I've had this discussion a few times now, with various people. Let's look at a problem in game design from two perspectives. The problem is rather simple. It deals with resource gathering in an MMO and demonstrates this the best. The basic premise is a player goes to a spot where there should be something to gather (iron, flowers, wood, whatever). Now the challenge is to make the user try to gather on this (and every other spot like it) to try to get resources, maybe multiple ones even from one spot. But there also is a skill check involved to reward those that have been doing it more often.
Let's look at the developer side. You could simply chose a random output, say randomly they fail or get something. Maybe randomize the amount you get from using that resource spot, and/or the amount of time it regenerates, rate it regenerates with, and so on. But since we are developers, we want a better solution than just plain random. So we build up a complicated table, backlog, statistical analysis and so on, and in the end ship it.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Multi tasking features
A good game feature does three things, all at the same time:
- Add a logical function to the game
- Be fun for the player
- Support the game lore/background
Monday, August 29, 2011
Name that... thing
Mithril. With one word, those in the know have an image of a silvery yet light metal in their head. The rest of the population react completely normal with a "what?".
Steel. Now we pretty much are all on the same plate. You know it, you have seen it, probably touched it. You might not know exactly what it's properties are or how it's made, but you know it's heavy, sturdy and well, a metal.
You see Mithril might be very well known and it's highly likely you get crucified by a strong following of Tolkien if you politely inquire about what the hell that is, but it's still a completely fabricated thing, something named by (although lots of background thought went into it) purely one persons brain with no correlation to reality.
If the following example sounds familiar, you get 2 geek points. Say we don't speak the same language. I pick up a cup of coffee from the table and offer it to you, then say "kekorti". Now what do I mean? Coffee? Drink? Warm? Pay attention the damn thing is hot? Friend? Drink this and die in honor? Yes it's from Star Trek.
Steel. Now we pretty much are all on the same plate. You know it, you have seen it, probably touched it. You might not know exactly what it's properties are or how it's made, but you know it's heavy, sturdy and well, a metal.
You see Mithril might be very well known and it's highly likely you get crucified by a strong following of Tolkien if you politely inquire about what the hell that is, but it's still a completely fabricated thing, something named by (although lots of background thought went into it) purely one persons brain with no correlation to reality.
If the following example sounds familiar, you get 2 geek points. Say we don't speak the same language. I pick up a cup of coffee from the table and offer it to you, then say "kekorti". Now what do I mean? Coffee? Drink? Warm? Pay attention the damn thing is hot? Friend? Drink this and die in honor? Yes it's from Star Trek.
Monday, August 22, 2011
The fear of making mistakes
Players are deathly afraid of one thing, more than anything else and that is making a permanent mistake. In real life we all know how easy it is done. I recently have manged to fabricate 3 of them in what is for me a very short period of time. Hindsight is always better of course, but we rationalize in reverse too. I could have seen each of those three mistakes clearly before making them. I could have avoided them, by avoiding the subject, thinking it over more, collecting more information and so on. But at the time, well, it seemed the right thing to do.
Now a player works exactly the same way. They think about it, agonize over it even, to the point where they block themselves from enjoying the game. It often starts at the beginning, by choosing a race, gender, class, starting location, profession, faction, heritage and many other things that might be rather important. Or not.
Now a player works exactly the same way. They think about it, agonize over it even, to the point where they block themselves from enjoying the game. It often starts at the beginning, by choosing a race, gender, class, starting location, profession, faction, heritage and many other things that might be rather important. Or not.
Monday, June 20, 2011
The right way
I'm always slightly confused when people tell me how to do something the right way. That confusion does not extend to manual things, like how to fasten a screw on a machine that might kill me if I don't do it right. But as soon as you start building something more abstract, an MMO for example, then things get hellish confusing.
The problem is not that there are no right ways. The problem is that there are too many. And they oppose each other more often than not.
Yes this is another one of those confusing posts.
The problem is not that there are no right ways. The problem is that there are too many. And they oppose each other more often than not.
Yes this is another one of those confusing posts.
Monday, June 13, 2011
The subscription rift
Clever people will easy deduce which game I'm talking about, but this is really not different from others.
I bought a game, new MMO title, with the expressed intention of trying it out with a friend. Explore a little, see what it does well and what it doesn't. It was already late when I decided to install the disk. So I'd just install, maybe let the updates run that probably needed to roll in, while I'd check my mails before going to sleep. Of course in the process of installing you also get told to make an account, entering your key from the booklet. which allows you to play a month for free.
