Short post tonight to highlight some of the recent FREE games that have been made available recently here at Shrapnel in case you’ve missed hearing the news when it happened.

Today multi-award winning Digital Eel (Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, Eat Electric Death!) made available a print-n-play fantasy melee combat game, Goblin Slayer. Can Stormbeard the dwarf survive an endless tide of gibbering goblins in his quest for the Shimmering Widget? Download the game, print it out, find a buddy, and find out for yourself!

Goblin Slayer is available here. While there you’ll also find three Digital Eel classic computer games ready for download: Plasmaworm, Big Box of Blox, and Dr. Blob’s Organism. All three are the complete games, and all are free.

The Camo Workshop recently dropped two new patches, one for winSPWW2 and one for winSPMBT. While both games have been around for quite some time the patches are new, so we’ll include them in this post. Grab the patches from their respective game pages by following the general overview page here.

Happy gaming!

For everyone waiting on Eat Electric Death! our fearless leader recently posted an update in the forums on its status, which goes as follows:

We are getting very close now. We have had some problems with costs, with proofs, with the box, with suppliers . We are working to resolve. It is going much slower than we ever anticipated and I apologize for the delays. As soon as I have a semi-firm date I will post it here, along with a press release. This should happen this month, hopefully sooner than later.

We are very careful with our board games. Unlike computer games, patches aren’t an option. This being only our second board game, and with the quality we had with Lock ‘N Load, we are being careful to get the quality we want at a cost that makes the developer money and is reasonable for the consumer. Unfortunately, we have had supplier issues throughout and we have hesitated taking this to China or Hong Kong for control reasons.

Please be patient we are making progress.

So yes, unfortunately it has been delayed longer than we’d like, but on the upside we’re trying to keep the game’s manufacturing in the US. I know there are a lot of gamers out there who are getting fed up with game production moving to China, especially when you end up with issues like Tide Of Iron’s warped boards (corrected before release, but how much money did Fantasy Flight Games lose on having to do that? And oh, they got burned again with the starters for Mutant Chronicles, having to redo those too…) or the chemical stench of Z-Man’s Duel In The Dark. And then outside of game production you have Chinese toys potentially poisoning children, Chinese pet food killing pets, and even Chinese made blood thinner killing eighty-one individuals around the globe.

While I don’t know if we can promise to keep future manufacturing inside the country, I know we’ll do our best to do so.

      It’s funny it only seems like a few weeks have passed since Tim and I first met while he was finishing up 101rst Airborne.  At the time I was almost finished with my tenure as head of Marketing and Business Development at Wargamer.com and we were interviewing Tim for the final release of his game to the general public.  Fast forward almost a year where Tim had just started Shrapnel Games.  I had started down the road to the gaming business by launching the product Red Thunder, for the now defunct EdenSoft Games, and was intrigued by Tim’s idea of how to change the face of wargaming.  I have never been one for conformity and I had been increasingly frustrating with the direction of the serious war and strategy gaming market.  Tim’s idea was to bypass retail and bring good games to the people and I felt it was an idea whose time had come.  And so a 9 year relationship with Shrapnel Games was born.

     I will always be indebted to Tim and the community for this opportunity over the last 9 years.  I can remember the early days where we struggled to find a reliable web host and spent several days down during the ice storms of late 99.  Recruiting and signing the first developers was a thrill and those early days of getting excited over an individual sale of a game or an individual post to our forums will always be special memories.  My favorite times were meeting with the people behind the forum posts and I will always cherish my visits to Connections or Origins and meeting our incredible community face to face. 

       If nothing else we did change the face of the industry.  Now the market blazed by a few small companies has blossomed into a way of doing business.  We also, in the process, developed a lively community of close to 10,000 registered members, who are passionate about gaming and each other.  We published some of the most award winning games in our genre and developed a reputation for excellence and close connection with our fans and community.  And I am glad for every moment I spent along that journey.

