The Flipside of Gaming
For this perceptive podcast, I spoke with Nathan Haddock from Lateralis Heavy Industries who developed the game OTXO. We spoke about the kind of action design Nathan wanted to focus on and balancing the high-speed play with the roguelike elements.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Dani Bunten’s classic economic simulation M.U.L.E. is one of the all-time greats, still fairly obscure even among people who know and talk about video and computer games, but hugely influential. Wikipedia tells us that Shigeru Miyamoto considers it an influence on the Pikmin games (although other than in theme I really don’t see it).
There are three current ways to play M.U.L.E. One is Planet M.U.L.E., an official port sponsored by Ozark Softscape, which is several years old, and I was certain I had posted here about before. It’s a proper update with new graphics and a lot of character. A thing about M.U.L.E. is that the original versions were intricately designed in a lot of ways, not just in game rules but the little details. The way the phase ending noise speeds up, the exact difficulty of catching a Wampus, the speeds with which players walk through terrain, the many details of auctions, even the time it takes to outfit a mule and leave/enter town, it’s all finely calculated. You can tell that Dani cared deeply about the game, and it’s a polished as any game I’ve ever seen, and that’s the old 8-bit computer versions. Planet M.U.L.E. isn’t as polished, but it’s still very nice, and you can tell its makers thought hard about it. It offers both local and online play.
Sadly, Planet M.U.L.E. seems to be on life support. While games can still be played, and the automated best player posts still go up on its blog, it’s not gotten an update in years, and it’s even possible they’ve lost the source code.
One legacy of Planet M.U.L.E. is a wonderful Youtube video they made that explains the game and how to play. It’s a great introduction:
M.U.L.E. Returns was a mobile port. It has a website, that’s still around, but apparently none of those versions are available. It’s got a page for a Steam version, but it’s not available despite the original game being released in 2013. The site claims it may come back some day, but it cannot be purchased currently.
Then there’s the new roboanimal on the block, M.U.L.E. Online, which is on itch.io for a very reasonable $5. It has the blessing of Ozark Softscape, and is a near match for the Atari 800 version. You won’t get any improved graphics or sound here, but you will get a game that copies the original very closely, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. It offers local single and multiplayer, as well as internet-based online play. They also promote a board game version of M.U.L.E, which I’ve long wanted to try!
Or there’s emulation. Back in college I played M.U.L.E. with roommates via an Atari 800 emulator burnt to a Dreamcast disk, a great way to play if you have the system, controllers and means to construct the disk because the Dreamcast has four controller ports. (M.U.L.E. is by far at its best when you have four people playing.) The Commdore 64 and IBM PC versions were also made by Dani and the others at Ozark Softscape. The C64 port is close to the Atari 8-bit version. I don’t know about the DOS PC version. I can say that the NES version made by Mindscape is a terrible version, while sadly possibly the most-played because of the great popularity of the NES. If you tried that version and wondered what the fuss is about, you should seek out the Atari 8-bit version and play it before writing off the game entirely.
World Of Mule is a fansite dedicated to M.U.L.E. in all its forms. For its 40th anniversary, they’ve published a long retrospective on the game, its history and the new versions. (That’s where the above image comes from.) It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most influential computer games ever made.
Long ago, on primordial wiki-like site everything2.com, I personally wrote a long examination and play guide to M.U.L.E. While my writing style back then was pretty crazy, I think the information holds up. If you have an interest, you may want to take a look.
Planet Mule ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)
M.U.L.E. Returns (versions currently unavailable)
M.U.L.E. Online (itch.io, Windows, Mac and Linux, $5)
World of M.U.L.E. (carpeludum.com)
M.U.L.E. The Board Game (boardgamegeek item page)
In my teens I got started coding on my old Commodore 64s. Learning to program was a much different process back then, there was no internet to answer basically any question you’d have almost on a whim, everything I picked up came from some written matter, mostly programmer’s guides (including the definitive guide to using the hardware, the Programmer’s Reference Guide) or periodicals like Compute’s Gazette, Ahoy! and Commodore Magazine.
