I still prefer smaller games or games by smaller dev teams. Don’t get me wrong, AAA titles are fun but it’s like going to the movies, it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless.
My biggest gripe is that these smaller, “starter” games usually don’t get much play. Everyone wants to immerse in a loading screen space sim but can’t stand well-painted pixel sprites? Crazy.
There’s still hope. Hit games are hits not because of just their art but because of their play. Fez, for example, had pretty mediocre art. What it did have is an awesome 2.5D world. Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. However, the level design, textures, and concepts, and play are still fantastic.
My only advice is if you want to make games, start making games. Who cares what your avatar looks like. Make it fun. @ works just fine.
Also, Commander Keen art splashes were top notch. The only thing missing was pro dithering.
> Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well.
It's in the eye of the beholder, but I strongly disagree with this. The art is absolutely timeless; cacodemons, cyberdemons, the super shotgun and the BFG9000 are some of the most recognizable video game designs of all time. Most importantly, the art direction feels very consistent and cohesive. You can contrast it to something like Heretic, which came out at the same time and runs on the same engine, yet looks noticeably worse.
I wouldn't play it at 320x200 on a modern PC, but take your pick of source port to run at 1080p+, and Doom still looks great.
We've come full circle on low-rez graphics, at the time it was the best definition they could generate but now it's an aesthetic.
The original Doom graphics work surprisingly well in VR, too. Fire up GZDoom with the VR mod (some fiddling required to make it work in Windows MR) and it works in a way I wouldn't have believed without seeing it.
A modern shooter that takes some inspiration from the doom (probably more Quake) era is "Boltgun". It's amazing and just so much fun. Play today. You can lower the graphics to look like Doom or adjust them to look like fairly decent, but obviously retro inspired. It's set in the Warhammer universe.
Regarding the datedness of games like Doom & Duke Nukem 3D, I've noticed a peculiar principle where they start off looking horribly dated to me, but my brain quickly adapts and I don't even notice the drop in realism after a few hours. It just becomes fun.
Boltgun's alright. My favorite of the neo-retro shooters is Amid Evil. (Weird to call a game with RTX raytracing support retro, but that's 2023 for you.)
But honestly, IMO, if you want to play Doom or Quake... I recommend just playing Doom or Quake. The modding scene for both games has been active for nearly 30 years, and there's still excellent content coming out for both games regularly. If anything, modding popularity has accelerated in recent years thanks to "Doomtubers" like decino giving additional exposure to custom maps. Dwell[0] came out this year and is one of the best Quake map sets/mods ever, and the Cacowards[1] always has great stuff, with the 2023 edition coming soon.
The weird thing is that I actually don't care even a little bit about graphics and really want a scaled down experience (partially as a parent it's not possible to spend hundreds of hours on a game anymore... or even 20).
But it's somehow bizarrely hard to find in Indie, they all want to be these sprawling finicky massive things where you have to read a novel length wiki to find out that "four sticks can make a log", or are brutally difficult, or both (Darkest Dungeon comes to mind).
There's some counter examples but theyre weirdly hard to find.
You should play a short hike, especially if you have a steam deck.
Other great or lovely short games :
Firewatch
Steamworld dig 2 isn't as short but you can play it in 10 min chunks and it's cheerful and fun
Backbone (now called tails noir I think) is weird but worthwhile. It starts as cheerful beautiful detective mystery and ends as dark beautiful existential story.
Hades is also great for 10 minute bursts.
Amanita design games - botanicula machinarium samorost
“A Short Hike” was the perfect indie game for me. A funny and beautiful world to explore for an hour, and then you’re done and feel a sense of completion like watching an episode of a TV series.
I recently came across Shadow Complex, which is a 2.5D Metroidvania type experience. It was fun, scratched the right gaming itch, and was the right size, if that makes sense. It didn't try to be anything it wasn't, but it did what it was well. Worth checking out if you haven't tried it yet.
Shadow Complex is a classic at this point—I played through it at release while sick in bed with H1N1 in 2009. it's like the perfect medium-sized game—it goes above and beyond to do cool stuff, without ever overstaying its welcome in any regard. just enough neat cool things you haven't seen before—like pushing the right stick up contextually aiming your gun into the Z-plane to shoot guys in the background. I wish people set out to make more medium-sized games like that, though I'm sure the budget was much higher than we think it is.
I hadn't realized it came out so long ago! It's gameplay is evergreen.
Thinking of medium sized games, I think the original Orcs Must Die! would qualify as well. It was a tight, solid experience. There aren't too many 3d tower defense type games that I'd put on a must-play list, but OMD is at the top.
