This Week End Freebie is an Android Market exclusive. Pinball Deluxe is a plain and simple 2D pinball simulator. Despite its basic appearance, its tables are more complex than they may seem and will appeal even hardocre pinball fans.

The release of Blood of the Chamaleon caught a lot of attention in the Hardcore Gaming 101 forums and quickly managed to create a small group of  fans, since behind that text-based interface there’s a very good RPG.

I managed to interview Thomas Lipschultz for Ars Ludica. Since the interview was published in Italian, here it is the original english version, for everyone else out there.

Enjoy it after the jump!

First and foremost, we’d like to know who you are and what you do for a living. I know you are somewhat connected to several XSEED Japanese RPGs, right?

Yes, I’m currently employed at XSEED Games as a localization specialist — a job I’m very proud to have, as I’ve always been a huge fan of Falcom (whose games have comprised the lion’s share of my time at the company so far) AND of XSEED’s past library of titles (Brave Story: New Traveler in particular, as I really do consider it to be one of the best RPGs on the PSP, and a fantastic complement to Miyuki Miyabe’s wonderful fantasy novel). I’d like to extend a special thank-you to my coworkers, in fact, for having absolutely no problem whatsoever with me releasing this game into the world. A lot of game companies would’ve tried to hold it back for legal reasons or what-not, so I double-checked while I was reworking it… and everybody at XSEED was like, yeah, sure, go ahead! We’d love to try it out ourselves!

I’ve actually been in the video game industry for a while, though I’m pretty new to the west coast of the U.S. — until about this time last year, I’d been living on the east coast and working in MMORPGs at EA’s Mythic Entertainment studio. In general, I’m basically a quintessential nerd — I play lots of games (both import and domestic), watch lots of anime, don’t drink, don’t smoke, hate sports, love karaoke and am gloriously unpopular with the ladies. I fit the stereotype to a T!

The one true constant, though, throughout my entire life, has always been a love of video games. I’d wanted to design them ever since I was a little kid, and even mailed crudely-drawn level maps to Nintendo at one point, hoping to make it big.

It didn’t work… but that didn’t stop me from learning BASIC, Pascal, C++ and Assembly, and having lots of fun programming some games of my own!

Blood of the Chameleon is kind of unique, as I finished it (more or less) long before I ever got employed within the game industry, and even before I ever really got into Japanese culture or knew all that much of the language (I was just starting to study Japanese when I finished it). It’s a glimpse into who I was, before I ever got caught up in all this craziness… and it’s kind of fascinating to look back on it now, and see what I was like back then, and what I would do differently now.

How do you see yourself as a gamer? What are your preferred genres? Is gaming your main hobby?

It’s funny, working in the industry actually gives me less time to play games than I’ve ever had before… but yes, gaming is definitely my main hobby, I’d say. The only other real contender would be… watching things, I guess. Movies, TV series, anime, etc. I guess you could say “visual media” is my main hobby.

As a gamer, I’m very much an RPGer. RPGs — more recently action RPGs, but really any kind of RPGs outside of tactical-style — are definitely my genre of choice. I also love music games (viva la Hatsune Miku: Project Diva!) and Metroidvanias (as well as level-based platformers, but Metroidvanias are the ones that I really get excited about!).

And… I guess I’m answering these in reverse order… as a gamer, I see myself as something of a deconstructionist. Even if I’m not trying, I’ll analyze every game I play, deconstructing it to figure out what makes it tick, what it did well, what could make it better, etc. I’m a huuuuuge proponent of game design theory, and I strongly believe that game design is an art that takes a lot of skill, practice and creative thinking to hone… and I’m utterly fascinated by it all!

I can only hope that I, too, will one day join the ranks of the industry pioneers, and become a highly-celebrated game designer. But for now… you’ll have to settle for Blood of the Chameleon. Sorry!

What’s the motivation behind the resurrection of such an old BBS game?

To be perfectly frank… an equal mixture of vain pride, the discovery that it COULD be resurrected, and the challenge of doing just that.