The C64 had a lot of graphics features, made possible by the machine’s powerful VIC-II chip. All of the home computers of the time had tricks one could use to get extra mileage out of their bespoke graphics hardware. The Atari 8-bit computers had display lists, for instance. The VIC-II had a powerful raster interrupt facility, the ability to share memory with the processor (at the cost of delaying the whole machine while it did so), eight surprisingly large hardware sprites (in double-width mode they could fill a whole scanline, something the NES’ sprites could only dream of doing), and a collection of interesting and flexible graphics modes.
Most of the time the C64 was in character mode, which was the standard kind of tile-based mode that pretty much all home computers at the time used by default, suitable for displaying messages, coding and some graphics. The ’64 three such modes: the standard mode where each character had a single color along with the screen-wide background color; a multicolor mode that gave a character its own color, up to two colors shared throughout the screen and that background color, and (mumble mumble). Sorry, what’d I say? I’ll get to that later.
The system also had two bitmapped modes that worked similarly, just directly viewing a region of memory instead of using each byte as an index into a character set. One mode was like the standard character mode, where the 1s in the bitmap were colored and the 0s were the background color; the other was multicolor mode, which similarly worked like it did in multicolor character mode: one color per 8×8 region, two colors shared throughout the screen, and the background color.
The problem with multicolor mode was, you had to trade horizontal resolution to use it. The big limiting factor to many computers’ graphics then was memory use: finding a way to encode the graphics information so the chip could access it and convert it into a video signal quickly enough to meet the needs of the display. So, to fit an 8-pixel-wide section of screen into the single byte it needed to be squeezed into, it could either use a one-to-one dot to screen ratio, or sacrifice two bits for one extra-wide pixel of up to four possible colors.
UNLESS
The Commodore 64 had a fifth graphics mode. The one I mumbled over earlier. The much-ignored Extended Background Color mode.
It was another character based mode that, instead of forcing you to make use of one background color over the whole screen, gave you up to four such colors. Every cell on the screen could display a character using its full 8×8 resolution, but could also pick which of those background colors it could have. Useful!
Well… not as useful as you’d think. There’s always a tradeoff, and Extended Background Color’s tradeoff was a dire one. How does the VIC-II chip know which background color to use for each character cell? It uses the two high-order bits of each character byte. Meaning, while you could decide which of two colors would be used in each cell with a lot greater nuance, you only had 64 characters to work with! A full screen of 1,000 characters is a lot to fill with just 64 possible tiles. A lot of repetition would be unavoidable, which is probably why it was so little-used.
It essentially was either this:
or this
These images are a little misleading, because I used the Commodore 64’s default ROM character set to make them, and the second half of its characters are just mirror images of the first half. But if you define your own characters, which basically any game worth its salt will do, it greatly reduces the number of tiles at your disposal. There may be some sneaky ways around it, sure, but they all involve their own tradeoffs.
I explain all this because Extended Background Color Mode is my best guess as to how Trap Door and Popeye do their graphics.
Here’s video of a playthrough of Popeye. It’s about 21 minutes, but it shouldn’t take long to get what I mean. It’s not Nintendo’s Popeye, it’s a completely different game.
And here’s a playthrough of Trap Door, with graphics by the same person:
Look at those huge characters! How could this be possible, and with that color depth? The C64 can have huge sprites, but only at the cost of making all their dots twice as tall and/or wide. And the pixels aren’t even multicolor mode wide. I can’t quite make sense out of it! Unless, maybe the games are displaying their large characters using the character set, which explains why they jerk along the screen? And the colors are using Extended Background Mode? That might explain the simplicity of the backgrounds, with only 64 characters to work with that means a lot of reused tiles.
I guess the point of this post is: what gives?
From Ludonarracon 2023, this is a demo showcase of all the games I’ve played during the show.
0:00 Intro
00:20 Cryptmaster
2:08 Tamarindos Freaking Dinner
4:12 Demonschool
6:29 The Invincible
8:12 Sucker for Love A Date to Die For
10:03 Kitsune The Journey of Adashino
11:24 Astronaut the best
13:29 Loco Motive
15:54 Slay the Princess
17:47 Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099
18:56 Forever Lost
20:35 Times & Galaxy
22:35 The Star Named EOS
24:08 Stray Gods
25:31 Dead Pets Unleashed
27:05 Roadwarden
28:51 1000X Resist
30:34 Harmony the Fall of Reverie
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?