You can play top-notch games like "It takes two" or "Unravel Two" with you kids though. Very easy to get into, two players at the same time, co-op. Both masterworks and I consider them AAA.
I played doom recently on Linux. I have almost all the original wads from Doom box set. One thing that struck me is how fast you can move in that game. But the not being able to look up can make it a little wierd.
I like simplier story games sometimes. The uncharted series I thought was fun, you get 2 weapons and maybe some grenades. Lots of cut scenes.
Compared to some of the inventory and level up trees I have seen it was refreshing. Watching my partner play fallout 4 I was amazed at the inventory management required.
On iOS when I need a quick game, I’ll play plasma sky which is a modern galaxan style shooter.
yeah that's why many modern FPS are considered walking simulators.
Back in the day, e.g. quake 3 arena, flying, jumping, always running was exhilarating.
Nowadays... cut scene, NPC hand holding, fake action to tutor... I get it, they lose less people from research groups, at the cost of the real gamers that know the basics.
Also the art team literally spent a month on a room that you can just jump through? What a waste, no, the player has to be stuck here for a solid minute, walking slowly, bobbing the camera side to side etc.
I'm convinced that to have games that people fly through quickly, you need either procedurally generated content or PS1 and older type graphics. With realistic graphics, it's impossible, unless it's a closed-room situation.
If you haven't played it yet, you would probably love Prodeus. It's basically a modernization of the Doom/Quake formula, but with satisfying pseudo-retro graphics and really thoughtful level design. It's also made by two people (I think three technically, but the site lists two) who have worked on AAA titles like Doom 2016, the new Wolfenstein, and Bioshock: Infinite
Prodeus also has a shotgun that can snipe enemies at far distances with a long range incendiary mode
I kinda wish the "retro graphics" could be turned off at least in 3D games.
I don't really get the appeal to start with. DOOM wasn't retro, it had amazing graphics and required good hardware to run acceptably. Monkey Island wasn't "pixel art", it was state of the art on the hardware of the time.
Many games of the era had high resolution modes, and got them as soon as it was remotely practical. Duke Nukem 3D could be played at 800x600.
In the case of Prodeus, the devs aimed to solve the problem of sprites, but in a true 3D space. With a lot of Doom ports, when mouselook was enabled, it showed just how flat everything actually was since looking up and down in true 3D would make them look like cardboard. But with Prodeus, everything is 3D but models render as if they were sprites at fixed angles. I really like this aesthetic and haven't seen any other games do something quite like it. I stopped consciously noticing it partway through the campaign
That looks like the same engine Warhammer: Dark Omen used. I played that quite a lot.
But I guess I never developed the nostalgia for the technical limitations of the time. Even back in those days I clearly saw them as a limitation to be tolerated. The sprites meant that I couldn't correctly perceive the rotation of the units, since there were so few angles available. This meant sometimes I couldn't tell if the game was buggy and my units were looking the wrong way, or the sprite system just wasn't able to display their true state. The sprites were a means to the end of rendering units with more detail than 3D tech of the time allowed, not something that in itself was appealing.
I think what would be more interesting is not to imitate the exact state of technology in the 90s, but try leaning into the same approach with modern tech. Render the hell out of those sprites at ultra high res and levels of detail, and try to make a sprite game that uses sprites because even a GTX 4090 couldn't render that in real time.
Though at this point in time it might already be too late for this to make sense, since the amount of detail a modern video card can produce is insane.
interesting! It'd be in cool to see someone use sprites to render a total war like game with historical scale (100k units) though at that point I think the real bottleneck is the cpu and pathfinding though.
Prodeus also seems to have an option to use those 3D models rather than the derived/simulated sprites. Saw it in an article a while back and thought it sounded cool... might have even stumbled on the article here at hckrnews?
After having played the game for so long, the model version looks really uncanny and doughy to me. I'll have to give it a shot just to see how the other enemies and objects look in the game
If anything I'd say Fez's real achievement is the art. Once the novelty of the 2D/3D hybrid gimmick has dried up (which happens pretty fast), the gameplay is pretty mediocre.
If you watched Indie Game: The Movie, it seemed like pretty much the entirety of Phil Fish's effort went into obsessing over the art. And I have to give him credit that it looks pretty damn good.
Dead Cells, HLD, both have much better art styles than Fez. Fez’s worlds were great but the choice of 16px vs 32px limited it in details, hence geometry carving of the 3D world to add more detail impossible to achieve with pixel art tiled textures without overdraw.
