Dota 2 Holiday: the Greeviling

So apparently Valve has had a promotional site up for a couple of days advertising something they call Frostivus. Well, today is the 3rd day of the site, and today they announced that Frostivus has been canceled because of something they call the Greeviling. It would appear that the Greeviling will pit players against hoards of Greevils in an effort to recover items which will be gifted to other players. If you weren't aware, a Greevil is a creature that Valve introduced back around Halloween for that special event. In fact, Valve is continuing to sell eggs that will hatch into Greevil couriers, so you can head to the store to purchase them. Hopefully, this event will give us a chance to pick up more essences for our Greevil eggs. Check out the official video if you want some excitement about the event.

Thoughts on farming casual games

I've spent some time tinking lately about farming style games and what I think of them. The basic gameplay in these games is almost exclusively clicking on something once to initiate a timer until you can click on that same thing again. This waiting game naturally provides some excitement as the moment of clicking approaches. Then you get a brief feeling of joy as you click and the reward for the action pops out.

This basic gameplay is actually a fairly good representation for a number of real world activities. For instance, in a real farm, you perform a brief action of planting a seed, then after some much longer period of time, you perform another small action to reap the reward of whatever that plant produced.

However, the vast majority of farming style video games these days seem designed almost entirely to separate the player from their money as efficiently as possible. Many gamers are offended with the genre because of this commercialization, but I don't believe that the design has to be monetized in that way. In fact games like simtower were very similar, but had a more traditional monetization through a one-time purchase.

If I find the time, I may design a game using this play style, but a much more reasonable monetization.

Planetside 2

I recently saw Planetside 2 on Steam and decided to give it a whirl. It turns out, this is the first real MMO-FPS game I've tried and I found it very interesting. First, you choose one of 3 factions on which to fight along with which of the 6-12 (if I remember correctly) servers to play on. Then you choose one of 5 classes to play (flyer, fighter, healer, reloader, sniper) and a spot to spawn on the battlefield. The spawns are almost always right next to some fighting, so you are very quickly placed into some action.

As it was my first experience with the game, I ran around shooting guys and dying a lot. Then I noticed that there are tons of vehicles flying and driving around. It appears that one of the main strategic actions in the game is to take a troop transport vehicle near an opposing base and deploy it to allow your team to spawn there until it gets destroyed. If you are attempting to defend a base, it's almost certainly a good idea to find where those spawning trucks are and destroy them as soon as possible. However, the majority of players really just seem to swarm all over the objectives, spending much of their time shooting the other team in the face.

For a first time player, I like how easily you can get in and play. For extended play, I'm unsure how well upgrades serve to keep the gameplay interesting. I'm also concerned that the weapons and progression may require too much grinding to really make it worth my while to keep playing long term. Still, I think the game is worth a couple play sessions.

Superbrothers: Sword and Sorcery EP

I've been known to buy every humble bundle whenever they come out. I recently bought a nexus 7 and have been able to try out the android humble bundles that I had previously not played. I found a pleasant surprise in a game called Super brothers: Sword and Sorcery EP. It is a point and click (touch) adventure game with old-school pixel graphics. They do an excellent job of using the features of tablet and cell phone devices. Occasionally you rotate your device to switch between movement and combat modes. The game is broken up into a number of segments and they lead to natural stopping points which is good for short play sessions. I haven't yet beaten the game, but I keep wanting to play to learn more about the setting and the story. I recommend that anyone who can, try the game to see what they think. Here are a few screenshots from the game so you can get an impression of what it is like.

Wizard Fight Race Steam Greenlight

Back in March I made a post about about Wizard Fight Race 7II, a game I made with a few friends in 72 hours. While we have a prototype as a proof of concept for the game, I believe there is still a lot more that could be done to improve it to the point where people might be willing, and interested in paying money for it. To that end, I made a concept page on Steam Greenlight to encourage community interaction and feedback. If you're reading this, and you feel like you'd like to give me a thumbs up (or down) or any sort of suggestions and input, then head on over to the Wizard Fight Race project page to leave comments and discuss the possibilities for the game with other interested steam users.

How to enable follow player in Dota 2

I have a friend that has Dota 2 and would like to play, but has not really been able to get into the game because he misses the screenlock feature available in other similar games. In other words, he would like the camera to be able to follow his character at all times so he doesn't lose track of what is happening to him by having the camera in a strange location. If you, like him, would like to be able to do this, I'm going to provide the steps right here in this post!

1. Find Dota 2 in your steam games list.
2. Right click Dota 2 and choose "Properties"
3. Click the "Set launch options..." button.
4. Type "-console" in the options if it is not there.
5. Start up Dota 2.
6. If the console window is not showing, press the ` key to get it to show.*
7. Type "dota_camera_lock 1" in the console and press enter.
8. Start a practice game (create lobby) to test it out and make sure it works how you want!

The downside of this method, is you will have to repeat steps 6-7 every time you start the game to turn on camera lock mode. Another method I found allows the F1 key to center in 1 press instead of 2, and you can customize the follow distance for that centering too. If there is interest, I can post those directions as well!

Towns (Steam Greenlight)

So this last week I saw a game that had recently been greenlit on Steam Greenlight called Towns. Now Towns is a game that is quite similar to Castle Story in a lot of ways, but with a number of differences. First, Towns in it's current alpha state has a lot more content than Castle Story in it's alpha state. That is, there are a lot more things to find and do in Towns. However, even though Castle Story has buggy building construction, Towns somehow manages to have even worse building construction. As both games are in alpha still, neither is really user friendly or good at directing the user to understand the interface and which things should be done.

One thing I've started doing in Towns, is to set a few commands for my town citizens to follow, then walk away and let them live their lives to see what they've done when I come back. Most of the time, I've come back to a ghost town where literally all of the town citizens have been killed and ghosts have spawned from their corpses. However, as I've managed to set up a fairly well armed standing army, the last couple attempts I've been able to return to a town population that was even greater than the one when I left. Right now my recommendation would be towns over castle story, just because there is more content in towns so far. It'll be interesting to see both of these games progress to see how much fun they can be when they are finished.