Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#18]

With everything going on in the world these days, I thought a bit of celebration of good gaming news is in order. We talked about various ways of monetizing your work in class, but there’s a good chance we didn’t discuss in the most important term: making a good game.

The following examples fall on various parts of the spectrum of a good game, but one thing they have in common is that they’re adequately priced.

Claire Obscure ‘just’ came out and has been making waves in the industry. Priced at 50$ full price, the quality on display outstrips many AAA titles. Creative art direction blends 19th century French Steampunk reminiscent of Jules Verne, and inevitably draws comparisons with the likes of Final Fantasy. This in no way means they are in any way ripping off Square Enix’ titles, as the art direction is visually distinctive. While it’s a debut title for the studio, the founder was a veteran of the industry, and has left Ubisoft in 2020 to found Sandfall Interactive and pursue the production of this title. It is a studio of under 60 people, but the game has sold over half a million units in its first 24 hours.

Lords of the Fallen is not my kind of game, I’m a little over the gothic aesthetic, souls-likes, but the story of its development was incredibly compelling. When it came out, it was panned by critics and players alike. Instead of eating the dirt and moving on to the next game, they doubled down on making it the best game they can, and have produced *50* free updates, including visual revamps, mechanics updates, and the most revolutionary change in a long while. That’s (ironically) French-revolutionary less than industrial-revolutionary. In a world of game price hikes, closed off and backward incompatible consoles, online game libraries that can disappear at any time, and Nintendo retaining the right to brick the hardware you bought if you step out of line, CI Games SE, went the other way. If you have a copy of the game, you can have a friend join you in multiplayer, without buying the game. Their character and progress will be saved, and if they ever purchase the game themselves, they’ll be able to continue from where they stopped. This practice should be commended and supported.

Factorio is a game for future (or current) system integrators, processor architects, and supply chain optimizers. As it is very open ended, it falls under the category of games where I have to remind myself I have do these things in real life, and should probably just do that instead. The systems in place in it, develop your own understanding of logic and complex systems, and tools have clear and applicable analogies in programming. It’s also very popular, receiving numerous updates since its release in 2020. The unconventionality comes in its pricing. The game started selling at 15$, has never, and presumably will never go on sale, and is currently 32$ on Steam. With each expansion it receives, the price only goes up. And it seems to be working for them.

They say best things in life are free. This game is not what they were talking about. DeadTime Defenders is such a designed-by-numbers game, it’s the digital equivalent of a colouring-by-numbers book. I’m not propping up the other free game on Epic this week, because we’ve done our issue on typing games, but also because it’s 20GB large, and for what it is, I refused to install it. DTD, for all its faults, which are mostly those of mundanity, is neither long in playtime, taking at around 2 hours to complete, nor does it have a large footprint on your drive. Small enough to fit on a CD in fact, if anyone remembers those things. I feature it here because a free game on Epic, is still paid for, by Epic. In a way, this is a challenge to you, if that can get published, what are you waiting for? ;)

Daigo’s Comeback