Vain pride, in that this is a game I poured my heart into back in high school and early college… and for the reasons mentioned on the website and in the in-game history, very few people actually had a chance to play it back when it was “new” in 1999. And after putting so much time and energy into it… I really wanted people to be able to experience it, as I’m quite proud of what I accomplished with such limited tools and capabilities.

The discovery that it COULD be resurrected, in that I had no idea the QB64 project even existed until I randomly stumbled upon it — at work, actually, while attempting to find a more elegant means of accomplishing some simple spreadsheet management. Learning that there existed a version of Qbasic designed specifically for modern Windows systems and almost fully compatible with QB45 was like, a sudden awakening for me. I knew I had to play around with it… and the more I played around with it, the more it all came back to me. It’s like riding a bike, I guess! And it wasn’t long before I remembered BotC, and thought to myself… heeeey…

And the challenge of resurrecting the game, in that the original was designed as a multiplayer BBS door game that liberally made use of ANSI escape codes — which means I couldn’t just compile the thing under QB64 and call it a day. Rather, I had to actually “port” it to Windows! But nothing thrills me more than a good programming challenge, and the idea of duplicating the full functionality of ANSI.SYS was a challenge I just couldn’t pass up!

In the era of Door Games, what were your favourite titles?

Among door games, you mean? Unsurprisingly, I was a big fan of LORD — Legend of the Red Dragon, the definitive BBS door game by Seth Able Robinson. That game inspired virtually every other in the genre, and could basically be thought of as the Super Mario Bros. of BBS doors — the game-changer, and the one that you could pretty much ASSUME every single BBS everywhere would have up and running.

LORD wasn’t my FAVORITE favorite, though. I was a fan of the ones that expanded upon what LORD had to offer. The Pit did a nice job of this, adding a bit more depth and dimension to combat. LORE was pretty amazing, too,and was a huge inspiration for me — not many people know about LORE, but it was essentially Ultima, BBS door style. It had line of sight, seasons and weather, day-to-night cycles (with changing dialogue and closing shops and such), full-on tactical battles, dialogue trees, a complex narrative full of political intrigue… the works. All done in glorious ASCII text with ANSI coloring! It was probably a bit TOO deep and complex for most people looking to get their BBS door game fix, which might be why it’s not more well-known. But I totally loved it — I even broke out the graph paper for it to map out some of its dungeons!

LORD 2 was created late in the life cycle of BBSes, and was an amazing followup to LORD, featuring the same basic sense of humor, but with a massive overworld full of secrets, Zelda-style. It almost had a bit of a King’s Quest vibe to it, actually. And again, as with LORE, LORD 2 was a huge inspiration for Blood of the Chameleon.

There was also another door game I really loved back then, but for the life of me, I can’t remember its name. It was basically a Dragon Quest-style RPG, and utilized what were essentially sprites and tiles, composed of… 5×3, was it?… ASCII/ANSI text art grids. Graphically, it was far and away the nicest-looking BBS door game ever made, I’d say, and it was also a lot of fun. Weird that I can’t remember its name, though…

Did you switch to MUDs like everyone else when the World Wide Web took off? You still play modern MMOGs?

Surprisingly, the answers to both questions are “no.” Believe it or not, I’ve somehow never played a MUD, despite knowing tons of other people who both played them, and even RAN them. And when it comes to MMOs… well, to be perfectly frank, I kinda hate them!

And yeah, this is coming from someone who worked in MMOs for over five years. I loved working on them, and I put my heart and soul into the job, but playing them? No thanks!

I think it’s just that I can’t stand stories that don’t end. Sure, MMOs have “endgame” content, but their stories are never actually RESOLVED. It’s always an ongoing struggle… and whenever I try playing an MMO, I always think to myself, “what’s the point?” Every monster I kill is going to respawn, every accomplishment is going to be undone… it’s just not fulfilling.

Doesn’t help, too, that all the “main characters” in an MMO are other players. See, I enjoy the literary side of video games — I like knowing that the story I’m participating in was penned by someone else, starring a cast of characters who were painstakingly crafted with backstories and dilemmas and numerous other prosaic links to the events that are occurring. With other human beings in all the starring roles, you *sometimes* get a good role-player who’s able to approximate that, but it’s not quite the same as a well-written narrative featuring characters who are relevant to the overall script.

