Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Gaming Links And Notes

First off, that AFI song in Rock Band 2 is a bitch on Expert drums.

Andrew Shih (via Popehat) sent me a link to an interesting blog discussion by Jeff Vogel on the economics of being an independent developer. Vogel is the creator of the Geneforge and Avernum series, and what makes his posts so interesting is that he's actually sharing information about his development costs and unit sales. It's an excellent and interesting read, and here are the links:
So Here's How Many Games I Sell
So Here's How Many Games I Sell (part two)

Allen Varney sent me a link to a video demo of Mount & Blade's upcoming expansion Warband, and it looks damned good.

If you ever wanted to know how Gamestop processes the bajillion used games and consoles it buys, today is your lucky day, because Victor Godinez has an article and pictures here. In short, it's an absolutely massive operation.

I think I link to this about twice a year, but it's so interesting that I'm going to keep doing it. The link is to the latest developments log at the Bay 12 Games website, and the details of the ongoing development of Dwarf Fortress are always fascinating. Take a look at a few excerpts (these entries were made over multiple days):
As you might want to gather and treat the wounded without the benefit of tables or beds (due to resource constraints or otherwise), I went with an activity zone for the hospital. I've added a few options to activity zone placement to make that a little easier (they can overlap now, you can flow them out like rooms, and delete a single zone regardless of overlaps). This'll also be a good test for using zones for things like dynamic workshops (way) later if things go that direction, as hospital zones will need to manage several buildings. It might also be useful for some military applications for this release.

The broken-armed dwarf understood that he needed to run off to the hospital zone properly, but care never came, because I'm still working on that. Poor little buddy.

He's now surrounded by many skilled medical professionals. They still aren't all that useful, but just their presence must be encouraging for him. Well, I guess that's not true either.

The doctors now plan out our dwarf's care in detail, but lacking the tools they need, we still find them prescribing nothing more than bed rest. Hopefully I can get a positive outcome for tomorrow, as I'm looking at 40d10 the day after that.

After a brief period of the doctor walking up to our injured dwarf, looking at himself and deciding that nothing was wrong, the medical staff were further educated. Then the doctor went off and grabbed the wooden splint and properly fastened it on the patient's right lower arm. The dwarf left the hospital and mined out a passage with the pick in his left hand.

I've said this before, too, but just the dev log for Dwarf Fortress is far more interesting than 90% of the games I've ever played.

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