Editorial Jeff Vogel on How to be Smart & Cool & Awesome

[Elwro]

Well, Drakensang has much better ruleset.

That's true. But is it actually used?

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Well, Drakensang has much better ruleset.

That's true. But is it actually used?

In Drakensang 2 (River of Time) - Yes.
A vast improvement over the first one, though it still has some flaws that need to be adressed imo.

 

[cutterjohn]

Bottomline for me is that he's priced himself out of Indie

He's been living on debt for the past twenty years. Never made any money. He just wants to make games.

and?

IMNHO he's a coward. He comes off as a whiney bitch on EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS BLOG POSTS moaning about the BIG BOYZ, but he's such a coward that he won't even consider moving into the 90s let alone the 21st century...

Obviously he's not borke, but he's so faggotty that he won't take a chance. I'll back the hmmm... whats the Depths of Peril guy(Din's Curse) against Jeffy any day.

[EDIT]
Oh and whoops Josh(IIRC) on MoM already whooped his sorry faggotty ass...
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Jeffy, hope that you can find your teeth again...
[/EDIT2]

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Obviously he's not borke, but he's so faggotty that he won't take a chance. I'll back the hmmm... whats the Depths of Peril guy(Din's Curse) against Jeffy any day.]

Why would you want to take chances with your lively hood when you are already doing fine on your own? If someone handed you a gun and said there was an 80% chance it spit out $100 bills and a 20% chance it shoots bullets, would you put it to your head and pull the trigger?

 

[Zomg]

Can I fire it into a wallet?

 

[cutterjohn]

Obviously he's not borke, but he's so faggotty that he won't take a chance. I'll back the hmmm... whats the Depths of Peril guy(Din's Curse) against Jeffy any day.]

Why would you want to take chances with your lively hood when you are already doing fine on your own? If someone handed you a gun and said there was an 80% chance it spit out $100 bills and a 20% chance it shoots bullets, would you put it to your head and pull the trigger?

Well the way that he arrogantly write his blog entries like he's some kind of CRPG messiah he ought to be so full of himself that he'd take the risk, although I REALLY don't think that he could pull it off, especially given his ignorance wrt engines and availability/pricing.

I mean, hell, he could pick up an OSS engine and probably spend less licensing exitent 3D art/models than he's spent on his crappy dilapidated engine to date. Hell, the modern scripting support alone would make it worthwhile.

 

[BLOBERT]

BRO HE IS IN TO OBJECTIVISM THE WHOLE POINT OF THAT IOS TO BE ARROGANT AND TALK DOWN TO OTHERS BRO THEY ALL THINK THEY ARE LOGICAL SO IF YOU DISAGREE WITH THEM YOU ARE STUPID

 

[GuideBot]

Hell, the modern scripting support alone would make it worthwhile.

Would it? He already has a scripting system that allows him to do whatever he wants - and he has all those games to prove it. What point is there to writing his scripts in python or ruby or Haskell or whatever the latest fad language is when he already has a way to script an RPG? Who cares if does it with unsexy tech like CSV files or however he does it?

Personally, I enjoy how he whinges about the "cost" of engines.

WTF?!

GarageGames has EXCELLENT deals for their Torque engines for indie devs, as do a few other commercial engines.

There are several OSS game engines available, e.g. OGRE which has been proven by Torchlight and several other commercial games.

Art/models/effects can't be all that expensive, e.g. Minions of Mirth licensed most of their textures/models/art/effects along with commissioning some out to an artist in Europe, although they did get the soundtrack free IIRC.

What? Torque is not a ready made game engine. It is a graphics engine, a sound engine, a networking engine, but the "game" part has to be programmed yourself (or at least scripted in TorqueScript). You can't just download it and start pounding out RPGs. Ditto OGRE. There's a reason Iron Tower has a programmer on board.

And although moving to 3d would be technically achievable for a small indie dude like Jeff, "being 3d" isn't the bottleneck - the bottleneck is creating decent looking 3d assets. It takes a lot longer to model a wall in 3d and texture it than to draw a 32x32 or whatever isometric wall in whatever the Mac equivalent to Paint is. It takes a lot longer to model, texture and animate a dragon in 3d than to draw a static, unanimated 32x32 or whatever dragon in MacPaint. Jeff makes low res, unanimated 2d isometric games not because he can't write a 3d engine (the man has >20 years of programming experience and could probably pick up 3d programming fairly quickly) but because making 3d assets takes too long - which is exactly his point. The more time you spend making fancier assets instead of reusing what you've got the less time you spend releasing games and having money to feed your family.