I’m not saying I disliked Fez, but to compare the art of Fez to Chronotrigger is like holding a child’s finger painting to a Van Gogh. From a distance they may look the same…
> it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless.
I've been referring to this as "baked-bean-ification". Something originally quite distinctively spicy and varied gets progressively fine tuned for the mass market, resulting in a universally inoffensive and yet immeasurably bland experience.
> I still prefer smaller games or games by smaller dev teams. Don’t get me wrong, AAA titles are fun but it’s like going to the movies, it’s predictable - it’s consistent - and it’s mindless.
I so strongly agree with this.
There's a certain sense of "exploration of the game" that's missing in AAA games. AAA games are just entirely too smooth as experiences, there's no jank, very little learning, etc.
I don't necessarily mean exploration as in, exploring every bit of content/land, but learning the game itself. When Pillars of Eternity came out, so many people didn't like it because they were surprised by the idea of having to actually learn the underlying system.
I was hopeful for VR for a while because I figured if the developers themselves haven't "solved the problem", there would be a return to that type of exploration where a game would often have amazing parts and then parts that didn't work as well.
What do you mean "mediocre". Pixel art (like so many graphic adventure games) might not be your thing but different styles for different folks.
I know you were trying to say "it didn't offer graphic card pushing 3d like AAA games but it did X uniquely" but by no means can you call that mediocre, specially if you've ever seen old games.
Gameplay over one specific style of graphics, is probably the concept you're looking for.
I mean mediocre. There was nothing special about it. It wasn’t even that good. There have been much better looking pixel art games made. The style of Fez came from Phil redoing the art 3 times, outsourcing the character design, and still managed to release it.
And never seen old games? I grew up on Atari. I’ve been playing games since. Even made a few. Fez was amazing but not for its art. It was flat. I still enjoyed it. I think gamers shouldn’t get so hung up on pushing their systems to the limits and instead should focus on pushing their play to the limit.
If that's the basis, "nothing special" about it can be said about any game that is not GTA.
There's much better games out there is, again, unspecific and bad criticism. There's also a lot of focus on the individual developer (and his personality). I don't care how it's made, criticize it on it's own terms.
I've played many old games. You don't make a coherent or specific point.
I agree with you that gameplay beats everything (I said it in my original comment) and there's no one size fits all, but that's why it's so absurd for you to attack art of a game as mediocre with absolutely no basis. Basically you're trying to use it as a binary opposite of "outstanding".
Maybe pick the words you use carefully or have an actual argument to back then up.
I feel like the mistakes new dev makes leads to fun little bugs or Easter eggs in some games. I remember once playing an indie game (can’t remember the name) but I was able to jump out of bounds of the level. I had more fun doing that then actually playing the levels correctly.
Since the whole point of games is to have fun I don’t mind bugs.
Into the Breach (turn based) can be played in ten minute campaign bouts if you have the self discipline. Katana Zero is about ten hours of gameplay total in side scrolling fighting game sort of like Double Dragon.
Based only on the trailer, there's an upcoming Switch game, Unicorn Overlord, that looks like a reincarnation of Heroes of Might and Magic. Slightly more than Into The Breach.
Pixel sprites are their own predictable mindless thing nowadays. Check out Splattercat who does first impressions of indie games. Once in a while there is an ascendant experience but most of it is samey generic RPGs, often with lazy sprites.
Doom gameplay has aged quite well. The sprites have a bit of "cardboard cutout" quality to them in higher resolutions, but the gameplay is still really good.
Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come?
I remember reading about that a while ago and it wasn't until the last 5 or so years that indies got back into magazine covers and such.
> Are you in the camp that says the creator was an insufferable man that did a lot of damage to the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come?
I can't agree with this assessment at all - the idea Phil Fish, "insufferable" or otherwise, somehow caused a lot of damage to "the credibility and likeability of indie developers for years to come" seems a bit absurd to me.
Not at all. I think Indie Game The Movie took a lot of liberties to show him a certain way. I think the stress of it all got to him and now he does other things. I’m more aquatinted with the programmer Renaud from back in the days. I think the media loves a juicy meltdown story and tried to make him a scapegoat for the indie game industry going mainstream.
Indie games not on magazines says more about the indie games at the time, nothing more. How many times you going to feature Jonathan Blow?
Was Phil Fish insufferable? I don’t know, never met him. Did he say some things that were not in alignment with my worldview? Yeah, sure.
I do think Fez, the game, the wonderful spectacularly clever game, was the indie equivalent of a Mario brothers hit.
