I wanted to make a social game last year, so my girlfriend Brenda told her employers (Lolapps, Inc., a social game developer in San Francisco, California) that I was interested. I started consulting in August 2010, designed the game in a few days, and got the team working on what I decided to call Ravenwood Fair. At the beginning, I did art direction toward a painterly style until the lead artist, Christine MacTernan, totally got the look and took over from there. I created and coded all the sound effects, and worked with a great composer named Aaron Walz from Game Audio Alliance on the game’s looping soundtrack. He did an excellent job, as the song can be played infinitely without annoyance – the true test of a great composition.

The team was very small: four programmers, two concept artists, two animators, a UI artist, a producer, Brenda and me. That’s only 12 people. In addition, the game launched on October 19, which means it took 2.5 months to go from concept to ship. This causes many a social game publisher to gasp, but there’s a good reason for it: the team worked very hard, and they had already been working on several game concepts for 7 months before I showed up, so they were already “at speed” and no ramp-up time was needed.

When I arrived at Lolapps, the owners told me I could create whatever, as long as the game would make money and launch by September 30. That was less than 2 months by the time I started working on it. I knew I had to hurry up and come up with a concept, so I quickly identified the best game on Facebook at the time, FrontierVille, and played it for three days so I could understand its design patterns and monetization model (I had been following the social game space since 2009). Then, I got the scoop on the engine we were using and found out it was really fast and could draw a ton of graphics on the screen quickly. I learned from the lead coder how much code had been written for the previous game prototypes, so I needed to use as much as possible to keep moving forward and not go backward much.

The idea for the game appeared very quickly. The setting was going to be a fairytale/storybook/magical place that floated in the air and was occupied by a slightly scary forest. Since the biggest games on Facebook were business sims, I needed to have the player build their own little business, and I wanted it to be like nothing else on Facebook. I thought a Fair would be a really nice obvious positive goal for the player to build, and there wasn’t a carnival/circus/fair sim on Facebook……yet. My thought was this: when you’re building a place for visitors to come and occupy, why wouldn’t you want them to be doing something really fun while they’re there? What’s more fun than Disneyland? I imagined what it must be like at a high-level point-of-view to actually RUN DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida – to have to carve out a bunch of wilderness packed with alligators and other denizens, and then have to build a fun place in the middle of that – and KEEP it happy and fun, all the while the alligators and beasts want their place back. I figured that would be a fun game to play – as I cut back a scary forest, I build a Fair, visitors come and use all the things I’m building, and I get to interact with them in a light fashion. That was the basis of my design, so we had our first meeting, and the producer and leads wrote down the long list of things that we needed to start working on immediately.

After August, we were still working on the foundations of the game systems and entire art overhaul, when Brenda joined the team from Critter Island (it had been shut down by Facebook). Brenda immediately started working on the quests, the map layout, and the tutorial parts of the game. She had to basically try to get all the final parts of the game together while I was still working on the foundational stuff, and we had to make sure that they would meet in the middle and the game would be complete by September 30.

Near the end of September, to make the launch date, the game had been re-scoped and re-prioritized so much that it wasn’t going to be anything I’d want to play if we shipped it in that state. Facebook games are well-known to ship incomplete and get fixed post-launch. I’m not from that world – I’m from the world of “You only launch once” and the first impression is extremely important. There were game systems missing that absolutely needed to be included in the game for the design to harmonize, and it got very tense at the end of September with the execs pressing for launch and me holding the game back to make it great. Every day in October was a “Can it ship?” day. It took 19 more 12pm-to-4am days to get the game in a state that I’d launch. In fact, I held back on doing interviews about the game until I knew it was going to be something I’d put my name on. Finally, around October 15, the game was quality enough for me to do the Dean Takahashi interview in VentureBeat.

The game launched, but the team kept working. We had lots of holes to fill, and obscure bugs to fix. The launch on Facebook went as good as a launch could possibly go: millions of people played the game and hundreds of thousands still join every week. Brenda and I ended our consulting with Lolapps on February 25, 2011 so we could concentrate full-time on our new startup, Loot Drop, Inc.

