Achievements are a Crutch - 07-09-2008

Hello everyone! The name's Patrick Fisher (pay no attention to the mrimer icon behind the curtain), and I'm the guy temporarily responsible for Caravel Games' monthly newsletter in order to alleviate some of Mike's workload. For those of you who don't know me, I'm known as "gamer_extreme_101" on the forums. I've been around since early 2004, and have been responsible for such things as the hold "Delver's Demise", the redesign of the Drod.net website, and pretty much any support request since March.

When the Orange Box came out for the PC last year, I was initially in love with the concept of achievements. Maybe it's the little bit of OCD in my personality, or maybe it's the ability to be able to show off online that you beat a gigantic robot up a hill, it just gives you reason to throw a little extra effort into a game. And believe me, if you can squeeze an extra hour or two into a game, it's usually worth it (as most games nowadays are too short to begin with).

But as time went on, and additional updates brought new achievements, I started to see the downside to the whole achievement phenomenon. Achievements are a cheap way to tack on extra time and extra content to a game that clearly cannot be expanded onto any other way. Yes, killing every single creature in a game with a broken chair leg might be entertaining for the first fifteen minutes, but after an hour you'd be ready to gnaw your arm off!

This is what makes DROD such a wonderful game. We don't need achievements to lengthen the game or enhance the gameplay in any form. We have over 320 additional level sets, and the amount of rooms that can be constructed in the engine are almost infinite. Who needs achievements when you can spend a lifetime creating and playtesting the various additional levels that can be made in the editor.

But achievements aren't always bad. This whole newsletter is intended to show appreciation to all the people in our community who go out of their way to make the extra difference. So, I bring you the following achievements that should be handed out this month.

Achievement: Be the new Voice of Beethro

By his excellent audition, unanimously acclaimed by forum-goers who responded, our dynamic Snacko has been chosen to be the new voice of Beethro Budkin, fifth generation smitemaster. You'll hear him in the upcoming Smitemaster's Selection by Calamarain called "Devilishly Dangerous Dungeons of Doom".

Achievement: Start beta testing of DROD RPG: Tendry's Tale

Yes, that's right. Mike and the rest of the Caravel team put the final smack-down on level design, voice recording, selected some beta testers and started slashing all those bugs hiding inside the game's code. Are you one of them? Well, you would would most certainly know if you were? Odds are high you may not need to wait that long, as at the time of posting, we're sitting at 94.5% completion. (Have you heard the song yet?)
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21722

Achievement: Publish a hold without ripping your hair out

In June, we had four holds released: Door Master, Desert Plateau, 39th Guard -1- Silent Cliff, and Floor 33. Right now, three out of four of those holds are rated over 8.4, so give them a look!
http://forum.caravelgames.com/holds.php

Achievement: Bite and claw your way to a contest victory

I kid, really, but the voting for June's contest, Frankenstein's Wanderer, ended today. Of the six entries that were submitted, Rheb's entry took the gold! He was followed up closely by mxvladi and VIPCOOL, respectively. Congratulations to the three of you! As well, congrats to techant, hyperme, and eb0ny for submitting entries. At the very least, they're adding on to their eight-timer prize!
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21867

July's contest, Puzzles Galore, has been released, and it's about showing off your own cool puzzle. Read about it here:
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21952

Jatopian's Topic Picks

Once again, our brave forum reporter spent day and night, braving the elements, scouring the forum for the best topics worthy of this newsletter.

Cartographical Theory
A discussion with fine points and examples of fantastical and strange map-making.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21811

Philosophical Smokescreens
We answer the unanswerable.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21346

Snake Tangle
A simple puzzle for your enjoyment.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21504

Subforum report: Quest for Yrolg
Crystal Shard releases its novel new adventure game, in which you play the force of evil attempting to bring the adventurers to their demise.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21891

Thanks, Jatopian!

And on that note, have a wonderful July! Enjoy the warm weather by installing DROD onto your laptop and playing it on your patio in the blissful summer heat. If you're in the southern hemisphere, come on up and join us!

-Patrick

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And now, without further ado... - 06-07-2008

Without further ado -- or without any ado, really, for those with a pedantic streak (but, seriously, who likes the aforementioned "ado", anyway?!) -- I bring you the latest and greatest news for Caravel Games and the Forum:

TCB Trailer

A TCB trailer video has been released for DROD: The City Beneath. It's excellent, if I do say so myself. A big thanks to forum member slimm tom for helping with the video recording. You may view it from the Caravel Games TCB page here:

http://www.caravelgames.com/Articles/Games_2/TCB.html

JtRH is in 3.2

Danforth Strout, in the constant pursuit of bringing greater value to the DROD fanbase, made the following promotional announcement this month:

The official DROD:Journey to Rooted Hold hold has been updated to work in the 3.2 game engine. Registered JtRH owners logged into CaravelNet may now download JtRH into their DROD:TCB installation from the game's Hold Management Screen. That is, you must be using the 3.2 game engine or newer and have registered your copy of DROD:JtRH to your CaravelNet user account for this option to be available.

