Martin Straka, the Musician I have been working with on TRAUMA was pretty overwhelmed by the positive response since the game was released. Many people asked for a proper Soundtrack for the game. So he went back to the source files, remixed some of the loops into longer compositions and made a mini-album OST.

Get it here!

In other TRAUMA news, the game was released on macgamestore.com and Indievania. Indievania is an especially notable one. It’s an indie digital distribution platform with direct PayPal interface. They payments go directly into the developer’s PayPal account so Indievania dosen’t even handle the money. It gives the developers themselves full control on how their game is presented and sold over the service. It’s a great model that I would love to see succeed!

I used to prefer Vimeo over YouTube. Vimeo was always a bit better in quality, had a nicer looking player and website. Most importantly, it had a more mature and tasteful community. So when I released my game TRAUMA, it was a no-brainer to publish the trailer for it on Vimeo. It was an arty project that was made exactly for the kind of audience I would meet on Vimeo.

Today, I’m regretting that decision.

How about if I show some tits?

The first warning signs was a dispute I had back when I uploaded a gameplay preview of the game for the IGF. I used Vimeo back then for the same reasons. When the video was hit by the IGF traffic, I was contacted by the Vimeo staff. Unbeknown to me, uploading gameplay videos was a big no-no for Vimeo in general. My video was taken down immediately – exactly during the small window when having it online mattered. In a lengthy discussion, I had to explain myself that I was actually the author of the game and that the video was meant to show my work. The video got put back up eventually, but the damage was done.

I should have been wary of using Vimeo back then. A company so rigorous about game-related videos is hardly a safe haven for a game developer. But foolishly, I thought that just having each video properly credited would be enough. It seemed like the anti-game community guideline was only in place to outlaw “Let’s Play”-style videos, where people record playing games.

Fast-forward to a few days ago. I was lucky enough to get TRAUMA to be released as part of the Humble Indie Bundle, a pay-what-you-want charity/indie fundraiser with an extremely high traffic volume. My web site was hit with up to 30k views per day – three times as much as during launch. I was worrying that my web host would give up. It didn’t. But Vimeo did. Again.

I received the following E-Mail from rights@vimeo.com:

We see that you are using Vimeo for gameplay videos.

We’re sorry, but as stated in our Terms and Conditions of Use
http://vimeo.com/terms, on our Community Guidelines
http://vimeo.com/guidelines page, and on the upload page itself,
gameplay videos are not allowed on Vimeo Basic or Plus accounts. If you
wish to continue using Vimeo to upload this type of content, you *must*
use Vimeo PRO http://vimeo.com/pro>

At this time, you can purchase Vimeo PRO and continue using Vimeo to
host your content, or take the next *72 hours* to back up your videos or
move them to another host more suitable to your needs.

*Purchase PRO*

If you take no action, your account will be removed in automatically in
72 hours.

That sounded like the same issue as the last time. So I tried to refer to the last E-Mail exchange. I received the follwing explanation:

… things have changed since your last exchange with *former contact on Vimeo*, as we now have Vimeo PRO: http://vimeo.com/pro
Because your videos are commercial in nature, you must have a PRO account: http://vimeo.com/pro_guidelines
As far as gaming videos are concerned, you must have a PRO account if you wish to upload game trailers and gameplay videos. Videos showing the development of a game (before and after shots, explaining the creation process) are still ok with a Plus account.
Please let me know if/when you purchase PRO.

So it seems like the fact that I had a trailer on my account was a problem this time around. This is weird because there are plenty of movie and game trailers on Vimeo. And the PRO account is not a bagatelle. It costs 200$ per year, that’s actually more than I pay for my web host that hosts the ACTUAL GAME. But believing that this would the the bitter pill to swallow, I decided to get the PRO account to set things straight once for all. I mean, they mentioned it like 4 times in that one paragraph, right?

But it didn’t help. My videos were working again, but they couldn’t be accessed on the Vimeo website. You see, the PRO account is pretty much a pure hosting service, quite distinct from the actual Vimeo website. The PRO account allows to upload pretty much any content, but that content won’t be available on the Vimeo website. As a PRO user, you can request individual videos to be shown on the Vimeo website, which is called a “Community Pass”. But in oder to be eligible for one, the video in question needs to follow the community guidelines i.e. no gameplay videos, no game trailers. So when I asked for the Videos to be put up back again I got the following response:

I’m sorry, I was mistaken on the status of your videos. They have not been removed, they are simply hidden from Vimeo.com, as you are a PRO user with the Community Pass off (http://vimeo.com/help/faq#community_pass). Because your videos are commercial in nature, you will be required for them to stay this way. Sorry for the confusion.

Keep mind that I had 3 videos and only one of them was a trailer. The others were the IGF gameplay preview that was cleared by Vimeo previously and a much older talk I gave on a different topic. ALL of the videos were removed from the Vimeo website.

But you don’t need to look for too long to see that there are plenty of game trailers on Vimeo. Why? Well, because the Vimeo guy I had to deal with was plainly wrong. The Community Guidelines say explicitly that indie developers are excluded from the “commercial use” clause:

http://vimeo.com/guidelines

But of course now, the Humble Indie Bundle promotion is over and the trailer was offline for over 3 days during the most crucial time. Again. I might eventually get to a person at Vimeo, who recognizes the mistake and puts the videos back up. But I lost time, nerves and money dealing with all this. Most importantly, Vimeo let me down again when I needed them most. I have no reason to believe they won’t let me down again.

And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both.

