Brian Abbott, perhaps best known as the titular brainy gamer behind Brainy Gamer, has posted an opinion piece on what makes jRPGs special. A good JRPG (any well-designed RPG, for that matter) envelops a player in a unified ecosystem that weaves together rules, mechanics, and storytelling such that each informs the other in the player’s […]

An indie RPG walks into a bar. “We don’t serve indie RPGs here,” says the bartender. “Why not?” asks the RPG. The bartender says, “You always bring a mob.”   An indie RPG walks into a bar. “We don’t serve indie RPGs here,” says the bartender. “Why not?” asks the RPG. “Look,” shrugs the bartender, […]

Every once in a while, I get an obsessive compulsion to create a more-or-less comprehensive list of something. Most recently, it was clones; specifically, games (typically iOS apps) that have been publicly accused of cloning existing indie games. Look at just how many of these we’ve seen over the past few years:

Jay Barnson has an opinion piece up at the Rampant Coyote blog exploring the possibility that RPGs are just too long. A snippet: The real problem isn’t so much that the games are too long as a whole. But eventually any games (or stories of any other medium) will begin to drag in the middle. […]

Today is a holiday in the United States. Originally known as Decoration Day back when it was established in the 1800s, Memorial Day has come to serve as an annual reminder of the many thousands of American soldiers who have died in various wars throughout America’s history. It’s sobering to think of the tens of […]

Games writer and RPG enthusiast Eric Schwarz has come out with another opinion piece on Gamasutra, this time concerning the use of ability cooldowns in RPGs. In practice, my biggest complaint against cooldown-oriented design is that it tends to take a way a lot of the tactical depth in a situation.  As a brute-force stopgap […]

There has been some discussion lately about whether there is really such a huge difference between jRPGs and wRPGs after all. Quite aside from whether we can prove that “East is West” based on a sample size of two, I’d like to discuss an issue hinted at near the end of Rowan Kaiser’s piece: specifically, […]

Another year, another Independent Games Festival; another Independent Games Festival, another group of finalists; another group of finalists, another army of aggrieved developers who didn’t make the cut. There has arisen something of a tradition among indie developers of complaining about the Independent Games Festival. There are reasons for that. For one thing, the stakes […]

Last night, I watched the fourth and final part of Matt Barton’s interview with Jay Barnson, developer of Frayed Knights. In the interview, I was disturbed to hear that someone had gone to the trouble of cracking the (incredibly minimal and non-invasive) copy protection on the game, then distributing it to a variety of warez […]

Project Zomboid isn’t quite dead-by-real-life (the tag below notwithstanding), but that doesn’t mean that life hasn’t given the project a few sound wallops with murderous intent. First Paypal froze their account. Then Google Checkout decided to do the same. Then pirates created an auto-updating pirated build of the game which threatened to kill them with […]