indie – Mana Obscura

I’ll start with a disclaimer: although we’ve never met in person, I’ve known Leithart since 2012 when we were both fans of the then-upcoming MMO WildStar. Since those early days, he went into game development (coincidentally for the studio behind that same game), and I moved into game journalism. We still ping each other tweets from time to time, but that’s about it.

Getting on to the meat of the article, I wanted to respond to Leithart’s question above. As a small indie studio, with limited resources for marketing and PR, it’s only logical for the development team to want to do some of the heavy lifting themselves. It drums up interest in the game, provides direct feedback from potential players, and removes any reliance on the fickle foibles of the gaming press. Sounds like a win-win for spending a few minutes on Twitter, right?

Only, not really. While I’m a big fan of developers interacting with fans on social media, producing blog posts about their work and sharing unique insight, there’s also a risk that it gets in the way of actually developing the game. Tangentially, there’s also a risk that the game’s marketing voice – how it wants to be perceived by the gaming public – can get fragmented and/or diluted. And what happens if one of the developers goes off-brand? Can the incident be isolated without contaminating the game’s brand as a whole?

So, with both of these in mind, answering Leithart’s question is going to be tricky, particularly as I’m eager to make sure that both gamers and developers get something from being on social media. Luckily, there’s a bit of a cheat-sheet.

Continue reading “Developer Interaction By Design”

Have you ever wanted to change something about your favourite MMO? Maybe write your own questline or create your own models? Perhaps build your own game world or maybe even write your own game? Have you wanted to go from just being a passive consumer to an active creator within the genre?

If you do, I know how you feel. I’ve been looking at creating my own online games to play around with various concepts and ideas I have, and it’s been a real struggle. The current techniques that most MMO publishers permit are restricted to user interface addons and extensions, which is great if you want to build your own UI but not much good for anything else.

I’m a lot like the legions of other coders who’ve experimented with creating their own in-game content. From Doom through to Half-Life and beyond, some gamers have taken their games apart like clockwork wristwatches just to see how they work, before tinkering and experimenting with them to change the game in new ways.

I’m not yet sure if MMO developers and publishers are coming round to this way of thinking, but there’s a little glimmer of hope.

Continue reading “Hobbyists, Indies and the Doom Moment”