…Now this does, of course, beg the question, WHY THE HELL DID I MAKE A BBS DOOR GAME? And the answer is, quite simply, because I could! I had the know-how, and I stumbled across the DoorFrame library for QB45 (designed specifically for making BBS doors), so I figured… what the heck, why not?

And while it’s no masterpiece of storytelling by any stretch of the imagination, I like to think I did a pretty good job with its overall narrative structure. For one thing, it actually DOES have an ending — though you need to beat the game 5 times in order to see it (this was the age of BBS doors that continued on forever, remember, so winning 5 times didn’t seem an unreasonable goal by comparison!). And even after you win, you CAN continue playing — but it’s explained, at least, that if you choose to do so, you’re basically just repeating your accomplishment over and over again for the fun of it, through the power and mercy of an omnipotent deity.

So basically… if you beat the game 5 times and see the true ending, you ARE done. But if you just can’t get enough, go ahead and beat it again — I ain’t gonna stop you!

The world of BotC is pretty vast, original and detailed. What were your main sources of inspiration?

Aside from the aforementioned door games… off the top of my head, parts of BotC were inspired by Dragon Quest 1, Zelda 2, Final Fantasy 1, Loom, Ultima: Exodus, and the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. 1999 was a long time ago, though, so beyond that, I don’t really remember. I was always a bit of a weird kid, so I’m guessing a lot of it was the result of pure madness.

And yeah, those are all older titles — even though I didn’t finish MAKING the game until 1999, I actually had the whole thing planned out on paper long, LONG before that. I don’t even think it was originally meant as BBS door game, actually — I probably originally meant for it to be a Zelda 1-style adventure game on the NES.

Here’s one interesting tidbit, though: The basic layout and general descriptions for the caves of Eagle (sans Eagle Village) were actually lifted almost verbatim from a choose-your-own-adventure game I wrote on a word-processor back in the late 80s. The crack in the wall, the eagle flight, the golden surprise at the end… that was all the product of a hyperactive 10-year-old mind. Scary, no?

Why all the humor?

Why not?

In all seriousness, though, I blame Seth Able Robinson for that! He’s the guy who created LORD, and LORD was a pretty silly game. The descriptions were all very sarcastic, the monsters were a little off-the-wall (and always attacked with very weird things, which is why BotC’s enemies often have some creative weapons of their own), and most of the IGMs (in-game modules) people designed for it were fun, goofy romps. LORD 2 was even more ridiculously over-the-top, too! And while a lot of the other BBS doors I played at the time were much more serious (Usurper, The Pit, LORE, etc.), Robinson’s games were pretty much the benchmarks for the genre, so it’s no real surprise that I tried my best to emulate his sense of humor when working on a door game of my own.

What was the most challenging part of its development and design?

Originally, I’d have to say getting the thing debugged was the toughest part, since there are a lot of “moving parts” in its game engine (so to speak). This is definitely the most ambitious thing I’ve ever programmed!

For the Windows release, the most challenging part was getting the ANSI files to display properly. Windows 98 was the last version of Windows to natively support ANSI.SYS (to my knowledge), so I basically had to read up on ANSI escape codes and build a function from scratch to interpret them into colors, cursor movements, etc. Some of the ANSI files are animation scenes, too, which draw to the screen instantaneously when not being viewed over a 28.8k modem connection, so I had to figure out the proper delay to use, then script in a toggle that only utilizes that delay when drawing an animated ANSI scene — not a regular ANSI image.

None of it was all THAT difficult, though. And the challenge of getting all that to work was part of what made this such a fun project!

What struck on me was the extreme balance of the game that is a novelty since older Door Games were quite difficult. Was it a deliberate design choice?

Nope! That was pure luck, mixed with a lack of experience at difficulty balancing.

To be honest, I actually wish I’d put a little MORE effort into the difficulty, as a lot of the “super-powerful” spells I created (like the hard-to-find “Cataclysm” spell) simply aren’t all that useful due to their huge MP cost versus their relatively tame damage output. And some spells that I basically intended to be throwaway novelties (like “Berserk”) are almost game-breakingly overpowered. The use of elemental strengths and weaknesses, too, isn’t quite as deep as I’d originally intended it to be, since you can pretty much win the game just by relying on non-elemental equipment.

