Dragon's Crown

So I recently heard about this game Dragon's Crown. It is for the Playstation 3 and Vita. Apparently it is a 2D side scrolling RPG. I guess they say the graphics are nice. The thing that caught my eye are the crazy proportions of the females in the game. Maybe that is just the marketing materials. But these witches have breasts that are much bigger than their heads. LOL. WTF is going on here?

Crystal Heroes

I just read a postmortem on 50+ games from a developer's last four years of work. One of the games was Crystal Heroes. I downloaded the game and tried to play it. The thing complained that a DLL was missing. That's when I paid more attention and saw that you need to have the RMVX RTP installed.

Well I never heard of that acronym. Figured it might be some type of game maker engine or something. Guess I was on the right tracker. I googled around and got to the RPG Maker download page. There were a few options there. I clicked the first one.

To make a long story short, I did not want RPG Maker VX Ace. I needed RPG Maker. Or at least I needed the runtime for that development environment. Once I downloaded and installed it, I could play the game.

There was a lot of dialog that I had to get through. Got a bit tired of pressing the space bar. Then I finally got to the game. After all the dialog, I decided to skip the tutorial. You seem to control one player that has three others follow. I did not seem good at killing monsters. My followers were better at that.

I got through a few screens. Then I arrived at a screen with no visible exit. I did see a shovel on the ground. Figured I needed to pick the thing up. But I did not know how to do that. Darn. I wish I used the tutorial.

This game seemed nice, especially given that it was made with some game maker software. Graphics seemed good enough. It did not hurt that the download was free. Looks like there are many other games to try out from this developer.

Young Game Makers

Just read this long post about one developer's game he made four years ago when he was in the sixth grade. Man the graphics look pretty good. Many of his games were never released, or released for a while and then pulled.

Guy seems to use game making software. I guess that helps with the game assets. Heck. I have downloaded a few programs that help you make games. Could never get into them. I love programming from scratch too much. The problem' is that my games don't look that good.

You should check out this guy's part 1 post where he does a postmortem on the games from his sixth grade school year. Very entertaining and educational. I look forward to reading his other parts in the future. Who knows how far this guy has come in the last four years?

Successful Game Marketing

I read a post and an article on how CJ E&M Corporation is dominating the game charts over in Korea. How do they do it?  They say it has something to do with their social networking presence. Yeah maybe.

But take a look at the marketing picture for one of their games. I see a lot of reasons why someone might want to download/buy their game. We have a naughty nun. Then there is the sexy nurse. And who can overlook the vixen cop?

There are plenty more reasons that come out on their graphic. Got a bunch of animated hotties with the cleavage ready to draw you in. No rocket science there in their marketing prowess. Sure a social networking campaign might not hurt. But don't discount the fact that sex sells.

A Tale of Two Demos

Recently I heard about this alpha version of a demo that a team was making. It sounded intersting. So I decided to check it out. Downloaded the files and tried to run the program. Got an error message stating that "msvcr110.dll" was missing. WTF?

I really wanted to check out the game. Therefore I researched the file and found that it was a Visual Studio 2011 redistributable runtime file. Microsoft releases their redistributables for free. I downloaded and installed Microsoft's install. Then the game worked. I was irked that I had to go through all this trouble.

The game was not bad. It was not good. With the broken install, I decided to pass on even mentioning the name here. Contrast this with another demo I just checked out today: NeonJack. This download came with a readme file that explained everything I needed to know quickly. The executable worked right out of the box.

Initially I tried running NeonJack using a small screen. That was no good. I could not see the track well enough to drive in it. Even with a bigger screen, I had trouble when I hit the gas too much. I only used my laptop and keyboard to play the game. It is supposed to be played using an Occulus Rift Virtual Reality headset.

Good luck to the people at Shinyfish software. They might have a winner here with NeonJack. I was impressed that the lead developer quick his day job to work on the game. This was especially surprising as his day job was mobile game development.