      Many of the newer members of the community probably will not remember any of this, and to be honest, probably will wonder who this Richard guy is .  That’s the other reason for leaving.  Over the last few years my real career has taken off and has increasingly asked for more of my time.  In that time other people have stepped in to take over many of the things I used to do and I think there will be opportunities in the future for more folks in the community to help continue to fill that void.  So that’s why it’s time for Mindi and I to step aside so we can concentrate on the other interests in our life and blaze our own path along the road.  That doesn’t mean we won’t be back from time to time but when we do it won’t be doing it as employees of Shrapnel Games, we’ll be doing it as supporters of the community.  Because if there’s nothing else that I treasure of the last 9 years it’s the folks I have met along the journey to where I am now.

       So thanks again for everything and hopefully we’ll see each other in the future.

They say to everything there is a season and I certainly believe that’s true.  We change, we grow, we evolve….  So it is with mixed emotions that Richard and I announce that we are stepping down from our positions at Shrapnel Games.  It’s something that we’ve been talking about for a while, but finally decided we couldn’t put it off any longer.  We’ve reached a point in our lives where we want to pursue some of our other interests and need to make different priorities.  We aren’t even for certain yet which of our other interests we want to pursue, we just know it’s time for us to make a change and chart our own course.

We want everyone to know that we’ve enjoyed being part of this family and will continue to pop in from time to time even after we finish with our official work.  We won’t be leaving tomorrow, next week or even next month, but once we finish up some technical projects we have going on and transition our responsibilities to other Shrapnel staff members, we will be leaving our official roles.

On the personal side, I want to thank everyone who welcomed me with open arms when I came on staff.  You all made working on the beta tests and with the community a joy….well most of the time.   All kidding aside, I have enjoyed getting to know you all and will miss being the leader of a community filled with great people. 

In our most recent press release (which if you missed it can be read here) we sent out a call to writers, specifically interested in genre fiction. I just wanted to take a moment and mention that what we’re looking for is purely standalone entertaining fiction. It does not have to tie into gaming, nor do the authors.

We’re getting a lot of folks who have backgrounds in game reviewing, or similar positions, and while there is nothing wrong with that I just wanted to ensure that if you’ve contemplated submitting something but haven’t because you have no experience in the game industry, that’s perfectly fine. Honestly, you may be someone who has never even touched a game in your life–we don’t care. We’re just looking for potential good genre stories.

So please, if you have a friend or colleague who enjoys writing but isn’t a gamer go ahead and tell them about this and have them drop us a line.

And what exactly is this for? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see.

We’ve been running a couple of new ads. The first one was this:

We have a couple more running in a similar style. In fact, unless the peel ad on the blog is rotating you should find another similar one on this page.

Reaction to the ads have been extremely positive and this has been shown by a number of things. To begin, there’s a nice forum thread currently at five pages which started up with the first ad. I can’t think of a single other ad in the nine years Shrapnel has been around that has spawned such a discussion. You even have one community member who changed his avatar to the ad for a while and is now using it as his sig, currently slightly modified. In fact, there’s a number of folks who are toying around with the ads. Again, in nine years no one has ever felt the desire to “play around” with one of our ads.

Forums are of course not always the best barometer though of how something is perceived. After all, as we all know, all it takes is a couple of umm, say we say “verbally enthusiastic” members to make you think the entire world either loves or hates something particular about a game. With advertising though we have access to real world data to see how it’s performing, not just sifting through the signal to noise ratio found on the Internet. And how well are these ads doing?

The first ad which was launched on March 31st (and so at the time of this writing has been active for less than a week) has a clickthrough percentage of ten times the rate of one of our traditional ads for a SIX MONTH PERIOD. Six days.

So yeah, it’s spreading the word.

Now, you can’t please everyone and there has been a couple of folks who found it shocking that we were now doing some sort of cheesecake campaign. Sexist, juvenile, so forth. Since these kind of debates crop up all the time in our world I’m sure it’s not hard to imagine constructing an argument against the ad campaign even if you don’t have a problem with it. Think about it for a sec. Done? Good, what you just thought up has probably been said by those that disagree with the direction we took.