Of course I did not get to play the next day or the day after. In fact life happened and over a month later I finally get a couple hours where I think now would be a good time to try this game. Guess what happened.
I bought a game, new MMO title, with the expressed intention of trying it out with a friend. Explore a little, see what it does well and what it doesn't. It was already late when I decided to install the disk. So I'd just install, maybe let the updates run that probably needed to roll in, while I'd check my mails before going to sleep. Of course in the process of installing you also get told to make an account, entering your key from the booklet. which allows you to play a month for free.
Of course I did not get to play the next day or the day after. In fact life happened and over a month later I finally get a couple hours where I think now would be a good time to try this game. Guess what happened.
Monday, June 06, 2011
Die cut scene, die
I couldn't find a better title. Seriously. The other titles had so many expletives I think I might have been kicked off the internet for that alone. The current one still captures my heartfelt feelings though.
Raise your hand, who played a game where your main motivation was to see the next cut scene, because the rest of the game wasn't all too impressive to play? I'd be coughing in the back now and trying to say Final Fantasy 8 at the same time. Not saying the game is bad. It's just, if you pull away the cut scenes, there is fairly little substance left in ways of story. It's a very grindy game (nothing wrong with that if you're into that) in a very strange world.
Cut scenes have been used by game developers to shiny over some not so stellar other things. Many other things. They also have been used to make the feeling more movie like. Boy what a big pile of [massive amount of expletives deleted, imagine about half an hour worth of bile here].
More samples, like recent ones? MMO samples? Well there are plenty.
Raise your hand, who played a game where your main motivation was to see the next cut scene, because the rest of the game wasn't all too impressive to play? I'd be coughing in the back now and trying to say Final Fantasy 8 at the same time. Not saying the game is bad. It's just, if you pull away the cut scenes, there is fairly little substance left in ways of story. It's a very grindy game (nothing wrong with that if you're into that) in a very strange world.
Cut scenes have been used by game developers to shiny over some not so stellar other things. Many other things. They also have been used to make the feeling more movie like. Boy what a big pile of [massive amount of expletives deleted, imagine about half an hour worth of bile here].
More samples, like recent ones? MMO samples? Well there are plenty.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Stacking boxes
Imagine you buy a car. Imagine it comes in a box, with a nice bow on it. You open the box and find your car in it. It's really great, but you soon realize that you have been chipped a little, as all other cars can also drive backwards. So you buy another box, with the feature of driving backwards. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.
Then you realize all other cars also have a horn. So you buy another box with a horn feature. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.
Happy with your car you find out that everyone else is able to personalize their car's appearance, while yours is dwindling around somewhere in the dirt brown. So you buy a box with custom paints in it. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.
And then you realize you have missed [insert something else ridiculous here]. You stand in front of box number four. And now you are just pissed off. And you have every right to be.
This is exactly the situation on many large MMO's today. It makes as much sense as the car example above though.
Then you realize all other cars also have a horn. So you buy another box with a horn feature. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.
Happy with your car you find out that everyone else is able to personalize their car's appearance, while yours is dwindling around somewhere in the dirt brown. So you buy a box with custom paints in it. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.
And then you realize you have missed [insert something else ridiculous here]. You stand in front of box number four. And now you are just pissed off. And you have every right to be.
This is exactly the situation on many large MMO's today. It makes as much sense as the car example above though.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Looks of limbs
L.A. Noire demonstrates a wonderful technology that makes faces almost perfect. Yes almost, we still aren't there yet. Making faces look good in 3D stuff is incredibly hard. Skin in general isn't an easy task, but the face, that's the holy grail. If you could make faces in games that are indistinguishable from real ones, that would be awesome. With sauce.
Looking at the rest though, we pretty much are good on metals, cloth, wood, hair and in general the human anatomy. There are some 3D renders where you have to do a double take to see it's not real. I seen a picture where the modeler cleverly added a mask, that looks fake, so you couldn't even see the face and the rest looked just perfect. I was thinking of trying to find out who the model was, before I read in detail how it was all just 3D trickery.
So why do the characters in games still look like they either have a rather bad case of caustic armpit sweat or like a marionette with the strings coated in sticky glue? I'm not talking cut scenes, where carefully animated and motion captured movies are presented to you, but the normal game play, where the problem compounds on an MMO scale.