For me this is a more serious issue than the Rogert Ebert debate. Roger Ebert was just one old guy stating an opinion about something he knows little about. This is an institutionalised disbelief in games as vessels of culture and meaning. It has real consequences for people, who want to make games. Ironically, especially games that challenge that very notion.

So if you are a game developer, I recommend you to consider this the next time when you chose a place to host your videos.

UPDATE:: http://gamedesignreviews.com/scrapbook/vimeo-situation-update/

Yeah I’m still at it. Last time I showed an updated HUD, although it was adjusted again during implementation and is about to be changed yet again. Today I’ll talk about the other manifestation of the score system: the Score Sheet.

Redesigning the Score Sheet

Continue reading “Harvest Mania Developer Diary #3″

I recently found this very interesting series of short videos on The Escapist. It’s basically a short summary of the history of Hollywood. See, it’s easy to look at Hollywood as this constant, unchanging entity. After all, movies are a pretty solid, mature medium and Hollywood is the poster child of a well-oiled entertainment industry. Personally, I was born in the 80ies, so I have never known Hollywood any different. So I found this kind of look on the history of Hollywood rather interesting.

Of course, none of this is really new or surprising. But I found this a fascinating way to put everything into a coherent picture. And of course, as somebody so interested in the games industry, it’s hard for me not to see the parallels to what the AAA games industry is doing right now.

The TV of the games industry are clearly the iPhone games. The kind of dilemma Hollywood had to deal with when TV came out is exactly the kind of dilemma pictured in this PA strip. The traditional games industry hasn’t been developing products for anything else than entertainment. As more money was funneled into productions, the production values grew, but the goals of the project (ENTERTAIMENTZZZ!!! HERPDERP) remained the same. This lead to the bizarre situation where a bunch of 99 cent iPhone game can actually compete with a single 40 dollar game. We are left with an industry that has failed to learn how to turn money into substance.

But as always, there are also differences. For example, Hollywood turned to young film students which eventually saved the bacon and established Hollywood as what it is today. Will AAA do the same? Somewhat doubtful. I hardly see the next AAA projects being led by the creative influx from game studies. Because unlike in movies, you can be successful as a self-published indie if you have the creative ideas. So there is actually no reason for any game studies alumni to go AAA.

On the other hand, the demographic left behind by AAA games are not the young people as was the case with Hollywood in the 70ies. The reverse it’s true. Games were always targeted at children and adolescents. The audience that still can’t find their home are the adults… and that’s even more true for the female audience.

There is one horror story ending in this. Namely that the way to reach the adult audience is with even MORE brain-washed, simpleton entertainment. Exactly the kind of entertainment Hollywood needed to get away from to appeal to an adolescent audience. And we all know that perhaps this has already happened with Brain Training and Farmville.

But recent experiences with TRAUMA led me to believe that there is also a significant audience waiting for games with substance and meaning. From this point of view, Hollywood didn’t succeed because the catered to a specific age group, but because they increased the depth of the medium they work with in general. Thus, allowing for a wider spectrum of the audience to be addressed.

Needless to say, I will definitely continue trying to confirm that hunch. Because I’d rather not be a game developer otherwise.

After reading all three books of “The Hunger Games” Trilogy, I feel like I need to write an addendum to my previous post about them. You see, I realized that most of the stuff I have written in that post actually only applies to the very first book.

To give you an idea what I’m talking about (spoilers), the second book kicks off by having the PRESIDENT OF TEH WORLD come over to the female protagonist and literally tell her which boy she is allowed to kiss, or else. I kid you not. The president of the world apparently has nothing better to do than to have an army of spies follow a teenage girl around so they find out which boy she kissed. So he can then come over with the evidence in hand and call her out about which boy she really, truly loves. And that would be actually a funny story except it’s dead serious. By the end of the third book they are dropping bombs on a group of children.

I had no idea that this is whee the story was going so I initially ran with it. But after some time it became evident that the series tried to step up the drama and lost everything in the process. The first book started out as a personal underdog story of a simple girl coming to the big town to find out how much ass she can kick. In the following two books the plot gets inflated to epic proportions. Suddenly, there is a rebellion! People get executed on streets. War breaks out. The world order is at stake. People take sides. Villages getting bombed.

And suddenly, that personal story doesn’t really work anymore. When people are getting killed left and right, I find it very hard to really care about which boy the protagonist will end up with or what kind of dress she is wearing. That’s the problem with every fictional war story, isn’t it? In order to have it work, you need to commit an act of fictional racism in you head. You need to suspend your disbelief that some characters in the book are pretty much sub-humans and it’s kinda ok if they die. At least not as bad as if – say – the protagonist’s cat died.

In that regard, The Hunger Games reveals it’s affiliation with books like Twilight. It depicts a entire world where everybody seems to be intensely obsessed about the petty, trivial hardships of a single white teenage girl. And what was initially a kickass female protagonist becomes a bundle of self-doubt and insecurity, pretty much like Twilight’s blank slate. To give you an idea: in the very last book, the protagonist leaves pretty much every action scene with some form of injury she must recover from in hospital. It happens like 5 times. I guess she’s got some incredible health insurance.

And all the gaming parallels I was talking about? Yeah, they are pretty much gone by beginning of the third book.

I’m still curious on how the movies will turn out. Perhaps now even more so. I suspect they will weed out a lot of filler to get it on screen. I can imagine the first two books of being able to yield a good flick, mainly because of plenty opportunities for action scenes. I’m completely clueless on how the 3rd could ever work. It’s just so dark and there is just not really anything happening. I certainly don’t want to be in that director’s/screenwriter’s shoes. Let’s wait and see.