Personally I don’t have a problem with the ads. I find them amusing not strictly because they feature women with come hither looks on their faces, but because of the juxtaposition. If we had an ad with a snow tire and it was selling winSPMBT I’d find it equally amusing. They’re different. And most importantly, really not that offensive.

Look, the women are clothed. There’s no sexual innuendo. I see worst photos on the covers of all those women magazines when I’m standing in line at the grocery store. The ads could be for a line of perfume, or shoes. Which is again what makes them amusing. It should be a perfume ad, not an ad for a hardcore niche strategy fantasy game or a military simulation (we have one for Air Assault Task Force).

I also find myself a tad shocked that the ads are considered sexist and immature when you consider the industry we’re in. Just off the top of my head let me a list a few things that qualify for far more scorn than a chick laying on a couch..

• E3 at its pinnacle.
• Launch parties featuring half-naked women and decapitated goats.
• The Postal series.
• Any of Acclaim’s marketing campaigns. Anyone remember the gravestone idea?
• Uwe Boll.
• Mike Wilson’s Gamecock. I mean c’mon, the name of the company is GameCOCK. How would you like to have that on your resume? “So, Mr. Smith, I see your last job was at…umm…ah…Game…cock?”
• Actually, anything Mike Wilson has been involved in. The GOD E3 trailer. The recent flamefest with Romero.
• Japanese hentai games.

When it comes to the world of video and computer games it’s not very hard to come up with a laundry list of things that you wouldn’t want your wife/girlfriend/mother to witness. We don’t think this current ad campaign rises (or depending on how you look at it, lowers) to that level.

We’re here to sell games. We want people to be aware of our games, and I’m fairly certain our developers want the same thing. We’re always going to be looking for new ways to attract attention and get more eyes on the games. Whether it’s experimenting with social network sites, or running off beat ads, we’re going to try out new methods. See what works and what doesn’t. We’re an independent publisher. We’re not going to ever get the cover article, or be the exclusive story on some cable show. We have to approach things differently. What all this means is that the ads aren’t going anyplace. To those couple of folks who aren’t keen on them, sorry.

And I hope you know us well enough to know that we’re being sincere and it’s not just a brush-off. One thing I think we’ve always prided ourselves on is our accessibility. We’re not some faceless corporate gaming conglomerate, if you ever have a question, comment, or an issue we’re here to listen. The answer may not be what you want to hear (especially if you’re emailing me about release dates…heh), but at least you’ll get an answer.

Gaming should be about fun. Let’s have some fun and not get too serious. Sound good?

One of the problems wargame designers face is the fact that history isn’t balanced. There have been few moments in the history of human conflict when both sides ran equal when it came to force composition, position, and willpower. The challenge then is to take history and turn it into a game (mind you, not a simulation, which does allow for imbalance) that is somewhat balanced for playability’s sake.

Typically as the design widens the more difficult the balancing act becomes. At the tactical level it’s rather easy to essentially ignore history beyond making sure the right unit is in the right place, but at the grand strategic level your design must accurately represent what the belligerents faced. For example, a strategic game on the Vietnam conflict with absolutely no consideration for the politics of the era would fail as a game. Likewise, an American Civil War game that doesn’t take into account the 1864 election would be lacking.

The war in the Pacific is one of those tough acts for designers. Historically a Japanese victory was almost impossible. If you want to go all Turtledove possibly a quick victory in China would have helped (thus freeing the massive number of Jap forces there to strike into India). And perhaps if the US carriers were at Pearl—and if the oil storage was devastated—that could have set the US back another six or so months and the IJN could have ruled the Pacific unchecked for a longer period. In the end though it still would simply equal a delay, assuming the war in Europe went about the same.