Just recently at the beginning of March, Ravenwood Fair made the #15 slot on the AppData Top 15 Applications list – this list is of ALL applications on Facebook, not just games (over 125,000 apps are on Facebook). Ravenwood Fair is the #1 non-Zynga game, and that’s quite an accomplishment. Currently, over 25 million people play Ravenwood Fair every month on all social platforms (over 11 million on Facebook alone), and over 1 million play every day on Facebook only. I never thought I’d see the day that I would make a game that doubled World of Warcraft, player count-wise. I’d like to thank Brenda and Lolapps for giving me the opportunity, and the Ravenwood Fair launch team that worked so hard on the game.

Ravenwood Fair Trivia Time!

                          

Here are my updated directions for Mac OS X:

(1) Copy entire contents of the Dark Forces CD to a directory (ex. ~/Games/Dark). Keep the directory name to 8 letters or less.
(2) Download the latest Mac OS X version of DOSBox and install it.
(3) mount c ~/Games/Dark (or wherever you put the game on your hard drive)
(4) c:
(5) subst p: c:
(6) p:
(7) cd dark
(8) type either imuse or dark to run the sound config utility or the game

To go in/out of full-screen mode, press Option-Return. That’s it – it works great!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, for Mac users there is an awesome program named Boxer that will wrap your DOS games up in a simple app file and you just double-click to launch. It’s really amazing. Check it out here.

                          

But, if you’re flying in or out of Stormwind, you can see the carefully aligned texturing on the top of the wooden beams that was completely neglected on the bottom side.

Please. Just fix it.

                          

I listen to game music. A lot. This is a recent trend circa 1995 with Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo. Well, it’s even earlier if you count the one time I finished Karateka in 1985 and let the music at the end of the game (scored by Jordan’s Dad, Francis) loop for hours as I recorded it on a tape player. But CD quality audio-wise, Chrono Trigger was the first game that demanded more attention. It was Yasunori Mitsuda’s first game composing job and it was pure magic. I still listen to that soundtrack today, interspersed with the thousands of other game songs I’ve collected.

When you play a game you are experiencing a combination of story/design, interaction and audio. The audio is a very important part of the gaming experience and I always listen to the music and sound effects because it was carefully designed into the game and frames the entire piece. After the game is over and you listen to the music outside the game, if you bother to get the soundtrack, you will remember what was happening during the game as you listen to the songs.

This is what I like about game music: it lets me remember playing the game without me having to actually pull out my SNES and find the cartridge and spend time replaying it. Listening to the full soundtrack lets you remember the whole game, not just one part of it. With a library of thousands of songs, I’m reliving many of the games I’ve played.

Seiken Densetsu 3: Whiz Kid

I also have a lot of music from games I’ve never played and after listening to them for so long, I feel as if I know the games without having played them. For example, I’ve played Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) and listen to all its music and remember the parts I played and it’s great. I also have the soundtrack to Seiken Densetsu 3, never released in the USA, and the music is similar in a way, but very different. And through the music I get a very good sense of the kind of game that it is.

Remixes take game music to a whole new level. The Zelda, Super Mario, Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger series have some of the most remixed songs. The styles these songs are remixed in vary from 70′s disco to jazz to orchestral to just plain crazy and creative. Best of all, you can get most game remixes for free from OCREMIX.ORG. Remixers have gotten so good at remaking these songs that they also create their own originals and recently have been scoring the soundtracks to new games such as Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD. The industry is waking up to a whole new world of talent – game music remixers. Back in 2005 when I started working on my MMO, I wanted to have remixers as composers for my game. Quinn Fox has already delivered some great stuff.
Illinois Afterglow – Quinn Fox

It’s true, game music doesn’t sound like anything you would hear on the radio or MTV and most people don’t recognize it when they hear it. They think it’s electronic music usually. But it’s not – it’s a special musical form that not only sounds great, but helps you to remember.

I like remembering.