Looking at the rest though, we pretty much are good on metals, cloth, wood, hair and in general the human anatomy. There are some 3D renders where you have to do a double take to see it's not real. I seen a picture where the modeler cleverly added a mask, that looks fake, so you couldn't even see the face and the rest looked just perfect. I was thinking of trying to find out who the model was, before I read in detail how it was all just 3D trickery.
So why do the characters in games still look like they either have a rather bad case of caustic armpit sweat or like a marionette with the strings coated in sticky glue? I'm not talking cut scenes, where carefully animated and motion captured movies are presented to you, but the normal game play, where the problem compounds on an MMO scale.
Monday, May 16, 2011
The fall of standing
There is an absolutely fantastic way to screw with your player base. This first part ain't it, but it's the basis on which you can go on and really make them suffer.
Have factions, more than two though. A dozen or so would work just great. Have each one occupy a physical location, with the major ones being in most of the interesting spaces. Create now standing, a value to indicate your relationship with them. You can call it fame, notoriety, reputation, whatever you feel like, I call it standing for the sake of this post. These things by themselves are not bad. They can be implemented horrible but I come to that a bit later. It takes a lot of very special incompetence to screw up this part. There are consequences, like being shot on sight with bad standing and so on, but I don't even have to go into that here.
The next part already gets tricky. Now you could opt to add a co-dependence between the factions. If you gain standing with Faction A, then Faction B will lose standing, because they hate A. Maybe if you gain 10 points in standing, you loose 4 points in the other faction. Tricky but not impossible. Now to really make players go bonkers.
Have factions, more than two though. A dozen or so would work just great. Have each one occupy a physical location, with the major ones being in most of the interesting spaces. Create now standing, a value to indicate your relationship with them. You can call it fame, notoriety, reputation, whatever you feel like, I call it standing for the sake of this post. These things by themselves are not bad. They can be implemented horrible but I come to that a bit later. It takes a lot of very special incompetence to screw up this part. There are consequences, like being shot on sight with bad standing and so on, but I don't even have to go into that here.
The next part already gets tricky. Now you could opt to add a co-dependence between the factions. If you gain standing with Faction A, then Faction B will lose standing, because they hate A. Maybe if you gain 10 points in standing, you loose 4 points in the other faction. Tricky but not impossible. Now to really make players go bonkers.
Monday, May 09, 2011
Update? Update!
Updating. If you have a digital device, you probably have experienced this by now. The voodoo of said process escapes the general public in most cases. Something is downloaded, a bar goes left to right and done. And then reboot, more often than not.
This process is wildly different from one manufacturer of the device to the next. Even within the same device (i.e. a Windows machine) it's often different from each single bit of code to the next. The experiences range from pretty much not noticing it except that small unobtrusive note saying it has been updated, to a gargantuan task, ending in you reinstalling the entire machine. Depending on what you are updating, you want to know it happens, and what happened, and in very many cases, you don't really care.
So what is the current MMO developer to do?
This process is wildly different from one manufacturer of the device to the next. Even within the same device (i.e. a Windows machine) it's often different from each single bit of code to the next. The experiences range from pretty much not noticing it except that small unobtrusive note saying it has been updated, to a gargantuan task, ending in you reinstalling the entire machine. Depending on what you are updating, you want to know it happens, and what happened, and in very many cases, you don't really care.
So what is the current MMO developer to do?
Monday, May 02, 2011
Players are the story
Welcome to the amusement park. Sit down and enjoy the ride. Oh you already were on this one? Well it's still the same one, but maybe you'd like to enjoy it again? No, you want new things? Things changing? Well maybe we could rig a few puppets to look another way, make the cart stop suddenly once or twice, would that be good enough? Not at all, you say, well then I'm lost on what to do.
So, or very similar I expect many current MMO designers to feel like. It's a trap of their own doing. When I saw the Star Wars MMO, I felt like we are back to where we were with the first Diablo, just with prettier graphics. Even calling that an MMO felt a bit like a stretch. What has happened is the developers suddenly think that story is the overall guiding principle. Oh boy, how wrong they are.
This means huge production costs. As a player you should be interested in this as well, as that money goes to story instead of, say the bugs or other features you would actually enjoy. The even more important factor is that they run out, get boring, repetitive and that very quickly. And they lack something very important: Humans.
So, or very similar I expect many current MMO designers to feel like. It's a trap of their own doing. When I saw the Star Wars MMO, I felt like we are back to where we were with the first Diablo, just with prettier graphics. Even calling that an MMO felt a bit like a stretch. What has happened is the developers suddenly think that story is the overall guiding principle. Oh boy, how wrong they are.