Now, I'm no Spiderweb fanboy - I've never bought a single one of their games or even played one of the demos to completion. I think the lack of music is what does it in for me. But the guy released 11 games in the last 10 years. If you like his sort of game, how can you argue with the results? I personally enjoyed Eschalon more than the Spiderweb games, but it's taken BasiliskWrangler 3 years to do the sequel, in part because of all the changes he's made to the engine: increased art requirements, higher resolution, new features, rebalanced combat rules and so forth. As Eschalon was the first in the series a lot of these changes were necessary - the first game's mechanics were pretty broken. But even though Eschalon is written in BlitzMax (a higher level language than what Jeff uses which should reduce the time it takes to do things like cross-platform and graphical effects) this all took time. And, as Jeff says, with all the studio closures and massive losses publishers and developers are making, it's clear tradeoffs need to be made.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

A 2D isometric/topdown engine made for cRPGs that would allow to use Exile/Avernum-style static sprites would be fucking awesome.

 

[Mortmal]

A 2D isometric/topdown engine made for cRPGs that would allow to use Exile/Avernum-style static sprites would be fucking awesome.

It already exist for 3d isometric at least http://www.avernum.com/blades/index.html.(Edit: oh and in 2D too http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/blades/winBOE.html )

Its funny to see the hate towards the guy , why call him a coward ? where should i go if i want another game like the ultima ? where do i get a game like fallout 2 ? no where, jeff make game relatively close to the ultima games, they dont have everything you had in ultima 6 7 or worlds of ultima but theres absolutely no one else making old school rpg, he's already taking a risk since obviously no one think its worth making them.
Drakensang much prettier, superb in fact, yes technically perfect , a typical german quality work, but completely boring.
Eschalon in my opinion while prettier , had zero interest, just move one square back and shoot with your only one character, or click and attack its never more evolved than that, and it took them way longer to make a sequel.

 

[Sceptic]

Well the way that he arrogantly write his blog entries like he's some kind of CRPG messiah

Rule #1 when dealing with Jeff Vogel: play his games and ignore his blogs. If you do read his blogs, just be thankful that he is not applying any of the shitty ideas he blogs about into his games, or that he doesn't make his games anything like his favorites.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

A 2D isometric/topdown engine made for cRPGs that would allow to use Exile/Avernum-style static sprites would be fucking awesome.

It already exist for 3d isometric at least http://www.avernum.com/blades/index.html.(Edit: oh and in 2D too http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/blades/winBOE.html )

Does it allow Fallout-style dialogues?

 

[Azrael the cat]

Personally, I enjoy how he whinges about the "cost" of engines.

WTF?!

GarageGames has EXCELLENT deals for their Torque engines for indie devs, as do a few other commercial engines.

There are several OSS game engines available, e.g. OGRE which has been proven by Torchlight and several other commercial games.

Art/models/effects can't be all that expensive, e.g. Minions of Mirth licensed most of their textures/models/art/effects along with commissioning some out to an artist in Europe, although they did get the soundtrack free IIRC.

Jeff is just too set in his ways to survive. His engine is creaky and his graphics leave something to be desired. I think he's deathly mortified to go beyond a 1 person project team. Hell, he probably couldn;'t handle it, but given his pricing he's got to do something.

FFS Drakensang was $2 more than his most recent games and they, apparently, did well enough to get a sequel through while doing it on what amounts to a miniscule budget. That game was EAISLY better than ANY of Jeff's even discounting graphics and comparing base story/mechanics as if they had both existed in the 90s when he started with Exile.

(Especially kills me how he "forgot" about re-hashing 5 of his games: Exile I-III -> Avernum I-III (not many changes, just new engine and crappier mechanics), Blades of Exile -> Blades of Avernum, and the Nethergate re-write, which I have to say is my favorite game of his. (Never much cared for the Exile world or Geneforge. Geneforge always just made me say blah while I could play Exile for a while.)

Parting shot:
Funny how he mentions goldbox. You know what Jeff? At the time that goldbox came out they had pretty decent graphics and BTW they DID get updated graphics and new tilesets. Too bad Jeff's games some 10+y later still look like goldbox and arguably not nearly as good.

Infinity Engine: snicker, well people could actually mod IE and again, every DLC/expansion came with new graphics and tilesets.

Graphics: Yes SOME re-use of artwork is fine, especially things like architecture for areas that are set in the same or similar geographical locations, but there's a limit to re-use. Also, yes, things like monsters etc. could be re-used but come on toss a bone here add a little variety once in a while, especially with NPCs.

Bottomline for me is that he's priced himself out of Indie while NOT offering the goods that his pricing scheme demands. I think the biggest problem is really his engine, and all he'd have to do is hire/license some models/art and get dug into a modern OSS or commercial engine. Hell in the long run it'd probably save him dev time and DEFINITELY would give him a better scripting engine to work with.