The void I think you speak of was when XNA died, MonoGame wasn’t quite there yet, people jumped to Unity and it took them awhile to get up to speed in it. Others like me went off and wrote their own engines and stuff, others joined the ranks of the studios.
I think Phil made the best game he could. That’s all that matters. Everything else is superfluous.
Artist is weird (and probably a real jerk). News at 11.
It seems an enormous leap that one goofball did anything to damage the "credibility" of developers. How many people could name even a single indie designer?
His game was clearly inspired by an extremely good Japanese indie game (Cave Story), which makes his quote about all Japanese games being bad a strange thing to say. Funny enough the Wikipedia page for Fez hasn't noticed the inspiration either.
Kinda a diff topic but if anyone else read "Doom Guy" - what did you think of it?
I know it's not what this interview (blog) is about but I feel like compared to Masters of Doom this one had a little too much "narrative" and "drama" and felt like it was an answer to certain things discussed in Masters of Doom which he wanted to set the record straight.
Another weirdness - i.e. early into the book John Romero says that he has a super-power like ability to remember everything perfectly...which to me sounds like some big ego bullcrap? Because there are a lot of things that he conveniently did not discuss in the book but which fans know happened! So what kind of super-power
This has been mentioned extensively before, and corroborated by other people. I think it's true. He had an old podcast he'd ask old time Apple II/PC developers about stuff they developed, and they'd be struggling to remember stuff that Romero knew every detail of. It's remarkable, and even a bit frustrating to listen.
Also, about some stuff not mentioned in the book... I do think it gets light in details the further it goes, but you also need to read the disclaimer: there are people who asked not to be covered in the book and he respected that. There's one particular storyline that is never mentioned at all... to me it's very clear the person involved likely asked not to be mentioned because they've moved on.
When one's writing from the first person, about friends and acquaintances, they have to be more polite than someone who's acting like a neutral observer, like in "Masters of Doom".
>There's one particular storyline that is never mentioned at all... to me it's very clear the person involved likely asked not to be mentioned because they've moved on.
I just finished Doom Guy a few days ago and really enjoyed it. The start of the book is definitely not what I (or probably anybody else) expected but it was a hell of a story. I also appreciated his honest conclusion near the end where he comes to the conclusion for his post-Id failures.
I did think he should have gone into more of a deep dive into why Daikatana was a bad game. Yeah, turnover. Yeah, delays from chasing the new shiny engine. But for a company he started where "Design Is Law", why did his game suck when Deus Ex being developed at the same time at the same company turn out so great? And how was id able to pump out Quake II and Quake III in the time he was buggering on Daikatana?
Somewhere in the book (start or end, can't remember) there is a quote from Carmack that references Romero's amazing recall ability, so I'll give hime the benefit of the doubt here.
To make this more HN-relevant, I will say that the whole point of Ion Storm was supposed to be unleashing Romero’s game direction, but the business partners who were supposed to give him that space instead provided another level of distraction.
John worked insanely hard and doesn’t blame others for what he’s responsible for, but with all the business chaos at Ion which he dealt with personally, he just could not be on top of everything and that’s the major reason why DK was not the epic game it could have been. That’s the part that he doesn’t want to say, but to me it’s clear.
It’s a good example of why a startup needs its product visionary highly focused at the most critical times. As a rough approximation, every night John went to bed thinking about Ion’s latest issues instead of thinking about Daikatana was a lost chance to make the game 2% better. That adds up.
Cool to hear from someone that lived it, if just for a short time!
I read the article and it certainly touches on the high points, but to John's credit, he goes into much deeper detail in the book. Eight people left because of high level infighting, but John knew of the problem and didn't do anything about it until it was too late. John was for buying the Anachronox crew thinking it was an easy way to knock off one of their game commitments to Eidos. Turned out it wasn't so easy. Eidos was all in on the fancy office tower and happy to pay because it would be their corporate HQ as well.
I was a bit surprised that the article said Dallas was a difficult place to staff. My impression from the book was that good people were so keen to work with a big name game developer that they'd go anywhere to do so. My memory from the book was that John got pretty much anyone he made an offer to.
I was not as aware of all the drama that happened before I got there (August 1999) except for reading Stormy Weather* and hearing the weird twice-daily all-office pages for Todd Porter that made me wonder if he was holed up somewhere.
From what I learned about it since that time, the details John shares in the book are definitely much more significant factors in why things happened why they did. And if anyone needed to learn what the words “vertical slice” meant, it was the DK production team. Programming the sidekicks, a definitional feature, was left until close to the end of the project, with disappointing results.
