bosses and being given resources. It was a learning experience working for a publisher. When I went on my own I didn’t have a safety net. I know how things are supposed to work but there are lots of business details that I have to know about: taxes, payroll, etc.

DF: I had an acquisition offer before Audiosurf was released, and it was a good offer, but I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to be a manager and I needed to see the project through.

Audience question: So the acquisition offer was more than you expected to make on the game and you turned it down?

DF: Yes, but I knew that there was the possibility that I could have made more money.

Audience: Did you get advice from a lawyer on the music IP issues around Audiosurf?

DF: Yes, I did.

BG: Not that I encourage anyone to break the law, but a lot of times people get paralyzed by legalities. On some level you need to barrel forward and hope for the best. You run some risk but risk is part of running a business.

CE: Charles has done a lot of Flash games and has tried to turn that into a living.

CB: The whole thing is one long terrible obstacle. I want to focus on the terrifying pressure that’s happening in iPhone, indie, etc. There’s a pressure to not cost any more than $0.99 or be free, and to be the best game out there, and to provide new content every week, and customer support, all financed by NOTHING. I’m concerned from a point of view where I’m trying to make a living, but also from a philosophical point. It troubles me that games are considered less valuable than a cup of coffee. I don’t know yet how to overcome that. I think microtransactions are an option.

Audience (Kim Pallister): What pressure? If you’re indie you set your own price.

CB: It would be nice to believe that you can set your own price but to compete in the app store you need to sift through an enormous number of cheap apps.

Audience/KP: Differentiation is hard, but a majority of the top grossing iPhone games don’t sell for $0.99 so it seems like the price drop is a last ditch tactic.

BG: Well the race to the bottom is about getting more sales to get on the top selling list. M59 was one of the first monthly subscription fee MMOs. The going price for a lot of games was $12-13/month. We went for $10.95/mo and we had continuous feedback from players that it was too much. I think there is that pressure that if you’re making a game that isn’t AAA you should charge less and somehow magically make money.

Audience/KP: I get the pressure to make that top 10 and not be below the fold. But all the guys dropping to $0.99 aren’t magically appearing on the top 10 list either.

CB: I agree with that, some of this pressure is perceived and may not be real on final analysis. But it’s a difficult thing to overcome when your bank account is hang gliding towards 0 and you see a community discussion that nobody is going to get something for free. And that I’m deleting an app without a weekly update.

Audience/KP: The latter part of your argument sounds like an issue people haven’t been talking about enough, that you’re selling once and acquiring a relationship that you need to turn into a business model.

Audience: Hi, I’m an independent developer, me and my boyfriend are the two people in the company. We released our first app and it was successful but it’s on Facebook and customer support alone is a full time job. Has anyone found a solution for this?

BG: Yeah, that’s a big obstacle for indies is turning something into a real business. We hired a co-founder’s brother to work for cheap on customer service. You have to find people who will work for you. Find interested game developers at your local IGDA meeting who want to get into games or are tired of the corporate life.

CE: This is an uneven playing field. We have individual developers who see the potential to make quality apps on iPhone or portals, who are competing with companies that have venture capital and full staffs. They’re putting 10 $0.99 apps out there and supporting the ones that do well. It’s both remarkable and terrifying that a two-person team can compete with Zynga. I know an iPhone developer who’s developed a great puzzle game and can’t even get people to review it. It’s tough to get over that barrier of perception.

AS: Even though the iPhone app store lets you self-publish, these perception problems are still there. Innovation plus promotion are what you need to do to get noticed.

BG: Or just dumb luck. A friend of mine sent an email to Rock Paper Shotgun and the person who read that email happened to like it and get front page featured. For indies sometimes you can get in on the ground floor of a new platform and find success. Timing is really important, sometimes good or bad things happen to you that you have no control over.

AS: My motto is I’ll try and make stuff, work part time as needed to fund it, can’t worry too much about whether the game will make any money.

CE: Touch Pets Dogs was one of the biggest budget iPhone games. It was featured in the OS 4.0 announcement.

AS: Our marketing was handled by ngmoco, so we had a big venture funded company trying to capitalize on the same marketplace indies are trying to compete with.

CE: In the day when games were all PC-based there was a variance in price. With consoles there are only a few tiers. Is there some psychology where people on iPhone will want to see a flat tier?

CB: You have set values you can choose for most distribution channels, not the same flexibilty where you can charge $17.98 or whatever. You have to pick a price point which defines everything you’re going to compete with.

BG: There’s a whole field of pricing psychology. One example from M59 was we came out with a daily/monthly/weekly subscription thing and little CDs that you put next to the checkout at game stores. When the CDs were free nobody touched them. When we started to charge for them people actually decided to pick up the CDs.