If you thought the game felt balanced, though, then maybe I’m just being overly critical. I am thankful, at least, that it didn’t turn out to be ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE TO WIN. Rookie mistakes when designing video games tend to fall either into the “too easy” or “too hard” camp. I think BotC is too easy, but that’s definitely the lesser of two evils, as far as I’m concerned.

The user interface is pretty easy to master for a BBS Game. Did you refine it before release?

No, that’s been the interface since the very beginning, actually. The only thing I added for the Windows release is the ability to use regular arrow keys instead of being restricted to 8/4/6/2 for cardinal movement. Otherwise, I just released the game exactly the way I made it in 1999!

Why the labyrinth of caves? I hate labyrinths!

The Labyrinth was *purely* inspired by LORE, actually. I remember spending three days going through a set of mountain caves in LORE, mapping my progress the whole way, and I absolutely *loved* it. I knew BotC needed a similar dungeon of its own, and I also knew it had to have some cool gimmicks — like those invisible doors that only show up after you light the room at the end of the corridor, and all the false walls.

Plus, I couldn’t very well have a Minotaur as a boss without giving him a labyrinth in which to dwell, could I?

How well the game was received? Any plan for a “Hi-Fi” remake?

Well, I think the fact that you’re interviewing me about my recent BBS door game release in 2011 is proof positive that it’s been received pretty well! I was actually kind of shocked to find that my trailer for it got over 1000 views within only a few days of its release, and I’ve received numerous emails and private messages from people asking questions about it, or even just telling me how much they’ve enjoyed it. Which is immensely gratifying!

I don’t specifically have plans to remake the game right now, but I’ve toyed with the idea a few times in the past, and even worked together with a college friend of mine to expand the game’s plot into a full-on RPG epic about ten years ago:

http://forgottenkings.tripod.com/

Forgotten Kings, as we were calling it, never got finished (and a lot of what’s written on that website is outdated) — but it did get the creative juices flowing a bit, and believe it or not, THREE SEQUELS to it have also been planned out in my head, to be titled “Remembrants,” “Body of Time,” and “For Jana,” respectively. The series, were it ever to come to fruition, would be called “Forever Endeavor.”

It’s a pure pipe dream, and probably won’t happen anytime in the foreseeable future… but if I ever become independently wealthy one day, or just find myself with a WHOLE LOT OF FREE TIME on my hands, I *will* make these games… and I’ll have Blood of the Chameleon to thank for them!

You think that in the indie gaming scene there’s still a place for text-based games?

I have no idea, to be honest. Probably not a BIG place… but I’m sure there’s a small corner for them somewhere. Heck, *I’d* play them, at least!

You’re on a tower and you need to toss two games you played in the last year. Make your choice!

Assuming the idea is to DESTROY those two games… let’s see…

One would be “Kitchen Panic” for the PlayStation, which really disappointed me by being utterly average AT BEST, despite your protagonist being a SENTIENT POTATO. I mean, seriously, how much of a waste of potential is that?! You’d expect a game where you play as a potato to be something totally magical and amazing, but nope… it’s just a frustrating mess!

The other… and I’m really stretching here, as I honestly haven’t played many bad games in recent memory… would have to be “Pop ‘n Music Portable” for the PSP. I love the Pop ‘n Music franchise, and used to play the game at arcades all the time when I lived in Japan… and other arcade music titles, like Taiko no Tatsujin (Taiko Drum Master), have made the transition to PSP *shockingly* well, so I had high hopes for Pop ‘n Music to do the same. Sadly, however, the game just feels REALLY AWKWARD on the PSP. The load times are crappy, the controls are awkward and unintuitive, and just in general, it feels like a really half-assed port of an excellent game. With so many better music games on the PSP — the Hatsune Miku: Project Diva titles, the Taiko no Tatsujin Portable titles, Gitaroo Man, PaRappa the Rapper, DJ Max, etc. — Pop ‘n Music just feels really out of place to me.