                          

Published and developed by Valve (well, really, developed by their newly-acquired studio Turtle Rock Studios in LA) and using the very beautiful and speedy Source engine, Left 4 Dead does very right what i was attempting with Daikatana – going through a story with sidekicks. There have been some great decisions made with the way the L4D sidekicks are handled (some learned from MMORPGs like having character names above the sidekicks and being able to run through them) and the very limited options for interacting with them because they basically do all the things you’d want them to do without telling them. In Daikatana, commanding the sidekicks could become a hassle, especially when they didn’t do what you told them! LOL.

Aside from Painkiller being a decent attempt at DOOM-for-the-21st-century, L4D does the best job i’ve ever seen at being able to recreate the DOOM atmosphere and insane action of hordes of enemies coming to destroy you. The pacing of the gameplay is perfect with lots of slow and fast sections, a lot of that determined by how observant you are to your surroundings. The AI Director system in L4D is also a major help for replaying the game over and over. I’ve already blasted through the entire demo twice in a couple hours and loved seeing the gameplay change the 2nd time through.

And for me the most awesome feature is the CO-OP gameplay that i’ve been waiting for since Duke 3D and Quake in 1996. FINALLY! The sidekick AI is already excellent but playing CO-OP online is going to really make this game stand out. In the demo you can check it out – it’s really cool.

I also wanted to close with a quick note about Portal – if you haven’t played this short game, you absolutely need to. It’s a breath of fresh air in the FPS genre and tells a great story without actually telling it. The final level and credits are just …..wow. You have to play this game. Even when you’re finished, there’s more to do with Advanced Maps and Challenge Maps. Made me feel the same way after finishing Resident Evil 4 and unlocking a bunch of new content that felt like the dev team really put a lot of love into their game.

Oh, and Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 are tons of fun as well. Ok so now you know all the games i’ve been playing LOL.

NOVEMBER 13th!!!!!!!

                          

This is the entrance to Stormwind. These wooden beams appear in other areas of the game -properly aligned. How can a texture misalignment of this magnitude go unaddressed for so long? The lighting bug in the entrance of the Booty Bay Inn was fixed months ago (finally) but this huge mistake is still around.

WHY?

                          

The original PC version of Ghost Recon was released in November 2001. The entire campaign took place in Russia with some locations being in Tblisi and Ossetia – the sites of today’s turmoil. That’s what sparked my interest in jumping back into the game again. And I’m so glad I did – it’s truly one of the greatest games made. I can play it for hours and hours; it never gets boring. In fact, it’s massively suspenseful.

Ghost Recon was the very first (and one of the very few) games where enemies in camouflage are 100% effective. You can be lying in prone position on the ground as a sniper in your ghillie suit, scoping out the area, and not spot the enemy crawling slowly toward you in full camo – it’s that amazing.

It has every multiplayer option you could hope for….and I always hope for Co-Op. It has excellent support for Co-Op as well as a bunch of other modes. My favorite way to play is to just jump into a Quick Mission on Castle MP06 (daytime), make Team A be only myself as a sniper with an SP25 + Grenades and Team B be a Demolitions expert with an MM1 and a Tank Killer rocketlauncher. I like trying to take the entire place out by myself. If I get killed then I’m auto-switched to the Demo member and I just go nuts bombing the whole place until I’m taken down (it’s inevitable). I start with a Team B member because I like hearing the confirmation of every kill.

After saving Moscow from the Russian rebels, the game ends. But that’s not all. Red Storm released two additional add-ons: Desert Siege (2002) and Island Thunder (2002). DS took place in Africa and IT took place in Cuba. Both are just spectacular experiences. The storylines are serious and the environments and missions are sublime. In all games, the enemy AI is what totally shines – they are TOUGH. You’ll know what I mean if you try to play a map by yourself with no backup. Crazy suspense and totally FUN.

You can buy all of this in one big Ghost Recon Gold box for about $20. It’s so worth it. The graphics look dated by today’s standards but it’s the gameplay that will live forever. It’s DirectX so it works great on everything. I play it on Vista with no issues. Performance is top-of-the-line as the game is 7 years old. Go pick it up – you’ll love it.

                          

And tomorrow at noon, Texas time, they will be releasing the first teaser trailer for the game!!!