This is a slightly edited version of a diatribe I emitted on mefi.social. I really want people to see it and think about what it means though.
A dismaying thing is how much of current gaming culture is locked behind Discords, and/or is revealed to the world only through Youtube videos.
These two phenomena are the result of the Myth of the Benevolent Corporation, which was largely started by early Google and their “Do No Evil” policy, which sustained the early web for a good while but itself did huge damage to online culture, and yet promises to do much much more, when they decided that profits mattered more.
When Youtube started, everyone saw it as a kind of miracle. In the early days videos were limited to 10 minutes, but even so they began attracting a huge amount of material. When they switch to just letting people upload anything for free, that exploded.
It’s not just gaming stuff that I’m talking about really, although as a popular fixation for people it’s kind of a hint of things to come. Lots of information is currently exposed to the world through Youtube videos and minidocs.
But Youtube has always been a time bomb for all this content. It’s inevitable that Youtube will someday begin deleting things. If not sooner, then later. Yet there are few entities capable of preserving all of it, or even most of it. All of this will [get destroyed] like [crying] in [a downpour].
Of course, it’s not like videos like these have any other hope as it stands. A collection of the incredible size of Youtube’s is so big that only a government could realistically do it, and most of those have their own issues when it comes to continuity of mission and funding.
But combined with Discords as a means of communication, and (bizarrely) information, a lot of online culture is currently a black box to outsiders, unless they sign up to dozens of miscellaneous Discords. And there is a limit to the number of servers you can follow, which is reputed to be 100. (It used to be that Google could get you a quick answer to a question like how many Discord servers can one user follow, but now I’m not sure.)
Social media companies, who all seem to be racing each other to make their services as crappy as possible to non-paying users, are no solution either.
Fediverse to the rescue! But no, a lot of it is transitory, sometimes intentionally so! In some circles even suggesting that Mastodon be just searchable, let alone preservable, will subject you to a storm of criticism. It’s true that being opaque to general search helps protect vulnerable users, a noble cause, but it also makes Mastodon’s discoverability very low. (One solution, which I think I mentioned here before, is an opt-in search solution called tootfinder, but it currently only goes back three months.)
And I don’t see many other people talking about this, even though the sudden decay of Twitter and Reddit has made this essential problem more visible than its been for a long time.
I feel like going onto every Discord I follow, gaming research ones in particular, and ringing alarm bells, but it’s a task just to find them out, and really what good would it do. People use Discord because it’s free and easy and they even maintain the server for you. These kinds of spaces have always relied on some patron to uphold them; the only real differences are before they were visible to search and the Wayback Machine, and now, it’s a single company that will increasingly hold access to these places obscured behind a storm of pleas to subscribe to Nitro, and someday will delete them entirely.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, there are vast swaths of online culture that are already lost permanently: the Compuserve forums of the era immediately preceding the rise of the web. Compuserve was once the biggest online presence. And AOL, which grew to eclipse it in size, likewise holds (still? I don’t know, it’s on AOL!) a vast amount of early internet culture.
Newsgroup archives are a bit better off because of their openness, although nowadays it’s mostly seen as just a way to enable piracy.
Still, essential web services are at least preservable. The Fediverse resembles those, at least in principle, so it’s immediately better off than Discords and Youtube, for making old information findable, even if it’s currently really hard to do it (and some people are outright opposed to it).
It is time to wrap this all up. I say things like this frequently these days. Maybe someday someone will listen. The power and reach of the internet doesn’t have to rely on big companies. I also have qualms about the ability of a even a horde of individual servers to keep things going, mind you. All those dead links on all those surviving old websites, they once represented living projects too.
I think what we ultimately need is an independent organization that can keep up old sites and communities, and provide a place for new ones, maybe supported by donations, without the explicit profit motive of the bigcorps. Something that looks like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia. There’s places where you can host plain websites even today, like the Tildeverse (but its individual pieces, like Fediverse servers, always feel like they could vanish at any time), ancient-yet-still-here Angelfire (of which, like the Lycos it’s a part of, it’s amazing still survives), or the newer, enthusiast-focused Neocities (which too has no guarantee of longevity).