…I still wouldn’t toss these off a tower, though, unless I had to. There are things to learn from games like this, and neither of them is anywhere CLOSE to the worst game I’ve ever played (which, if you’re interested, is an obscure Japanese PS2 gem called “Rivel Fantasia” — and even THAT one is worth playing, if only just to give yourself a good example of what NOT to do in terms of game design!).

Thanks for your time!

My pleasure! Thanks for interviewing me, and I hope my long-winded answers don’t make me come across as an egomaniac or anything. I just like to ramble on about nerdy topics, that’s all!

In the past few months I had this habit to propose a free (or cheap) nice game on iTunes or Android Market to my friends. Since the initiative got pretty nice feedbacks, I’d like to replicate it here.

So get back at least every Week-End to find a nice game to play!

I promise to get back with at least a meaningful post each week. We’ll see!

Well, since Spotify basically gives away things,  the service was very popular on the Internet. Since there’s a non-filtered entry for anyone that makes music, the number skyrocketed and many people now uses it to “discover” bands they will never pay money for, just like the old MySpace Music. The huge popularity on the net, coupled by aggressive marketing and number whoring (it’s called social or extreme marketing, nowadays) just made the financial condition of Spotify worse. Streaming is a non-linear business and growing an userbase using indie singers to paint the offering of Spotify on par with Apple, 7digital and Microsoft really helped Spotify image but also made their business a lot harder to operate.

How harder? Well, this year Spotify closed with a huge 19M€ loss. So huge that investors pressed for an US launch ASAP or else. Spotify managed to double its losses every year until 2009 (2M€ in 2007, 4.4M€ in 2008), the huge peak in losses it’s not completely unexpected. Popularity doesn’t always pay off in the streaming business and extreme and viral marketing couldn’t help you cope with the expenses and poor planning.

Despite the licensing issues, the constant losses and the huge amount of crappy music, at the end of 2009  Spotify was valued at 183.8M€, just to receive an investor ultimatum a year later. Another major problem is that despite the user base has already crossed 15M active users, no more than 750.000 premium accounts has been subscribed in three years and the company doesn’t divulge the renewal rates. Gotta love the side effect of this trendy extreme social marketing!

The licensing problem is worse than it seems. Spotify has a very harsh revenue share for musicians. It roughly equates 2.2€ for every 50.000 impressions. This low profitability makes lots of majors to question the service, even as an advertising opportunity. In several occasions talented indie musicians and newspapers complained that most of their potential customers (that may be measured in the dozens of thousands) could be totally satisfied with Spotify, leaving them dry. On the contrary, mainstream musicians and labels can definitely raise more money asking a free donation in exchange for a legal, DRM-free download of their music (Radiohead and David Bowie, among others, demonstrated how effective two different approaches to the direct-sale phylosophy could be), rather than surrendering digital distribution rights to Spotify.

Spotify is trying to fight its battle for profitability in the mobile world. As today, its service is shallow and spotty, its client is iffy, its offline content has zero portability and, more importantly, the premium subscription is 20-30% (depending on regions) more costly than their main really global competitor: Zune Pass. Zune Pass already boasts a more friendly licensing model (that allows you to move offline songs on any PMP supporting WM licensing system, Android and home consoles included) and has a huge technical advantage in adaptative streaming, lowering data and bandwidth costs for the end-users and business alike (Spotify has an astonishing hig 7h/GB bandwidth cost).

While the initiative was even suggested by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk a while ago, it may not be what investors expected and the execution is definitely not right.

As a user, I’m happy with Spotify. As a Product Manager I must say that the business did so many marketing and technical blunders that it’s very daring to hope for profitability in the midterm, unless a restructuring of the company mindset will take them away from the web 2.0 whoring attitude, back to the reality.

The problem is who is a gamer for Apple. Apple is very proud to share numbers, big numbers. Most of the time they are out of context, though. To Apple a gamer is anyone downloaded a game, even a free one. To Apple there are more than 85M iOS device, even if more than 40M are out of support and obsolete form a software developer point of view.