So the complaints about how hard staffing was and how people didn’t want to come to Dallas were straight from John’s mouth, but I think it had a lot to do with the state of the project and Ion. Steve Ash (RIP), our fourth lead programmer, was just about ready to return to California where he would end up helping to start Double Fine, so that situation was on his mind (speaking to me as a California fly-in AI programmer).
But as the 1300x960 arrow story typified, experienced developers were hard to find as team sizes were doubling from 20 to 40 throughout the industry. At the same time, Daikatana was being roasted constantly on Old Man Murray, Something Awful and various messageboards, and Half-Life made Daikatana’s story and cinematic ambitions seem less impressive. So by 1999, it’s fair to say Ion Storm was a hard sell as a place to work for a lot more reasons than the Dallas area...
For what it's worth I have fond memories of Daikatana.
Sure it was buggy as hell (at lest the build I had and how it behaved on my specific machine) and had a ton of flaws, and I could not complete the game due to a particular bug, but I could not help but feel something happening deep down inside this game. Frustratingly I can't exactly put my finger on it, but if I tried it'd be like I was reading between the lines^Wissues and in a way experienced that instead of the thing you directly interacted with.
And that wasn't because of the hype as it was handed over to me among a pile of other discs before I even heard of it (which is what happens when you live in some random remote area).
Romero does have some amazing recall.. it’s a little weird but it does cause his apple 2 podcast to get a little strange when he remembers things for his guests.
It’s probably the least steady released podcast (1 per year?) about apple 2 but some of the interviews are pretty fun and the stories of the biz back in the day are interesting. Also one about the apple disk imager “applesauce”
I'm not quite finished with it but I thought Masters of Doom had more drama. This one had more personal/childhood stuff, which I wasn't personally interested in. Romero's narration of the audiobook was a bit quirky though
I read the book. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, where he describes how he encountered the tools of the "stone age" of computing and learned to build games on his own. He starts from fairly nothing and gets to the point where his games are regularly the feature game in the computer games magazines of the time. All of this is juxtaposed against and with the constant background of his frequently gasoline fume volatile home life.
I found the second part of the book which begins after Doom is launched and Doom II goes into development to be more of a slog to get through. He also goes at length into his post-Id Games games and how he made some mistakes and some successes. For example. Deus Ex came out of his game company because he gave Warren Spector the independence to build it and many influential personalities in the game industry nowadays got their start at his game company.
My recommendation? Read the first part of the book if you want to get a real FPV of the Wild West in which pioneers like Id Games built the first complex, performant 2D and 3D games and game engines in a world where performance was mostly determined by assembly language wizardry and mastery, not a GPU.
I don't doubt that John Romero has that superpower ability.
I like how his childhood gets covered extensively. I wish we could see the same thing from Carmack. I'm particularly interested in his contract and softdisk days.
I loved the part where he was still with id; how he grew up, and how id came to be. The magic of that founding id games makes you wish you were a part of that group. After that, the Ion Storm stuff gives some context to the failure, which was interesting to read. But it becomes a bit more incoherent. Towards the end, post Ion Storm, it just feels like he's going through notes he wrote down, and you're reading them in a chronological order. All in all one of my favorite books, but the end was a bit of a drag.
I'm not saying I have the same memory, but the part that I find so frustrating is having conversations with people and then remembering it clearly while others either don't remember or seem to recall the conversation being completely different.
But I can recall the specific words and sentences used, not just impressions.
I 100% believe the story about how he was goaded into doing this, rather than beating the sorry of jerk that think that's hilarious.
Romero was impulsive and a bit naive (go read his IRC logs from the day!), and this is the shirt of stuff I can see someone who acts like an overstimulated 14yo doing.
I can't find it right now, but there was a collection of crazy stuff he said on IRC while Quake was in development. Basically promising the world (e.g. the dragon). Very energetic, but clearly not well thought out.
The biggest thing that kills indie developers is taking a waterfall approach to game design. "I want to make an XYZ genre game with mechanic ABC and a story about 123." There is absolutely no way to know if that combination of designs will be fun at all, and it won't be until they're too far in development before they realise it's irredeemable.
Best advice I ever got on this subject: identify what you want the most impactful element of the game to be. Is it a unique combat mechanic? Is it a compelling story? Make that first and only that. If it's impactful, take it further and build more around it. Show it to people as early and regularly as possible. If people tell you it's boring, they're probably right, but don't listen to them if they tell you how to fix it. If you can't fix it, toss it and move on. You cannot afford to find out if your game is fun 2 years into development. Also, most of your ideas are probably terrible and you won't start having better ideas until you make and finish a number of projects.