CE: You were one of the earlier indie games on Steam. Now there are tons of indie titles there. What light can you shed on your price point decision?

DF: They advised me to sell for $10 when I wanted to do $20, and convinced me on that price point.

Audience/KP: It’s interesting that you say they’re probably right, because you might have been an experiment to see how you would have worked at $10.

DF: I think everything with Valve is an experiment!

Audience: Our game was free and we made tons of money. We gained a loyal community of people we know on a first name basis who like to throw in $5 or $10.

CE: You leveraged the culture of being indies to play on that ethos.

Audience: We are very active on our discussion forums, it’s worked really well with the personal relationship aspect.

Kim Pallister: There’s a book called This Band Could Be Your Life, about how SoCal punk bands created their own distribution channels. All the zines and so on were fans they enlisted to market their games.

Audience: I’m curious as someone who’s a complete newbie here. What do the panelists think is the importance of festivals? Any tips or war stories around this?

AS: Festivals are a great place to meet other indie developers and potentially get your game noticed.

Audience: Have you been to PAX? The Behemoth sells so much merchandise directly to fans.

BG: One problem I’ve found on the indie side of things is that it feels more lonely. There’s no office for you to hang out in. The more opportunities you get to talk to other indie people, the better. I have a blog that I keep at psychochild.org that’s a great opportunity to talk with people.

CE: I know several people who have been IGF winners. It’s more than just submitting your game to a festival. There’s a culture around people who submit to IGF and you have to be a part of that culture. You need to not just design a game, but also talk about your philosophy of design, etc, so that when your game gets to IGF people know the developer and what you stand for. You’re building outreach to an audience beyond the game itself. The indie games that go on to win IGF are invariably people the community already know about who have an awesome game.

Audience: How do you incentivize people who are working with you?

CB: You offer them giant boxes of endless ramen noodles.

BG: I had a terrible time with that. I had M59 and wanted to work on my own projects for a while. I tried to incentivize people to work on my stuff. You find people, everything looks great, they’re part time, you ask them to not drop off the face of the earth. Two weeks later you just don’t hear from them ever again.

CE: I know some small studios who use internships and work with local schools. But you want to find someone who will seriously benefit from being in your creative culture, so you need to enrich volunteers or interns.

BG: You need to be careful about volunteers, you can be sued for minimum wage pay if the work is intrinsic to the company.

My friends Corvus Elrod and Charles Berube are working on an AI-driven virtual pet / resource management game called Addicube.  In their words:

You start with a single cube and encourage it to eat the red, green, and blue algae that grows in the dish. You cannot control the cubes–or the algae–directly, but have a small electrical summoning wand with which you can charge the agar, drawing the cube from spot to spot around the dish. As your cube eats, it undergoes growth spurts and before long, it undergoes cellular division, splitting into two small cubes.

You need to manage your cubes’ diet effectively or they become more difficult to control.

They are seeking funding via Kickstarter. Right now they’re at 73% funding and need to raise about $1,000 within the next 12 days.

Why You Should Fund This Game

• Corvus and Charles are great developers. Charles has made so many great games it boggles my mind. My favorite is QuestLine, a game that tells a whole RPG story using just interactive iconography. His best-known game is probably Father O’Malley 3, an action game where you’re a priest who fights zombies. Corvus is a stalwart of the indie game scene and his Honeycomb Engine may very well reinvent the role playing game as we know it! I’m convinced they’re going to make a great game.
• No money down! The way Kickstarter works is that you pledge a certain amount of money which is only charged to your account once the fundraising phase is over and then only if the team reached 100% or more of their funding goal. So you don’t pay a dime unless enough other people also support the project.

Fund Addicube now!

I promised I’d make the video reviews a regular thing. This is my attempt to describe in 2 minutes and 30 seconds what Desktop Dungeons is and why I like it so much. After you watch the video, download Desktop Dungeons and play it, fer cryin’ out loud!

The game I played most this past weekend is a surprisingly deep one-button RTS called Pax Britannica. To give you an idea of what the game is about, I’ve recorded a short video showing a play session and explaining the mechanics and dynamics of the game.

The game supports 1 to 4 players, and I highly recommend trying it with friends! The nice thing about a one-button game is that it can easily accommodate 4 players on a single keyboard. In addition the game supports up to four gamepads.

Pax Britannica is free to download and play. It was created by Henk Boom, Matthew Gallant, Renaud Bédard, Ben Abraham, and Daniel Burton.

(As an aside: what do you think about these video reviews? Do you like the format? Should I do more of these?)