This means huge production costs. As a player you should be interested in this as well, as that money goes to story instead of, say the bugs or other features you would actually enjoy. The even more important factor is that they run out, get boring, repetitive and that very quickly. And they lack something very important: Humans.
Monday, April 25, 2011
On trade
I wanted to write something on a different topic, but my mind kept returning to trade, so here we go. Trade has been on my mind a lot lately, because it ties into so many things. Item teleport, information teleport, player teleport, movement speed, resource gathering, crafting, communication, storage, money are just the most screaming topics. There are tons of other ones being influenced by them.
Now two steps back. Trade, what is that? When I talk about trade, I talk about the exchange of information, commodities, services and currency, in any combination possible, between two parties. These parties can include any combination of NPCs and/or players. Me giving a newbie a sword for free, is a trade. A good one for him, a financially not very good one for me, but then again, I might do it to woe the newbie to join my guild. See how those trade things instantly get a bit into everything?
Trade is the under appreciated orphan child of pretty much all games out there. There are exceptions. But few and far in between. The most common one is the item exchange, that happens between two players at the busiest location within the game. The next common one is buying stuff from NPCs. Not very exciting. But trade (especially the player driven kind) can be so much more.
Now two steps back. Trade, what is that? When I talk about trade, I talk about the exchange of information, commodities, services and currency, in any combination possible, between two parties. These parties can include any combination of NPCs and/or players. Me giving a newbie a sword for free, is a trade. A good one for him, a financially not very good one for me, but then again, I might do it to woe the newbie to join my guild. See how those trade things instantly get a bit into everything?
Trade is the under appreciated orphan child of pretty much all games out there. There are exceptions. But few and far in between. The most common one is the item exchange, that happens between two players at the busiest location within the game. The next common one is buying stuff from NPCs. Not very exciting. But trade (especially the player driven kind) can be so much more.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The way of the servers
A teenage me was sitting in the summer of 1996 in an apartment I shared with a friend and mused on the state of games. Master of Orion 2 was just the latest game and besides that my computer sported Ultima VIII and Quake World.
The reason why a teenage me was not busy shooting things or doing other things a teenage me would be up to, was that I was waiting to the awful sounds my 14'400 baud modem made while connecting to the internet so I could shoot some things on quake world. Those crazy sounds shook loose some thoughts in my head. Wouldn't it be nice if I could connect to the internet and then play Ultima VIII with other people online? Quake World did it, it couldn't be that hard, could it?
Well yes it was hard of course. You write a server, clients connect to it and... Wait a second... As my screen avatar got fragged perpetually I was busy scribbling down some notes. Those notes did not survive my subsequent moves (including twice over an ocean) but the ideas did.
The reason why a teenage me was not busy shooting things or doing other things a teenage me would be up to, was that I was waiting to the awful sounds my 14'400 baud modem made while connecting to the internet so I could shoot some things on quake world. Those crazy sounds shook loose some thoughts in my head. Wouldn't it be nice if I could connect to the internet and then play Ultima VIII with other people online? Quake World did it, it couldn't be that hard, could it?
Well yes it was hard of course. You write a server, clients connect to it and... Wait a second... As my screen avatar got fragged perpetually I was busy scribbling down some notes. Those notes did not survive my subsequent moves (including twice over an ocean) but the ideas did.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Don't listen to your community
I'm not advocating for ignoring them, but I'm advocating for considering the issue a bit more in depth first. What I mean by listen is really the listening part as in "what is said".
Communities have a very special dynamic and it's a though decision when you try to implement changes or try to decide what to do next. Getting priorities from your community is about as pleasant as having your teeth pulled by a 500 pound gorilla on a unicycle during an earth quake.
Now I apply this with such general terms because it's true for many things, be it websites or video games. I came across this topic though for a game, so let's just run with that. The discussion was about a feature, should it be put in or not. One voice was to look at the community, what are they saying. Instantly alarm bells went up in my head and I didn't distinctly know why. I knew it was a bad idea, but why exactly?
Communities have a very special dynamic and it's a though decision when you try to implement changes or try to decide what to do next. Getting priorities from your community is about as pleasant as having your teeth pulled by a 500 pound gorilla on a unicycle during an earth quake.
Now I apply this with such general terms because it's true for many things, be it websites or video games. I came across this topic though for a game, so let's just run with that. The discussion was about a feature, should it be put in or not. One voice was to look at the community, what are they saying. Instantly alarm bells went up in my head and I didn't distinctly know why. I knew it was a bad idea, but why exactly?
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