This is the secret to Nintendo’s success. Despite being a very traditional Japanese company, iterative, agile development is in their DNA.
They experiment with a lot of different game mechanics that might be fun, test them early on other people in the office, and then when they find a core mechanic that seems like a game can be built around it, they start fleshing that out, add other mechanics that work as sweeteners, and build up iteratively.
Only when they have a good picture of the game do they start piecing together some sort of story or setting that makes the mechanic make sense. Even the IP might be swapped entirely to something that better jives with the mechanic, or just to stick on a brand that will help it sell. That’s why their games stay fresh and fun and they can maintain their innovative edge.
No, the philosophies are completely orthogonal. “Lean” might be a shared buzzword, but the meaning is completely different in manufacturing vs software.
Toyota Production System, just-in-time manufacturing, and such are about making a running process more efficient and lean over time, but agile software is about being flexible as you develop something brand new, and Japanese companies are still terrible at it. They love waterfall, huge spreadsheets, and explicitly defining absolutely everything up front, often years in advance. None of this is incompatible with the other version of “lean” in manufacturing.
* Many (most?) say they do “agile” software now, but that just means breaking the massive waterfall spreadsheet into predefined two week “sprints.”
> There is absolutely no way to know if that combination of designs will be fun at all
Another perspective is, you shouldn't be doing this if you can't tell if something is fun without "testing" it.
> Also, most of your ideas are probably terrible
Without fail, all the people I know who are the best at this keep having one good idea after another. They absolutely do not run out of really good ideas that sound and play obviously fun. They lack free audiences and money.
This is basically the difference between making video games and doing product management.
> Another perspective is, you shouldn't be doing this if you can't tell if something is fun without "testing" it.
Trust me, you have absolutely no way of knowing until you playtest, seriously. You could copy all the game mechanics of a popular game, down to the engine and the exact magic numbers and functions that made it, and it can still suck. Just look at most AAA open-world action RPGs released in the last 5 years.
> Without fail, all the people I know who are the best at this keep having one good idea after another. They absolutely do not run out of really good ideas that sound and play obviously fun.
I'm sure the people you know do have "really good ideas" but they are nothing more than lottery tickets until prototyped. You don't need money to pull together a shitty prototype to prove some aspect of your game works, and there are numerous meetups everywhere for indie devs to show off their games. I'm gonna make a wild assumption that these people you know haven't prototyped any of these "obviously fun" ideas.
I was just thinking about Romero. I was watching the "Wha Happun?" episode about the System Shock remake, and I realized... back in the day we made fun of Romero for his mismanagement of the Daikatana kerfuffle: schedule slip after schedule slip, changing engines twice, the staff quitting and needing to almost be completely replaced, it's no wonder the game turned out crap. But so many of today's games have most or all of these problems. System Shock (2023) changed engines, had massive staff churn, and considerable schedule slips (taking seven years to Daikatana's four), especially when COVID-19 hit. But by paring back the ambition and focusing on delivering an experience faithful to the original, they got it out the door despite doubts from the fan base and it was a hit. So today, some games do turn out good despite mouldering in development hell for the better part of a decade. Of course you still get your fair share of buggy messes (which may be rehabilitated with a post-release patch) and complete misses like Mighty No. 9.
So it seems like maybe we've hit a complexity threshold beyond which it stretches human feasibility to turn out a good to great AAA game within a reasonable time frame. And maybe Romero was just one of the first people to "go big" with Daikatana, and he hit that threshold before everyone else. His ambition (and ego) exceeded his actual reach, but... few if any had attempted such a large scale project before, aspiring to reinvent the FPS and add RPG and story elements to it. Granted, Half-Life made everybody else look like chumps when it came to embedding story into an FPS -- but Daikatana was announced long before Half-Life congealed.
The man deserves full credit for learning from his most famous boondoggle, and focusing on smaller games rather than epic genre-busters that he doesn't quite have the ability to manage the development of.
If you slip 4 or 5 years around now the tech barely changes. You can't really tell much the difference between a game delivered in 2018 and 2023, especially if some polish is later added.
Whereas back in 1998, there is absolute night and day between 1994 tech (DOOM) and 1998 tech (Quake 2), to the point where the latter makes the former look ancient and almost unplayable in comparison.
Keeping in mind also that tech moved so fast that "serious" PC gamers would look to upgrade their PC on a much quicker cycle, every couple of years was a game-changing upgrade such as Pentium chips or DDR RAM, or some other new tech that just blew away the previous PC generation.