Companies can live longer than people, or their interest cycles. It doesn’t feel right that something like a website require someone to dedicate their life to maintaining it, but due to the dysfunctional way our economic has come to see companies (involving the hateful words fiduciary duty) are also vulnerable to the winds of change. It feels like a non-profit, or at least a durable privately-held company that isn’t pushed by rapacious groups to chase every profit lead no matter how disastrous, may be a solution. I don’t know if it really is, though. I’m just watching this, mostly from the outside. I hope someone can do something though, to overturn the cold tides of entropy. I really do.
For this developer interview on the Perceptive Podcast, I spoke with Endo who for their first indie dev game is working on Scholar of the Arcane Arts, a game that combines roguelike and emergent design. We spoke about what it’s like designing a high-level concept, learning game dev for the first time, and the balancing considerations of trying not to go overboard in terms of game design.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
The Japanese person (or people) behind the website www.gamedesign.jp are mysterious to me. I know nothing about them, except that they’ve been making games, first in Flash, then more recently using the Ruffle runtime, since at least 2001.
While the title under which they put up their efforts may not be memorable, if you’ve been playing web games for a while you probably know some of their work. Possibly their best-known game is DICEWARS, which is like a version of Risk that plays much much faster, most games over in minutes, instead, as with the people I know who have played it, of days.
In DICEWARS (several of GAMEDESIGN’s games are stylized with allcaps), you have nation whose territories are represented as colored areas, each containing a stack of from one to eight six-sided dice. Each nation gets a turn to act, during which they can use a stack of dice to attack the dice of a neighboring country. Fights are resolved by rolling all of the dice in the two stacks. If the attacker wins, they move all of their stack save one into their conquest and take over (the enemy dice are lost), with that single die remaining in the stack’s previous home to keep the lights on.
If the defender rolls higher, or there’s a tie, the attacker loses all of their dice in the stack except one and the defender loses nothing. A stack of one can’t attack, and is generally pretty easy to slaughter by other nations; a good element of strategy is figuring out how to keep high-dice stacks near the front, between enemies and your single-die lands, since you can’t manually move dice around between your territories. When a nation is done acting for a turn, they receive extra bonus dice relative, I think, to the largest contiguous group of regions they control. They are placed randomly among all their possessions.
Various versions of DICEWARS can be found on mobile app stores, although I don’t think any of them are officially blessed, and they tend to disappear after awhile.
It turns out they have a lot of other games that you may know of. One of particular note is Fairune, which is a capsule, very much simplified JRPG. Fairune and sequels made it to the 3DS and Switch eShops, where they are very inexpensive and enjoyable. Fairune is copyrighted by SKIPMORE, which may be a different entity. It’s still a nice game, worth looking into.
EDIT: SKIPMORE has their own website, which now mostly presents their downloadable console and mobile games.
The works of GAMEDESIGN (www.gamedesign.jp)
Ski-Free is a beloved part of casual gaming from the days before it was called that, before even internet use was widespread. Distributed as part of Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3, it predates even Windows 95, and even Windows 3.1! It goes all the way back to Windows 3.0. Checking up on the game in Wikipedia reveals that a version of it is included as an easter egg in current Microsoft Edge (go to edge://surf in that browser, if for some reason you use it).
One of the most remembered things about Ski Free is, if you get to the end of the course and keep going, eventually a yeti will chase your skiier down and eat him. A submission to GMTK 2023 gamejam, Yeti Upsetti is Ski Free in reverse. You play as the yeti, and try to chase down skiiers. You can run in all directions, but even so it’s very difficult to catch any of those elusive sportspeople. They’re very good at avoiding your abominable grasp. The only strategy that has worked for me at all is trying to chase them into obstacles, which gives you two short seconds to grab them for a monsterly meal before they get back on their skiis and coast away. Except to be told many times that you’ve died of starvation, and that you’re a terrible yeti. Which, fair, I don’t live anywhere near a snow-covered mountainside in real life.
