Better than Stealth Marmalade

Last weekend, Sneaky Bastards hosted the inaugural Stealth Jam, a 48 hour game jam focused on stealth games. Needless to say, a fantastic idea and I hope they'll post the games from it soon. I can't wait to check them out. If I wasn't participating in my own perpetual "finish Ninja, oh god oh god" jam, I'd have loved to participate.

Instead, I did what little I could and horrified the participants with video clips of my giant talking head. There's actually a lot of smart, awesome stealth game folks in the "Welcome to the jam" video above, saying (and especially doing, I mean, Tom's freaking cooking) interesting things. And there's a parade of special guests at the end, so I can't imagine a better way to have kicked off (out?) the jam.

Now back to making a ninja ... being less buggy. It's much less dramatic than one might think.

Humongous Explosives

Someday, someday soon, I'll write my own words here again. Until then, here's a awesome chat I had with Patrick Klepek over at Giant Bomb:

http://www.giantbomb.com/news/stealth-games-dont-have-to-be-so-niche/4181/

Patrick came and played Ninja at PAX East. After play, he said he normally doesn't really like stealth games, but really dug Ninja. That was incredibly edifying to hear. I like stealth games a lot, but as I said to Patrick, I get why they can be inaccessible for some people. Maybe it's just by virtue of its 2D-ness, but I'm hoping Ninja can do for more folks what it did for Patrick- allow them to better see the things I find so appeal about the stealth genre/style/form/whatever.

I don't think this ended up in the interview, but one of us (I honestly don't remember which) observed that once a particular genre develops something of a niche, it has three ways forward, two of which is distinctly not good.

1) Games in the genre exist to serve the niche and the basically same game ends up being released over and over, with minimal changes only the most fervent notice.

2) The genre attempts to be more "broad" and loses what about it the enthusiasts liked in the first place. See a great many games drifting away from what made them interesting toward being more generally action-y.

3) Smart developers manage to continue to innovate and refine, bringing in new people without compromising what made the niche so special in the first place.

In the context of horror games, Silent Hill may be 1) or 2) depending on who you ask, Resident Evil is definitely 2) and Amnesia manages to brilliant sail forward as 3).

Point being, I think there's plenty in Ninja for more ardent stealth folks like me, but maybe we'll actually be able to cross the divide and show some new folks what's so interesting here without losing what's so good about stealth games. We've yet to see if we pulled it off or not, but we'll see soon enough.