As a bonus, purely stylistic changes have been made here and there in the hold to take advantage of the three new room styles featured in 3.0 and the new weather and lighting effects. (If you are using the TCB demo and not the full version, then the hold will appear in the default City style, as usual.)

The New Voice of Beethro Could Be You

Ever wanted to be the next James Bond? How about the next Batman? Well, maybe it's not quite the same, but now there's an opening for you to audition to be the next voice of Beethro Budkin, Smitemaster Extraordinare, in upcoming DROD games! See all the yummy details for a chance at stardom at
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21552

Upcoming Smitemaster's Selection

We are beginning voice recording for the next Smitemaster's Selection, "Devilishly Dangerous Dungeons of Doom", architected by forum member Calamarain. Expect to see it available soon on CaravelNet!

If you are interested in auditioning for other DROD voice roles in upcoming official titles in addition to Beethro Budkin, you may read about it at
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21551

Don't Ask Award

I'd like to extend Calamarian a Don't Ask Award for being an upstanding member of the community in so many ways, including excellent fan-art and being a leading figure in advancing general architectural quality on the forum. Calamarain, please choose a prize from the Prize Pile.

May Contest Results

A contest about running mini-contests! Lots of love went into these creative endeavors, which you may read about on the Contests board. As reported by NiroZ:

First prize goes to Noma. I think you deserved 1st place, given the level of care shown towards entrants, as well as the overall quality of the contest ("Puzzle Rally Race").

Second place goes to TripleM, who I felt was a very close runner up to Noma. He paid close attention to his entrants, and had a well thought out contest ("Rare / Common answers"). Unfortunately, he fell into the teacher paradox, where people only consider the time actually in front of them. Having run many a contest, I know how much work is often put into the background of these contests in order to make them run smoothly, and that data analysis was superb, and must of taken up quite a bit of time.

Third place by her own choice is Techant, who presented a well thought out, carefully executed contest ("Spin Me A Yarn").

May Holds

A slew of great new holds (without further ado) have come your way, as reported by NiroZ:

Candy for Gramps

Why you should be bringing your grandpa candy is beyond me. But I know that bringing the elderly exorbitant amounts of sugar isn’t the main reason you’re playing this hold. No, it’s the masochistic urge in all of us that drives us bald with insanity. As such, this is a nice, relatively short, hold which features an allotment of puzzles, the majority of which focus on the aumtlich. While it doesn’t feature a perfectly smooth difficulty curve, I found it rather rewarding as it gave you motivation to persevere onwards.

not dr0d 2: DROD Tower

Hate lynchpins? Loathe the hack and slash? Still haven’t been able to pass the Infohut? Then this hold is for you. Seamlessly implementing word puzzles into DROD, this hold does injustice to its description, perhaps indicating the perfectionism of the author which has paid off in spades. Oh, and check out the treasure room!

Symphony

Who thought that DROD could be a musical masterpiece? Admittedly, as someone pointed out, this isn’t a symphony in the strictest sense, with its loose definition of some of the musical terms, but hey, it’s the concept that counts.

Pathways of Witherwood
This is the final entry in the excellent Witherwood series, with voice-acted storyline running throughout and a post-mastery surprise.

89-th Slayer
A hold about 89th Slayer, with some puzzles and quests.

Imperial palace
55th Slayer is, purportedly, the best Slayer, but the Imperial council decided to trick him and give him the worst work of his life.

DROD Tester One
A series of tests of increasing difficulty.

Get all these brain goodies at
http://forum.caravelgames.com/holds.php

Now leave me alone while I go fetch some candy for Beethro's gramps.

Topic Picks

Thanks to Jatopian for compiling these:

Zen
This ongoing Architecture project ports the game engine of Zen Puzzle Garden into DROD, mixing in DROD elements for previously unseen puzzles.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=18872

The Quiet Game
...
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21116

Snacko Reviews Games
Every so often forum member Snacko makes an incredibly insightful post about a game he's played. We keep telling him to start a blog like other high-quality reviewers, but he seems to prefer our forum.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=17189
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21616
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21592

Wonderquest Website
Gustavo Duarte's complex stepping game now has its own website.
http://www.wonderquest.org/


Now, without further ado, this concludes the June Illumination.

