Indie Illuminator - Scarizard

Once again, I’d like to use this week’s Indie Illuminator post to highlight a wonderful Twitch streamer with a growing viewer count: Scarizard! If you play League of Legends, the name might sound familiar. Scarizard worked for several years with Riot Games and played a big role in communicating with players. He provided plenty of puns in the game’s frequent patch notes, while also participating in design and Q&A streams that gave players deeper insight into Riot’s gameplay decisions.

Image from Scarizard's Twitch page.

This past year, Scarizard left Riot to pursue some personal projects. One of those projects is “the Backlog.” Many gamers start to pile up a backlog of games, hoarding games because they’re on sale or sound interesting. Scarizard put together a list of 50 wildly distinct games that he was unable to play because of work and other constraints. And now he’s been playing those 50 games over the course of 2017 and streaming his progress through the backlog.

Some streamers tend to stick to one or two games, but other streamers—often called variety streamers—play a variety of games for their audience. If you’re looking for a talented variety streamer with a great sense of humor, a strong rapport with his chat audience, and a marvelous beard, Scarizard is definitely your man. He streams most days from around 12-9 PT if you want to check out his stream.

Dev Take Tuesday - Desolation Trail

What’s in a name? Sorry Romeo, but I’m going to have to disagree with you here. My wife and I went on a small outing this weekend to a nearby canyon and stumbled upon a trailhead marker titled “Desolation Trail.” The name certainly caught our attention. I doubt we would have picked that trail from a list of less intimidating names, but since we had some time we took a few minutes to explore the desolation ourselves.

Photo taken by Ryan Malavolta for UtahOutside.com

We met another couple descending from the trail. They explained how they’d avoided the trail for years because of negative things they’d heard about the trail: it was arduous, it was treacherous, it was ugly. About what you’d expect from a trail titled “desolation.” But, after finally checking it out for themselves, they discovered that it wasn’t any of those things. Intrigued, my wife and I followed the trail up. All we saw was sunshine and trees, and we discussed revisiting the trail on a future outing.

As developers, we might overlook how much naming we do. We often do a lot of “proper noun” naming of places and people, but on top of that we frequently need to name enemies, abilities, and game mechanics. It might be easy to simply use the first names that come to mind. (What’s in a name? A fireball by any other name would roast thy feet.) However, if the connotations and implications of a name contradict its purpose, your players might be confused or—like the hiking couple in the story above—avoid the “desolation” all together. As we decide on final names for all of our character abilities in Alkanaur, I’ll definitely have that trailhead marker on my mind.

Oh, and I’ll probably name an ability “desolation.” As long as the name fits.

Dev Take Tuesday - A Bit of Personality

I’m a huge fan of the rebooted XCOM games made by Firaxis. There’s only one series on Steam that I’ve logged more hours into: the Civilizations games (also made by Firaxis). XCOM 2 made a few key changes to the first game’s formula, but the emphasis on a squad of randomly generated soldiers remained largely the same. XCOM’s approach to teambuilding affords it certain benefits. While the characters you play provide little personality of their own, that also means they can act as a tabula rasa for you to inject your own stories into them as the game progresses. The expanded visual and audio customizations added in XCOM 2 build off of this “blank slate” idea.

The Chosen in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen (image from the game's Steam page)

I don’t think the first two XCOM games’ approach to characterization was wrong, but I do love one key change they made in XCOM 2’s huge DLC expansion: the Chosen. Now as you’re fighting the alien enemies, three powerful and unique alien hybrids will disrupt your carefully-laid plans. Each of the three Chosen—called the Assassin, the Hunter, and the Warlock—have highly specialized strengths and weaknesses as well as a unique personality. Those personalities shine in the tactical battles and a few cutscenes, and the Chosen also have voice lines while you plan and prepare in XCOM’s strategic layer. Perhaps taking a page out of Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system, the Chosen’s constant needling and disruption helped me develop a pretty potent grudge against them. Especially the Assassin. Grr.

While I don’t think future XCOM titles will switch to only fleshed-out, pre-written story characters, I would be surprised if they didn’t at least include some fixed characters in their next game as well. By pumping in just a bit of personality, I found myself even more invested in the game. Much like Civilization 6’s “obnoxious Gandhis,” which I mentioned in another blog post, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen’s combination of game mechanics and dialogue breathes life into the enemy A.I. you compete against. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s about time I take out another one of the Chosen. Warlock, I’m coming for you.