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A Trademark Troll is a term applied to someone who makes money by relying on the revenue from legal action that they take against anyone creating something that they can link to one of their registered trademarks without really providing anything of any value.  This can be a lucrative course of action with some people seeming to make whole careers out of this and is particularly rampant in the technology industry.

Most recently, Markus ‘Notch’ Pearson, creator of the runaway success Minecraft, has reported that his recently minted development studio, Mojang, has received a letter from the lawyers of Bethesda concerning a trademark infringement.  Mojang’s in-development title “Scrolls“, according to Bethesda, is too similar to their long running RPG series, “The Elder Scrolls”, better known to gamers as Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and the upcoming Skyrim which should be released in November.

The argument is that the name Scrolls could confuse gamers into thinking that it’s associated with Bethesda’s series.  If successful, it would mean that Bethesda would essentially own the word scrolls.  Based on legal precedent, it seems unlikely that they will succeed.

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by ·Comments Off on Monday Morning Fuel: The Humble Indie Bundle 3

This week’s Monday Morning Fuel is a collection of amazing indie games.

The outstanding Humble Indie Bundle, where five indie games are offered for the incredible price of whatever-you-want-to-pay, has returned for its third instalment and now includes the following games:

  • VVVVV
  • Crayon Physics Deluxe
  • Cogs
  • And Yet It Moves
  • Hammerfight
  • Steel Storm
  • Atom Zombie Smasher
  • Free access to Minecraft until August 14th
If you pay more than the average amount (currently around the $5-6 mark) you also get:
  • Braid
  • Machinarium
  • Osmos
  • Revenge of the Titans
  • Cortex Command

This is an outstanding deal and you can decide how much of your donation goes to the developers and how much will go to the EFF or Child’s Play.  The games will run on Mac Windows and Linux systems but the deal is only available for the next day and a half.

Braid, VVVVV and Machinarium are my personal favourites on this list and would warrant a significant donation on their own but all of the titles here are truly inspiring pieces of work from highly talented developers.  The Humble Indie Bundle is good for you, good for hard working artists, good for digital rights advocacy, and good for sick children and can be found by following the link below.

The Humble Indie Bundle 3

by ·Comments Off on This Week’s Tortoises – 1-7 August 2011

This week has seen a flurry of activity as I have rediscovered the joys of blogging.  In order of earlier in the week to later in the week, we have had:

 

 

The Chaotic Tortoise What David Hing Has Been Doing ™ post in The Writer’s Quest Continues

 

 

 

 

 

A Tortoise Butler film called Listening Post

 

 

 

 

 

Game review of iPhone/iPad game Quiz Climber

 

 

 

 

In light of some commentary from Ars Technica, thoughts on game journalism and marketing in Game Journalists and the Marketing Machine

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video on demand and online broadcasting discussed as technology we take for granted in If you could have your own TV show…

 

 

 

 

Sharing mistakes and experiences in Game Design Friday:  Placeholder Graphics

 

 

 

 

 

 

Killer Dice review of farming-based board game Agricola

 

 

 

-Ding

by ·Comments Off on Killer Dice: Agricola

Killer Dice is a semi-regular column about board games, card games and pen and paper RPGs.

Agricola is a game about farming.  When I was first told about the game, that fact caused be to roll my eyes and groan in a cynical-before-my-time fashion because whenever I hear a game is about farming, my first response is for my brain to conjure up the image of FarmVille or Harvest Moon or some other farming-based video game that I personally find more tedious than watching vegetables grow.

Playing Agricola was therefore an exercise in humility when it revealed itself to be a spectacularly well designed, well balanced and more than anything enjoyable game to play.

Farming sim video games generally have their approach to farming all wrong by often paining a rosy image of the process.  Farming is not, and never has been, a quaint and idyllic lifestyle.  Farming is back breaking work, stressful and fraught with difficulties even in modern agriculture and has always required an immense amount of forward planning.

Agricola perfectly encapsulates this knife-edge between success and failure in a way that is not immediately obvious.

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by ·Comments Off on Game Design Friday: Placeholder Graphics

I am ever trying to learn the art of Game Design through trial and error, or as I like to call it, error and error (which if you learn by making mistakes is twice as efficient).

One element of the design process that routinely throws roadblocks up in my path is the graphical development.  When you start making your game, it is inevitably not going to look like a polished game unless you’re making text only interactive fiction, and even then you might end up changing the font.  This is unavoidable and is something that you shouldn’t be worried about, but there’s a balancing act here whereby you need to get it looking like something you’re at least partially happy with, otherwise you’re not going to work on the game at all.

I am awful at working on things at the best of times, but I so frequently get stumped by the issue of working with placeholder graphics.  I want the game to look like its polished state from phase one and that urge can damage development and general productivity.

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