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I Own a Time Machine - 05-10-2008

I Own a Time Machine

The Caravel headquarters has many things stored in its basement. There are vaults housing all manner of documental archives, blueprints, and devices. One of these devices is a fickle time machine. This week, I was able to activate it and go back in time -- about two months, that is. However, there's a catch. I can't physically go back in time. My conscious mind is sent back, and while there, I am only able to perceive events that were somehow connected to the workings of Caravel itself.

This is what I saw...

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I Believe in Imaginary Property - 03-01-2008

I've now written three, friggin' holy-roller essays on the sanctity of intellectual property. It's a subject that's been boring into my soul lately, because I keep running into these nice, normal, should-not-be-in-jail people that view the internet as a giant media freebie spree. It's extremely frustrating for me, because it's like somebody not understanding why they shouldn't stab me in the face. It's pretty obvious to me, after all, but how to explain why to somebody else?

My essays were each intended for this Illumination newsletter, but each basically failed to make a succinct and coherent case for why one ought to be respectful of what another creates. I think I bit off more than I can chew, or at least more than should fit inside of an Illumination post. I suppose we've got books like the Fountainhead for that kind of thing, so I probably shouldn't worry about it.

The problem with philosophy is that it's a terrible red herring. Any honest argument you make about what one ought to do will lead you back to philosophy: definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, and holy jeebus... epistemology. When you back all the way up to epistemology, you know you've hit rock bottom. So I often feel like I very badly want to convince people they ought to do one little thing, like not pirate computer games, for example. But in the end, I have to catch myself, because I know where the twisting arguments lead. Look deeper than all the clever debate scores you can make, and the coin comes up nihilism every time.

So I'll just make a quick little plea: spend two years working on something of your own design--a novel, an opera, a robot, something creative... I don't care. If you still feel like there should not be such a thing as intellectual property, I will respect your disagreement with my position. But often, the people making the case that every scrap of media in the world be free, have never created anything substantial of their own. So they never had the big "Mine" moment, and regrettably, aren't qualified to talk about what can and can't be owned.

I notice that it's the end of the month, the February Illumination hasn't yet been posted, and at least two people's creative output has gone unrespected (vocally, by me, at least). I don't want Jatopian blowing up his compromised topic picks with dynamite, and I don't want Mattcrampy encouraging the brightest members of the forum to relocate to a secret society. So I'd best pay brief mention to their efforts.

Holds Al Dente 2008

We did this contest before, and it was screamingly popular. The idea is that a number of holds (level collections) are put forth for the playing pleasure of the less-determined. Shorter holds, not so hard, and you can finish them in about an hour.

I botched the announcement timing here. You can't enter a new hold as an architect at this point, but you can play and vote for the holds. And this is the popcorn DROD-gaming that lots of people love, so I definitely recommend checking it out.

contest details

Over 29.4 Quintillion Served

Some folks put in vast amounts of effort in creating these ingenious new number systems. They can be used to represent any number between 1 and 29.5 quintillion, and they are particularly good for tattoos or drawing in blood. Math geeks, give it a looksee. You can vote on your favorite number system, if you like.

contest details

Jatopian's Topic Picks

With a Roarkian determination, Jatopian brought forth truth and certainty, caring not how cowardly parasites acted to bring about his destruction. You will benefit from his work, but know this: he did these things for himself alone.

To be a little clearer, these are some topics on the Caravel forum that Jatopian thinks might be interesting to you. Why not take a look?

The Resnakening
A fun official contest involving online serpentine multiplay is resurrected in unofficial form.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=19776

Xmas is over until next September or so...
The answers to the puzzling activities presented over Xmas are revealed. However, one may still find the reward for solving them.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=19915

Please Post Here If You Are Not An Actual Human Being
This topic is self-explanatory. It will clearly revolutionize the War on Spambots.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=19817

Extraordinary Ordinary Thread
Many forums have a thread in which members post links to things. Ours is noteworthy because we have Impeccable Taste.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=3480

Samuel's Tutorial on TCB, Cheap Trick contest compilation, Fireballs, Beethro's Brain, Doctor Beethro
These are all the holds which have been released since the previous Illumination.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/holds.php

Subforum Report: Subterra update & expansions
Crystal Shard's Subterra has been made bigger & better, with several new levels and a Hall of Fame for great players.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=19949

Yes, there will be a separate March Illumination. This one just barely made it for February. Pacific Standard Time, baby!

-Erik

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A Hard Man Answers Hard Questions. - 01-22-2008

I think it's time I started taking this business of selling computer games seriously. I've been wandering around like a baby on a skyscraper girder. In 2008, I need to be a whole lot more responsible and goal-oriented. I might need to buy some new pants too. The fancy kind that get severely wrinkled unless you never sit down in them.

