Interview with Patrick Casey, Developer of Voyage to Farland

I sat down (at my laptop) to speak with Patrick Casey, sole developer with Peculiar Games and developer of Voyage to Farland (a cute-but-hardcore, addicting roguelike that I reviewed).

I often see you refer to Mystery Dungeon or Shiren when you talk about Voyage to Farland. Were there any other inspirations for Voyage to Farland?

I probably mention Shiren TOO much when talking about Voyage to Farland! I guess I'm hoping to snag a few Shiren fans or at least get them interested in my game. Shiren was indeed the main inspiration. I'd seen Rogue, Nethack and so on, but nothing that brought those older ASCII games into the present with a modern graphical treatment. And Chunsoft does such a fantastic job with the design - they didn't just take a couple of ideas from Rogue and make a so-so game to generate a few bucks. Shiren's design is TIGHT - especially the revamped 2006 DS release (2008 for the English version).

I'd been playing Earthbound before I picked up Shiren, and I think a few elements (or at least atmosphere) worked their way into Voyage to Farland as well, more subconsciously than by design. Since I started working on Voyage when I lived in Japan, there's a Japanese cultural influence also with a few of the monsters: Oba (from Obatarian - the way Japanese people describe "battalions" of pushy middle-aged women), Oni (the Japanese word for demon), and the Maskboy monster which is influenced by the bouncing heads and the masked "No-Face" character in Miyazaki's film, "Spirited Away".

HE MENTIONED EARTHBOUND!!!! YES!!! Auto-awesomeness in my book.

Some of the weapons also reference actual blades manufactured in Seki, Japan (in Gifu Prefecture). But it's a very obscure & convoluted shout-out!

One Game a Month (#1GAM): Year Two

There's always an awesome monthly revamp of the site, this one celebrates making it into #1GAM's second year!

Christer Kaitila (@McFunkypants as he's better known) - an incredibly prolific indie game developer - came up with One Game a Month (#1GAM) last year and it's currently celebrating the beginning of year two! If I remember right, I first heard about it mid-December-ish 2012 and was so psyched! As someone who loves a good challenge, the idea of having a great excuse to come up with 12 video games in a year was too much to resist. Oh, and there are achievements and experience points to earn, two things I simply can't resist! I did make five games myself out of the 12 months, although two were in the same month.

The challenge is as simple as the name itself: make a game every month! Unlike many game creation competitions there's only one rule (taken from the website): "There are no rules. This is a personal challenge. Have fun and be nice." I unfortunately didn't note exactly what the count was on January 1st, but as of Jan 3rd there are currently 5,399 games from over 7,000 users! If you're a game developer, you've got no excuse not to give it a try (even if you just make bigger games, you can simply submit each one in the month it's completed), and if you're a video game lover you'll be able to play thousands of games from one place, all searchable by keyword or tag!

Each month, an optional theme is posted, and Christer often does a keynote speech or video. This month's theme is "Respawn", and it's absolutely perfectly fitting for a new year. You can checkout the keynote speech below in the video while you watch countless games going by.

Are you taking part in January's #1GAM? What are you working on?

Game Institute's Huge Game Developer Package Sale!

Yes, this might sound like an advertisement or something, but I wrote every word of it and I believe every word. I was not asked to write this, I was not paid for it, I didn't even get any free samples or stickers or anything! This entire article originates from being on their email list and just being genuinely excited about it!!!

One of the biggest problems with getting into game development, aside from the time required, is the high cost. If you've ever looked around any book store (or amazon.com, etc) for game programming books of any sort, you know all too well that $50-$60 is just an acceptable price for 300-400 pages of knowledge. That assumes, you know, that you did your research right, picked out a book that will actually work for you, doesn't assume you already know things that you don't, doesn't teach you the same things all over again... I seriously have at least $200 worth of books that are useless because I just couldn't get behind the way the author was putting the knowledge out there or had already learned those exact same things in another book (usually there's one or two chapters of goodness, but seriously, $60 is waaaaaay too much to gamble!).

Oh, and if you want to go to school for game development, unless you live near one of the few schools that teach it, you'll be going online, and that's ridiculously expensive too. I really love the looks of some of the schools (Digipen was the first I'd heard of and I drooled over the website for months), but there was no way I was affording it, and I don't believe in getting huge student loans that will take years (or decades) of my life to pay off.

The other day, I received an email from The Game Institute (I'm on their email subscription list) saying they were having a big sale. The Game Institute hosts a humongous array of game development training materials for wanna-be game developers of all sorts - it covers C++ programming, art/animation, math (yeah yeah, no one likes math except me, but you'll be using a LOT of math as a game programmer), AI (always one of my favorites, it's such an awesome field to learn) and even building your own game console (although if you want to actually build it, it's another $230 for the kit...). What's amazing is that all of this comes as one huge package, including online textbooks (you can purchase physical, but the price is unknown) and around 150 hours of presentations for only $99, but through January 1st it's only $49! That's less than gambling on one single book most of the time! Plus, apparently you also get any new stuff put out for a year. There's also the option of actually getting a professor to guide you and getting college credit for it, but I couldn't find a price for that anywhere without buying the package (and it's not payday yet...). You can actually find the huge, detailed list of everything here as well.

I wish I would have known about this sooner so I could have shared it as a Christmas gift idea for everyone, but it still makes an excellent gift idea for any game developers (or someone who would like to learn to become one!) in your life (or yourself!).