In fact the number of “gamers” in this research is almost like the real iOS attach rate. Apple continues to say it has a stable and unified software enviorment, even if you need to explicitly support at least 5 different platforms (iPhone 1&2, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS/iPod 3, iPhone 4/iPod 4, iPad) if you really want to tap the 85M market power. In fact nobody does that and almost everybody supports from 3GS on, even because using only iPad and iOS 4 as a reference will leave you with less than 5M of potential customers in total. A commercial suicide, and lots of iPad developers learned that in their early days: the boom didn’t happen (everything stopped a 2M units) and  they needed to turn back to iOS 4 portable devices to remain profitable and delay further iPad projects after the mobile ones.

But I digress. The problem in comparing iOS to dedicate game devices in market analysis is that they are basically giving the wrong message: as iOS games become more costly and complicated, they tend to fail more, the sale price is too low, the attention span of users is scarce. iOS games are not comparable to DS or PSP ones. Not even graphically, most of the time.

The problems is about user perception. iOS games are good time-wasters but rarely you will see an iOS user consider him/herself a gamer just because downloaded a free puzzle game. It not a criticism, it’s perfectly normal, because Apple sells an MP3/Movie Player as their main game platform, followed by a phone with a quite short battery life and a costly transportable eBook reader. The latter two platforms can play games but they are hardly the primary choice for that and Apple knows that well, just look at the Apple Store. Once again the market research removes context from AppStore earnings, impliying that iPad is leading in gaming sales, instead of saying that the platform is leading for eBooks, newspaper subscriptions and application sales (I’d like to share the exact numbers but as usual, I can’t). Perfectly logical, if you ask me.

Frankly, I’ve seen worse: like assuming that every cent iTunes earned was from Apps, when it’s mostly from music and videos.

So iOS is the next hardcore gaming platform? Ask Square or any other high-level developer that has shipped a real game on iOS. It’s a wonderful platform for some type of games (especially one shot ones, since users tends to use entertainment application just once) but not for all. Sure, Apple is trying to make the iPod their leading gaming platform (well, it’s leading overall, so why not make it the entertainment platform of choice?), but, sincerely, I can buy the superior PSP version of Chinatown Wars at 9.99$ from Sony Store or in a supermarket, why bother with a PSP-ized DS version on iOS? I did out of novelty but then I realized the sad state of touch controls that kills traditional games on the platform. With exceptions: Square’s Song Summoner was great, even if only I and a few others bought it. Yes, I saw Epic Citadel, but remember the market segmentation ot there. You’re not Epic.

It’s different for very well planned, designed and masterfully placed games like Hoggy or Flight Control, for example: games that can be played in very short spurs (even 30 seconds at time!) without need to focus too much on them are a masterful placement on iOS mobile devices.  You need still to battle with a fierce opposition, no different from other gaming markets (as this year GamesCom iOS panels said ad nauseam) but at least you’re sure to compete on the reference target for the platform.

Update. Today Epic announced that their citadel demo was downloaded 1M times. Even assuming that every download is a different device (absolutely not true when it comes to free apps), the “conversion rate” of the demo is as small as 1/40 of the devices able to run it (from 3GS on). Epic showed the demo worldwide at an Apple Keynote event. Could a less famous developer with a smaller marketing exposition place such hardcore software on a higher user-base? Hardly not. Comparing the dozens of millions of download of the few low-budget but massively successful iOS games, Epic’s title reception is less than relevant.

“The term ‘goldrush’ is overstated,” he said. “When the App Store opened there was the idea that any developer could become a millionaire. But that was true in only two or three cases. It’s actually like any other market. Make good quality games that people want to play and do PR and marketing and you get sales, like in any other.”

This time the words are not mine.Matthew Wiggins of Wonderland joined the ranks of the seasoned and jaded mobile developers who think that you shold have more than a nice idea and a developer account to be successful in the chaos AppStore is.

And for what it takes, other platforms are as much as insidious, too!

via Develop: iPhone Goldrush Is Overstated.

The game is completely free and comes bundled with the complete soundtrack (by Gryzor87) in MP3 format and ready to be uploaded in your favourite MP3 Player.

So, Microsoft, make this modular pad an item in your catalog!

Nevertheless, most of them are funny (if a bit repetitive) and, surprisingly, they work a lot better when taken out of context (that was my main problem of the game: the script was generic and rethorical).