As any business major will tell you, before you even start a business, you should judge your prospects. And the first task for doing that is to learn the size of the market you are entering. If your market is small or stuffed up with competitors, well then, maybe you ought not get into it. What's the point of chasing down a rolling nickel with a dozen other jerks after it?

I am ashamed to tell you that until today, I did not have any numbers on the size of my market. I was just flying blind without any notion of how high that ceiling was. So this morning, I decided to ask myself some hard questions. What is the maximum size of my market? Or in other words, how many people could I sell DROD and other games to? If the answer came back too small, maybe I would just stop making games and do something else.

I will walk you through my calculations so you can know how I came up with the answer.

First off, I wanted to find the upper limit of population density. I would do this by finding the most populated country in the world relative to its area, and assuming that the whole world on average won't ever get much more densely populated than that country. Populations tend to stabilize and even decline once people get deadly serious about limiting them. (I say this with all sympathy to the crowded countries that continue to struggle with population-related troubles.) So I think its quite likely that we won't have any countries in the future that are much more densely populated than the current density leaders.

Conventional wisdom would declare Monaco the density winner with its 32k+ people reporting residency inside one and a half square kilometers. But come on! Do you really think people are crammed in that tight? Nawwwww. For perspective, consider that the Olympic Sports Centre in Beijing could just barely hold the posted population of Monaco using about twice the square footage. And this is giving each sports fan from Monaco an average of one square meter to himself. The real answer is that Monaco is a popular tax haven. There are people on the books as residents that have never set foot in the place.

The #2 country for population density is Macau S.A.R., but I won't give it consideration because it's also a popular place of "residence" for rich, tax-dodging phantoms. Continuing down the population density list, we finally start getting to some countries with believable numbers.

Hong Kong, #3, I'm sure is very crowded. But its reported numbers are still a little iffy because foreigners can set up corporations there without paying taxes to the local government. So possibly the census is counting a very large number of people not actually living in Hong Kong.

Singapore, the #4 country, seems like it probably doesn't have a density number terribly exaggerated by favorable tax advantages to foreigners. So I'll use Singapore's figure of 6,369 human beings (a.k.a. potential DROD customers) per square kilometer.

I multiply my highest human living density with the land area of the Earth (148,300,000 square kilometers) to arrive at 944,522,700,000. So at some point in the future, we might have 944 billion people living on the Earth. Not probable, but it is possible. Maybe the world population could even stabilize at the number. So the next hard question to answer is: how long will the Earth remain human-habitable? The sun is going to blow up in 5 billion years and expand into an Earth-oblitering giant along the way. But much earlier, its expansion will make it too hot for us to stick around. Optimistically, we've only got a mere half billion years on this planet.

Average lifespan? I used the worst case (or at least one of the worser ones) and put it just past male puberty at 16. I'm not saying those would be happy times to live in, but, who knows--it could shape up that way.

So the maximum number of humans that could live on Earth between 1997 (first DROD release) and forever is about 29,516,334,375,000,000,000,000.

The DROD games have had an average "conversion rate" of about 1%. Meaning that for every hundred people that download the game, one person will buy a copy. I'm going to take the optimistic view that in the future I will be able to expose every member of the population to DROD (preinstalled on auxiliary brain storage at birth perhaps). But it seems only fair to admit that no matter how enjoyable DROD becomes, it would be very difficult to increase the conversion rate when every single inhabitant of the world is forced to try out the game.

So my market is capped at 29.5 quintillion customers. I firmly believe it will not be possible to sell more copies of DROD than that. Based on this number, I'm going to continue working on DROD and other similar games like Frogs and Mice. If one of the factors of my calculation changes significantly, I might reevaluate things, but for now I will stay the course.

The DROD Number

Another area of my business that I've been negligent about is customer tracking. I need to know my customers--what they are doing, what they are thinking, and what they are thinking of doing. Preferably, I would keep a customer database so complete and so extensive, that my customers would cease tracking their own personal information and just rely on me. Forgot your mother's birthday? Wondering where your missing argyle sock is? Or maybe you just want a precise GPS fix on your current location? All you will need do is log in to CaravelNet and submit a query. The answer with helpful supplemental detail will be swiftly returned to you, like so:

quote:

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CaravelNet response returned in 53 milliseconds: Your missing argyle sock is inside of a paper sack that fell behind the refrigerator. (CAUTION: The sack also contains a very old braunschweiger sandwich.) If you wish to reclaim your sock, we advise you fish the sack out with an unbent wire coat hanger. You're thinking of using the broom from the closet, but that won't work--it's too thick. You're going to try the broom anyways because you're a stubborn idiot, but just remember I told you it wouldn't work.

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