Games companies didn't have the luxury to slip years and still deliver on what they started, and any "engine change" would have been far more impactful against that background, and also keep in mind that "changing engine" back then meant from scratch engines not swapping, say, between Unity and Unreal or some other off the shelf stuff.
I hadn't thought about it like this, but you're right. I entered PC gaming as a teenager around the time of Quake, and the constant hardware refreshes were expensive but fun. I can imagine the tense race to the finish line to get a game out (and close to bug-free; very little internet) before the engine you probably built from scratch for that game became old hat!
I used to make fun/hate the guy, but nowadays I can tell her really cares about games, he just bit more then he could chew and was too inexperienced to properly deal with it.
The bit about being non-confrontational (and this being a hindrance during the Ion Storm days) also hits home. I would have spiraled out of control myself in that position I'm sure.
Right. id rode (and ending up being a driving force for) the emergence and adoption of x86 PCs as the dominant home computer platform with near perfect timing.
If you were gaming on a PC before they showed up you were a masochist.
I tend to believe many of the problems with id productions up to Carmack going off to Oculus can be seen from this early mindset. They can do focused experiences, but their practices cannot scale up, and certainly not to enable the sort of level of variety players want in big titles today.
Simply practicing making lots of small games is not enough. It's like that saying about going to space: you don't get there by climbing progressively taller trees.
The full story of id really has a lot to do with the group being built around some extremely motivated people who converged on the same prospects in the same place.
Like, the fact that Romero was doing work for Origin and New World, two of the biggest names in that era, working on some of the biggest projects, and then decided that he would drop that to do Softdisk's diskmag stuff, is only sensible in the eyes of someone who is extremely focused on being in the room for "next big things". And that's been a hallmark of Romero's career over the long run, really. When shareware games were new, he did shareware games. When mobile gaming was new, he did mobile games. When Facebook games were new, he did Facebook games. I have not checked to see if he did VR(maybe he was already satiated with that by the id experience, which did have some dabblings in that early VR tech) but it would not surprise me at all.
So in certain ways, his advice can't help, because it's advice that's about blue ocean markets where all you have to do is be there first and put in a good, serious effort. It's not about cultivating long-term fans, even though that did happen to him by chance.
All the more reason to spend time making small games without a goal of profiting from them in order to refine your skills. When things get more competitive, you need to practice more, not less.
I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". "try harder, and suffer competition" is just bad advice.
The real advice ought to be "don't work on games that don't have a legitimate reason to be successful besides being 'fun'", and have a strong consideration of market access, artistic hook, and value prop.
Your ability to execute on a vision can be honed wherever the heck you want. But making the vision itself should come from studying games and what made them successful or not. Not grinding out business failures. My hot take would be online co-op, realistic graphics, first person games in a unique setting for about $25. Dicking around with your friends' avatars is fun regardless of game quality and the value prop is strong.
Anyone starting out with a realistic graphics fps game, with co-op, will 100% guaranteed either stop at the most basic unity coop game tutorial, or be a forever project that never actually releases. It just doesn't happen.
> I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice".
Out of curiosity, how many games have you made and finished?
I've worked on several titles and completed none of them as a side hobby. I would like to finish one. I still work on it. My most important learning from this has been "don't do indie game dev for a living". Maybe you'll say "shut up then". But I disagree. Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do.
As for your dismissal of my comment, sure, it's a hot take. But I feel pretty strongly. Why?
* Well for one almost every single game that people start does not get finished. So that's a misleading metric.
* The amount of free 3D asset available are MASSIVELY better for 3D realistic assets. The lack of a specific art direction means you don't need to create everything from scratch. Which is bad if artistic design is your thing, but if it's not your thing, this is a lifesaver. Realistic 3D is the EASIEST art to acquire and prototype and even ship with unless you're interested in using very weirdly specific stuff from an asset store in a distinct style.
* Co-op is intrinsically enticing and lowers the bar greatly for the game to be good. I think my ideal indie success story are games like The Forest and Green Hell. If you look under the hood, these games... pretty bad? Like it's mostly really dumb combat, basebuilding to basically no particularly well thought out game loop, and big maps with a small amount of unique content in them. But they're still pretty great to everyone who plays them. It's remarkably achievable.
I thought this game was actually pretty solid. It's fighting system was interesting, the dialogue was decent even though I came into it knowing I wasn't going to care about the story, and the art was nice in my opinion. I liked playing this game. But there's now way I'm ever going to pay $20 for it. Standing out as a singleplayer game is extremely hard. Or comp multiplayer. Goofy co-op has a much lower bar because co-op is intrinsically fun when everyone's got an avatar.
> Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do.