I, for one, cannot wait for the Duke to rise again. It’s been a looooong time but it’s better to be late and super great than punctual and barely functional.

UPDATE: The teaser is out and I love it! (right-click, save as) The Duke is back and I’m going to like it no matter what.

My own observations and thoughts from the teaser:

(1) Love the Terminator hammering going on while the scenes fly by. Ominously badass.

(2) The redone Duke theme song sounds a little overworked for me. Heavier power chords like the original would sound harder if run through a Pantera-style GSP (Dimebag’s sound ruled).

(3) Totally love the American flag at the end – Duke is All-American FTW!

(4) I love the quote at the end, “I’m looking for some alien toilet to park my bricks, who’s first?” The reason is because it portends more sophisticated one-liners than you’d expect. I loved D3D’s lines immensely but seeing a slight evolution in style was very nice.

(5) The tech is great, the graphics (textures, anims, etc.) are great. If the gameplay holds true to the original in that there’s intense FPS fighting and tons of interactivity with the environment then I’m predicting huge success. One huge reason Half-Life 2 did so well was that they stuck with their incredible formula from HL1 and it continues to work.

My thought is that the very interactive nature of D3D’s environment was one of the defining elements of Duke’s IP and that continuing to include that kind of interactivity with the environment will further cement Duke’s IP and heighten the probability of DNF’s success. That and the over-the-top Duke attitude and humor make for one of the most engaging character-driven FPS’s to come along in…..oh, about 12 years (come February 2008).

                          

Imagine my disappointment (and many of you out there as well) when I read the initial tracklist and found jokes such as Flock of Seagulls, Police, Bow Wow Wow, Asia, Billy Squier, etc. I was actually really pissed. Here was a golden opportunity to showcase what I really believe should have been on the original Guitar Hero game in the first place. What happened? They played a big joke on me.

First of all, the press release mentioned “from the classic era”. Uh, guys, that was in the 70′s. All of which I very much respect given that I’m a huge Sabbath, Priest, Santana, Scorpions, Rainbow, etc. fan myself. Second, they list 7 initially confirmed songs that are supposed to allow me to “experience the ultimate rock star fantasy”. Sorry guys, but pretending to be the guitarist of The Police (whoever the hell he was) or Faster Pussycat (and who is he? Barely anyone knows. Or cares.) just isn’t anywhere in the solar system of guitarists I’d like to be. Red Octane already gave me some of those guys in the original Guitar Hero with Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix, Dimebag Darrell, Tom Scholz and Jake E. Lee. Hell, even Dimebag contributed to a video game in his own special way (see if any of you can track that one down). But with Activision involved it’s like someone brought a strap up against the nuts of the franchise.

Also, many of the songs listed thus far just are not what I’d call songs that I want to play on a guitar that make me feel cool. I will say that “Holy Diver” and “Round And Round” *are* songs I’m very happy with on that list. But that’s only 2 out of the 14 known so far (wikipedia has a more extensive list than the press release). There’s supposed to be 30 ass-kicking songs. So half of them produce only 2 that I like. I was expecting this “Rocks the 80′s” to be badass metal, mostly melodic and not thrashy because that’s just not fun to play. Okay, Nuno Bettencourt is in there, which adds a little cred.

If I was putting together an 80′s Metal version of Guitar Hero here’s what I’d put together. I thought about these a lot, they’re not the typical songs you’d expect (for example, no damn Paranoid, War Pigs, Iron Man from Black Sabbath) and they’re really kickass and definitely songs that I wish I could play on a stage in front of millions. Okay, not all of these songs are 80′s Metal but most of them are. The ones that aren’t are just awesome and should have been on Guitar Hero 1:

EASY:

Accept – Up To The Limit (great riff)
Black Sabbath – Nightwing
Crimson Glory – Heart of Steel
David Lee Roth – Big Trouble (Steve Vai!)
Deep Purple – Perfect Strangers
Def Leppard – Foolin
Dio – When A Woman Cries
Dokken – Unchain The Night
Firehouse – All She Wrote
Great White – Shot In The Dark
Helix – Heavy Metal Love
Judas Priest – A Touch Of Evil
Judas Priest – Turning Circles (70′s classic)
Kingdom Come – Who Do You Love?
Kingdom Come – Perfect O
Kingdom Come – Living Out Of Touch (great riff)
Kiss – Love Gun (70′s classic)
Motley Crue – Looks That Kill
Ozzy Osbourne – Hellraiser
Queensryche – The Lady Wore Black
Rainbow – Stone Cold (70′s classic)
Scorpions – Hold Me Tight
Scorpions – In Trance
Slaughter – Up All Night
Van Halen – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love (70′s classic)
W.A.S.P. – Restless Gypsy
Winger – Spell I’m Under

MEDIUM:

Accept – Teach Us To Survive
Alice Cooper – Step On You
Black Label Society – S.D.M.F.
Black Sabbath – Headless Cross
Bulletboys – Hard As A Rock
Cinderella – Long Cold Winter
Crimson Glory – Dragon Lady
Def Leppard – Photograph
Dio – Dream Evil
Dokken – Seven Thunders
Firehouse – Reach For The Sky
Great White – House Of Broken Love
Great White – Lady Red Light
Great White – Step On You
Iron Maiden – Flight Of Icarus
Judas Priest – Nightcrawler
Loudness – Crazy Nights
Motley Crue – Knock Em Dead Kid
Ozzy Osbourne – Flying High Again
Psychotic Waltz – Into The Everflow
REO Speedwagon – Roll With The Changes (70′s classic)
Savatage – Sirens
Saxon – Beyond The Grave
Saxon – Lionheart
Scorpions – You Give Me All I Need
Scorpions – Don’t Believe Her
Scorpions – Rock You Like A Hurricane
Steelheart – Can’t Stop Me Lovin’ You
Steelheart – Everybody Loves Eileen
TNT – Everyone’s A Star
Vinnie Vincent – Ashes To Ashes
W.A.S.P. – Charisma
Warrant – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Whitesnake – Fool For Your Lovin’
Winger – Hangin’ On
Winger – Hungry
Yngwie Malmsteen – Queen In Love

HARD:

Black Label Society – Funeral Bell
Black Sabbath – Digital Bitch
Bulletboys – Hell Yeah!
Crimson Glory – In Dark Places
Dokken – Kiss Of Death
Dokken – Sleepless Night
Dokken – Mr. Scary
Dokken – Sunless Days
Dokken – Don’t Close Your Eyes
Eric Johnson – Cliffs Of Dover (pure guitar mastery)
Gary Moore – Oh Pretty Woman
Iron Maiden – Powerslave
Joe Satriani – Devil’s Slide
Joe Satriani – Flying In A Blue Dream
Joe Satriani – If I Could Fly
Judas Priest – Demonizer
Judas Priest – Painkiller
Judas Priest – Hellrider
Judas Priest – Metal Meltdown
Lynch Mob – River Of Love
Lynch Mob – She’s Evil But She’s Mine
Ozzy Osbourne – Desire
Ozzy Osbourne – Fool Like You
Psychotic Waltz – Haze One
Queensryche – Eyes Of A Stranger
Racer X – Superheroes
Racer X – Viking Kong
Ratt – You’re In Love
Ratt – Lay It Down
Savatage – Conversation Piece
Savatage – Strange Wings
Savatage – 24 Hours Ago
Saxon – Searching For Atlantis
Scorpions – Make It Real
Solitude Aeturnus – Spiral Descent
Steve Vai – Erotic Nightmares
TNT – Sapphire
White Lion – Hungry
White Lion – Lonely Nights
White Lion – Lady Of The Valley
Winger – Blind Revolution Mad
Yngwie Malmsteen – Enemy
Yngwie Malmsteen – Leviathan

Okay, that’s a massive list but I pared my huge list of songs I love down to this. So I expect several 80′s Metal compilations. Or just choose any of these from each section, group them as you like and just put it out so I can finally play these “for real”!

But please don’t release the lame thing you call 80′s guitar.