So, when faced with a war that for one side is pretty much a losing proposition, how do you make it winnable but still ensure that it’s within the realms of possibility? I was curious how John Hawkins, the designer for the upcoming War Plan Pacific (in case you missed the news here’s the release) was tackling the problem, especially since he’s aiming for a fast playing treatment, so I asked him.

Each side has two ways to win (one quick, one slow), and two ways to lose (one quick, and one slow). Japanese victory depends on prolonging the war to the point that the American public would decide the cost of revenge for Pearl Harbor (and other things) wasn’t worth it. I’m not really sure that was even possible for the Japanese – one of my aunts was a young girl in 1941, and bitterly hated the Japanese for the rest of her days. A good friend of the family’s husband was a Marine photographer in New Guinea and the Philippines. She gave me some of his old photos (most he took were government property, but he came home with a few personal ones – mostly Papuan women in, um, “native dress”) but one was from the Philippines, and it was a billboard erected along part of the path of the Bataan Death March. It told passing soldiers what the Japanese did along that road, and ended with three foot high letters saying “Kill the Bastards.” I think Churchill was right, the Japanese were doomed to be “ground to powder”, but for purposes of the game, I’ll let Japan win or lose based on the assumptions Japanese leadership made at the time, that the American public would eventually demand peace.

There are two parts of the game that can be considered “blockades” of a sort. One, if the Allies control Luzon, Leyte or Formosa, they will interdict oil flowing from the DEI into Japan. Running out of oil is one way for Japan to lose (being bombed into oblivion is the other). The second place that the blockade (and specifically the US Submarine effort) comes into play is the Sea Lanes victory condition. If Japan can cut the sea lanes to Australia, the allies lose the forward bases in Oz, which were particularly important for the sub war, and it’s assumed that losing these bases would prolong the war to the point where Japan could get a peace treaty recognizing her conquests. Of course, understanding all that isn’t essential for someone who just wants to play the game, and to fit the design constraints I had to make many abstractions, but I tried to keep a historical basis for the decisions I made.

It was good to see the Japanese oil problem in the game. For the IJN player his oil score must always be kept above zero. If at any time it drops to zero or below, game over. Currently the oil score is computed as follows (bear in mind that as the game undergoes more testing this can change):

At the start the Japanese player has 4 oil points. Each turn (which by the way represents a month) one point is subtracted, but at the same time one point is added for each of the following bases controlled by Japan: Borneo, Java, and Singapore. This can be countered by the Allies controlling Leyte, Luzon, and Formosa.

John on the way he came up with this mechanic:

By setting the initial Oil reserves rather low, it puts immense pressure on the Japanese player to secure those islands, encouraging him to invest historically massive forces in the effort. This keeps a Japanese player from cavalierly attempting a zerg-rush against the Hawaiian Islands or the US-Australian sea lanes. With the impact that the Philippines have on oil flow, the Japanese are likely to be kept busy for a while in the region, giving the Allied player some chance at mounting an early defense.

As a side note another light PTO game that does a good job with the oil crunch is the board game Fire In The Sky, published by MMP. Currently out-of-print, if you can snag a copy do so.

John’s handling of the strategic air war (another side note, who else is also excited by Khyber Pass’ B-29 Superfortress?), much like the way oil works, is also a nice exercise in simplicity. Once B-29s become historically available (October ’43 turn) for each base the Allies control within bombing range of the home islands gives the Allied player one Strategic Bombing point. Accumulate twenty-five and Japan is forced to surrender, abstractly representing the atomic bombings.

There are also two other victory conditions. The Japanese player can force the Allies to lose by simply holding off and surviving into 1946. Obviously the key is they need to not only keep at least one oil point flowing, but also make sure the can survive the bombing campaign for that long. Another method is to isolate Australia for six months, thus denying the Americans their forward bases and material support to the land down under.

These are all sounding like great mechanics, that both fulfill reality but also make for interesting play decisions. For both players they will be faced with key decisions on what to protect, and what to go after, often directly at odds with their opponent.

Stay tuned for an interview with John Hawkins in this month’s Frag! newsletter.