I don't think we're saying completely different things. I am not advocating for making many commercial games where you release them and sink money into them. I am saying to finish games (that you like working on) instead of abandoning them. If you can't finish them, reduce scope until you can finish Pong even though that's not a viable game idea. Only then can you work your way up to your co-op multiplayer $$$ game. Even then, the games you mention have studios behind them with many people working on them.
Well I'm saying work on what you want to work on and it's absolutely fine to abandon games when you think you've detected the direction is not good. Finishing a game is very, very hard. You will almost inevitably encounter problems that require skillsets you don't have and aren't interested in learning. If you could to a place where a game could be finished, then hire a team to help you finish it. Otherwise you'll spend too much time learning skills you don't like or need (personally) to execute on a vision. For most indie devs, in my estimation, that's mostly a question of hiring artists to make it look nice and designers to grind out content for the game (e.g. levels). I think you can presume that most people that want to be "indie game devs" want to be creative directors with just enough skills of their own to prototype something successfully. And I encourage that.
The co-op thing is just a perceived niche of under-served market demand : effort required imo.
But back then it was much smaller. Suppose some will always find an excuse as to why things may fail today vs yesterday, while others will find a way regardless.
It’s a fantastic read, and with his sense of recall being so strong it provides a lot of detail you other might not get. He does say in the end he might have made it a bit more positive than some of the moments may have actually been, but I’ve not seen any of the other people from those times contradict what he’s said.
I also found that Shareware Heroes by Richard Moss was a good, if more general, accompaniment.
Yes, although it's worth noting it's only a few chapters of Shareware Heroes. For those curious about Shareware Heroes, I interviewed Richard Moss (the author) about shareware a couple months ago on my podcast:
https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/67e565b5/shareware-...
People that had success decades ago seems to be forgetting that it was decades ago. Doom was released 30 years ago. In a much, much smaller market and in a lot less competition. He is saying people are not making smaller games before moving to bigger projects but people, collectively, are doing that. For every "13 games that we made in 1991 alone" back then, now there are probably 130 games that gets released everyday. Not one of them will probably make any real money let alone be popular.
It is a bigger market. Sure you are increasing your chances if you release more, if you get better but still it is mostly about luck at this point for indie devs. Even with the name John Romero and some big publishers behind he is not able to replicate his success today
Check out https://itch.io/ there is whole communities of people that are constantly making small games. Better to get your feet wet then to jump into a giant game
This is a very poorly written article. Some examples of the multiple things leap out at me as bad style:
> John Romero on his book Doom Guy and developing games at a small scale
The title is styled in block caps. So in fact it says
JOHN ROMERO ON HIS BOOK DOOM GUY
What is a "book doom guy" and how can Romero own one? Sloppy.
> Posted On September 25, 2023 By zukalous
And yet, "CZ" is used as the interviewer shorthand. So how are we supposed to know who C.Z. is? That's both sloppy and deceitful, as the author is trying to hide behind a poor pseudonym. Grow up.
> I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail”
Quotation marks are not emphasis. This is a #fail.
> it occurred to me that at the start, he and the founders
Comma splice. Very poor English.
> My meeting John Romero at GDC 2022
"My meeting $PERSON"?
That's both bad style and broken grammar.
"My meeting with $P" would be better.
"I met $P" would be better still.
"The author and $P" would be better than that.
Almost anything would be better, in fact. Eugh.
> CZ: How did you scope it?
"Scope" is not a verb. Arguably, "scope out" is a phrasal verb, but the author -- I use the word very loosely -- doesn't say "scope out".
> The scoping on our very first game
Yeah, it's not a gerund, either.
Oh, there are so many it's just painful to read, and I have better things to do than sub-edit this.
> What Software company offices looked like in the late 80s.
Random capitals. Missing apostrophe. This is just such a mess, with random passive voice and all sorts of bad writing, and not so much bad editing as no editing.
I gave up. For me, this is unreadable. Shame: Romero is an interesting man and this was an interesting time in the industry.
My biggest gripe is that these smaller, “starter” games usually don’t get much play. Everyone wants to immerse in a loading screen space sim but can’t stand well-painted pixel sprites? Crazy.
There’s still hope. Hit games are hits not because of just their art but because of their play. Fez, for example, had pretty mediocre art. What it did have is an awesome 2.5D world. Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well. However, the level design, textures, and concepts, and play are still fantastic.
My only advice is if you want to make games, start making games. Who cares what your avatar looks like. Make it fun. @ works just fine.
Also, Commander Keen art splashes were top notch. The only thing missing was pro dithering.