Yeti Upsetti (itch.io, $0)
Goblin Bet is a website that presents an endless sequence of D&D 5th edition monsters fighting each other one-on-one. You bet pretend gold pieces on the outcome. Like the similar-in-concept Salty Bet, none of the money is real, you can’t pay for extra currency and it can’t be exchanged for anything. In fact, the game won’t let you drop below 50 gold, so you might as well bet all-in if you get to that point.
The game follows a rough tournament structure. It starts with eight low CR creatures 1/8th to 1/4th, that fight each other in a branching kind of format. (There is nowhere to view the bracket, this has been determined largely through observation.) The winner gets to advance to the 1/2 CR round, where it might die quickly, but it might not. Most monsters are granted one added advantage randomly from a variety, and some of them are pretty powerful.
The brackets continue: 1 CR, 2 CR, 3 CR, and up and up, until around the 16 CR range. The higher the Challenge Ratings, the harder it is to figure out the winner of each match. A few abilities, in the combat system the site uses, are ludicrously powerful. We watched a Giant Crab stop over two complete brackets, at one point taking out a lion, because it had an ability, Stong Grappler, that was basically inescapable, so once its opponent was grappled, it just got advantage on all its attacks, and the opponent had disadvantage. In 5th edition D&D terms, “advantage” means, when you roll, roll two dice, and use whichever value is higher, and “disadvantage” means roll two dice and take the lower value. It’s a huge factor.
A lot of the fight outcomes come down to things like this, which you have to pick up by watching many matches. Flight, to give another example, is pretty strong, because it lets a creature keep attacking and retreating, forcing opponents without missile attacks to sprint sometimes to keep up, wasting turns. Often there will be fights where the outcome will be decided by whoever rolls better; it’s best to save your pretend money when that happens, and wait until there’s a fight with a clearer outcome.
It’s surprisingly addictive, and there’s an included chat that’s often pretty entertaining. I’ve enjoyed it anyway.
This is just to remind people that the (extended) deadline for Roguelike Celebration 2023 is coming up on us very soon, July 15th! If you have an interesting story to tell about roguelikes, a roguelike game to show off, or even just something involving procedural generation, please consider giving them a pitch! The conference has been virtual the past few years, and it is again this year, so you can stream your talk from wherever you live!
I’ve presented twice, may do so again this year although frankly my talks have always run over, I always have so much to say and the time is over before I’ve even gotten to a literal tenth of it. They do a lot to keep roguelikes in the public mindspace. If you have something to say there, I hope you’ll consider applying.
Roguelike Celebration 2023 Call For Presenters
Reviews of Lunark and Rusted Moss, two very different platformers, played with press keys.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Reddit has been severely wounded. I’m sure it’ll keep going for a while, there’s still a lot of people who use it, but it no longer feels like an unalloyed good, it’s obvious that its owners care more about profits than their unpaid mod staff, and a lot of the best users, the ones who produce the really interesting posts and comments, are leaving for other climes.
And… I’m glad. Even though I used Reddit, and Twitter too, I felt bad for doing so. Single websites should not be such a large part of the internet. These are ultimately reimplementations of older ideas of course, community discussion sites go all the way back to Usenet, which predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade. The main reason anyone cares about them is that there’s already lots of people there, and their value grows as more people are involved with them.
Anything that breaks the hold of bigcorps over substantial pieces of the internet is a positive thing, IMO. All those people who are leaving Twitter for Bluesky or Threads, I feel like I need to warn them, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be put back into this situation again, no internet site of service run by venture capital, or put under the gun by shareholders and “fiduciary duty,” can escape being ruined. It is an impossibility, the drive for ever-greater profits will inevitably ruin them. This ends the editorial portion of this post.
The most promising alternative to corporate ownership and control at the moment is the “Fediverse,” a collection of sites that all talk to each other and interoperate. Whether it’ll be the solution to the capitalist internet remains to be seen, there’s lots of challenges ahead for them, but one small current win is a post on lemmy.world’s Games board, asking users for their favorite obscure games. It’s got rather a lot of comments of people, all reminiscing about their favorites. It’s worth a good look, for you’re both certain to find people who love the same neglected titles that you do, and a whole bunch of games to investigate that you’ve never heard of before. It’s a marvel.
lemmy.world Games: What’s your favorite game you never hear anybody talk about?