Nah, love it or hate it, he's got the pricing right. You should never EVER compete on price, and indies in ANY industry get that wrong too often. Someone will come along with better economies of scale and make something cheaper than you. Instead, work on making something that (a) few others make, and (b) few others CAN make.

Vogel can price the fuck out of his games because he has no competitors. I'm not talking 'no other indies' - I don't think his competitors really are the 'indie market', and frankly I don't think that 'indie market' - a market of people with a preference specifically for small-studio games - really exists. He has no other competitors because no other company makes games that are even vaguely similar (in terms of gameplay) to his own: no TB games, no games with equivalent combination of insane explorability and interactive world, no games with the same insane degree of factions, subfactions and political/factional interaction (in the Geneforge series that is) - simply nothing like it. The last time a product that played like Vogel's games came out was Ultima VII. Everything since then has been a completely different subgenre.

So if you're going in thinking 'I want a game like Vogel's', your selection range is...Vogel. Which is why he got away with shit graphics for so many years, and why he still gets away with high prices for an indie. Maybe he'll have a competitor if AoD ever comes out. But from his perspective he's seen dozens of potential competitors announce themselves and never reach beta, let alone sell, while he's still making a living out of it.

Marketing - in the sense of finding a market that is undertapped, producing products specifically for that market, and pricing in accordance with the market layout (i.e. here gouging the price insanely high for an indie, because he has utterly cornered the market) - is something Vogel has exactly right. If Vince finishes AoD and starts cranking out a new AoD or similar product once per year (think about that...think how long AoD has been in production for, and think how many companies, including Vince's, are going to be able to put out games with Vogel's regularity), then Vogel WILL need to drop his prices and may need to improve his graphics. As is, he can do just fine without either.

 

[Mortmal]

A 2D isometric/topdown engine made for cRPGs that would allow to use Exile/Avernum-style static sprites would be fucking awesome.

It already exist for 3d isometric at least http://www.avernum.com/blades/index.html.(Edit: oh and in 2D too http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/blades/winBOE.html )

Does it allow Fallout-style dialogues?

Not too sure on that but it allows dialog trees at least, i played a few modules using blades of avernum they were decent .

 

[Davaris]

Vogel can price the fuck out of his games because he has no competitors. I'm not talking 'no other indies' -
.

His prices are reasonable, considering how much play time you get from them. What is unreasonable is what Indies are selling their games for these days, and that's because of the portal wars and their race to the bottom.

I saw a couple of Indie devs a number of years back, warning other devs not to give their games to portals, because they would be giving their customers away and the price wars that would be sure to follow.

These same guys are still making a living selling quality games at "premium" prices today, while all the others are out of business, or making and selling small games for a couple of bucks .

Something I read last year made a lot of sense:
Even in hard times people pay for quality, because they want to get their money's worth. So never compete on price, always compete on quality.

If Vince finishes AoD and starts cranking out a new AoD or similar product once per year (think about that...think how long AoD has been in production for, and think how many companies, including Vince's, are going to be able to put out games with Vogel's regularity), then Vogel WILL need to drop his prices and may need to improve his graphics. As is, he can do just fine without either.

You are right. He will never need to drop his price, as he has a solid customer base of around 4000 people. These people like his games, so as long as he keeps making what they like, they'll keep buying.

As for ITS, they wouldn't be able to make a Vogel game, so they won't be competing with him. When I think of a Vogel game, I think of really, really, big games - from what I've read, he makes a map a day, until he is finished. So there is no way ITS or anyone else using a 3D engine, could compete with him in terms of sheer number of maps, if they want their games to look good.

 

[PorkaMorka]

A rare intelligent comment from Vogel.

If they made ten games in the TOEE engine, I would play them all, and possibly even buy them, assuming they were not as awful as TOEE.

Or the Silent Storm engine, or even the JA2 engine, it actually supports multiple different enemy graphics, they just didn't bother making them.

There are a ton of slightly obscure game ideas I am dieing to see, and they all make sense when you're milking an engine, but they don't really make sense if you're going to spend 5 million on a game.

And as far as giving him business advice, 16 years in the business means we should be trying to get advice from him, not vice-versa. His games are a good value if you are fucked up enough to enjoy that style of gameplay, they're very long.

edit: I'm a liar

I didn't play nightwatch and that was on the silent storm engine

but in my defense it wasn't a silent storm style game

 

[OSK]

I agree with PorkaMorka.

Also, the Codex is now full of graphics whores.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

And as far as giving him business advice, 16 years in the business means we should be trying to get advice from him, not vice-versa.

Nonsense, massive assburguers is more than enough to give advice to anyone about anything

 

[shihonage]

I've been thinking that we can sidestep having to make walking animations for sprites by having them take place in a world where everyone uses hoverboards a la those dark mages in Warhammer Online.

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