James on Game Design

Something a little more inflamatory

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:04:00 +0000

Just launched www.wowisbroken.com. It's basically polite trolling of WoW's developers, for the purpose of trying to get them to fix some of the stuff that I can't stand about the game.

Something I really loved about UO

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:32:00 +0000

I was just thinking that I really loved how UO had books. You could write stories. You could only fit maybe a page and a half of text in the longest available books, so that lead to very condensed writing when I was playing. I sold serial adventure stories on my vendors, and the RP community that I was a part of ate them up.

I think I might make a weekend project of a quickie gray shard system for collecting, rating, and spawning player-made books on the world's bookshelves. I doubt the tiny community on Alexandria will take advantage of it much, but there's always the chance that it'll enrich the shard for the better, and possibly draw in more RP-minded players.

I'll publish it here on Sunday night, if it's finished.

Game Design On Hold...

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:03:00 +0000

I'm sad to say that my game design ambitions have to be put on hold for some time. I've become possessed with the need to free myself of the 9-5, and that means either a) re-launching my web design site in earnest, or b) creating a bunch of profitable websites until I reach the critical mass where I can leave my day job.

Either way, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for game design & dev. I had a few ideas I was toying around with surrounding Flash (usually I haaaaate Flash, but I have found Actionscript 3 to be reasonable), but they'll have to wait. Ultima navigation DLL? On hold. Gray shard projects? Much to the frustration of my playerbase, on hold.

On the bright side, if this works, I can write an article or a small book on How To Free Yourself To Write Games.

Bye bye, blog. See you when I see you. Hopefully I'll be writing the next post in this blog from my laptop next to a pool.

Oh, hey, sup?

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Yeah, I've been neglecting the blog. The WOW expansion hit my productivity hard. For xmas, though, I've gotten 4 books on AI. Combined with the recent purchase of OneNote, this has the potential to be pretty awesome. Will write if anything particularly earthshattering strikes me.

Still here, still alive

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:07:00 +0000

Well, I've been doing more gaming than writing this month, thanks to Fallout 3 and now Wrath of the Lich King. I also had a few moments to try out a few demos, and snag some downloadable stuff via XBLA.

I'll mention the ones that were actually notable on a game design level...

Tomb Raider: Underworld demo

Drove me bat-shit insane jumping from ledge to pseudo-ledge and falling to my death. You can control the camera, but can't spin it all the way around to, y'know, actually LOOK where you're about to jump. Ledges and handles that look like you should be able to grab onto them tend to be blatant lies, leading to a ragdoll death for Lara. I spent a lot of time cursing at this demo, and promptly deleted it upon completion. If they were to fix the camera and loosen up on what is and isn't an "official" ledge type object, it'd be a lot more enjoyable. This is an example of a game I wouldn't have bought without a demo, and I won't buy with the demo either.

Mirror's Edge demo

This was a short-but-sweet demo. It showed off the premise of the game, had some cool experiences, let you finish your mission, and ended. I'm almost willing to give it a try based purely on the fact that the demo didn't make me foam at the mouth by ending in the middle of a boss or something equally dicktastic. I have too much on my plate right now, but this one's on my used games list, I think.

Fallout 3

This game is pure, burning, radioactive love. As a huge fanboy of the original games, I was really skeptical of it being turned into a 3D world, but it seems they got it right. Everything feels like an achievement, from blowing up a city down to picking a lock or shoving a live grenade into someone's shorts (Sorry about that, Mr. Simms). You get little hits of XP for almost everything, and that just makes it constantly fun. The wide-open world is quite awesome as well, and travel/exploration is by far better than the original games, where you'd just click on a map to travel and maybe get a random encounter. In FO3 you actually trek through the wasteland of D.C. and maybe see something interesting off on the horizon, and bam, you're off on a potentially disasterous adventure. I'd be playing this game for unhealthy amounts of time if not for...

WoW: Wrath of the Lich King

Oh gods, help me. It's pulled me back in again. After I'd finally managed to quit a few months ago, the expansion has pulled me back in. I get home, make some decidedly unhealthy food, and play until 2 or 3 AM. This is not a good thing. Hopefully once the initial rush to get to 80 with my rogue has finished, I can get back to a more healthy schedule and actually, y'know, get some work done on my various projects. Anyway, Northrend seems a lot more polished and interesting than Outland was, and the quest hubs are very streamlined. Maybe it's just because I'm actually using an addon called Questhelper this time around, but I'm enjoying my leveling experience much more than I did in the last expansion. Of course, last time I just skipped a zone ahead and started grinding...

Portal: Still Alive

What can I say, it's Portal with extra levels. The levels are devoid of GLaDOS, but overall the experience is as I remember it. Still an awesome game. I'm finding the developer commentary enlightening as well.

Megaman 9

Does anyone remember Megaman being so mind-bogglingly difficult? This is the kind of game that would've made me pitch a spaz as a kid. Just goes to show, nostalgia is more important than the frustration factor.

---

Navgraph update: Calling it Ultima.Navigation.dll. Should be able to do something like NavProvider.GetPath(pathinfo, callback). Callback's for the sake of time slicing, etc. But, like I said, WoW has sapped all of my time, so nothing new is likely to come of this for a couple weeks.

Still Alive...

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:10:00 +0000

Still here. Been letting myself get lost in WoW again... what can I say, I'm a sucker for Halloween-related events.

I've more or less finished the testing related to creating a global UO navgraph: It finds surfaces correctly. Next up on the list is linking (shouldn't be too tough). I've restarted the project from scratch and am now developing it as a DLL so it can be plugged in with very little effort and developed independantly from the main codebase. I've added a "nav info provider" that will fetch nav nodes (optionally linked) from a given area, so the process will look something like

Rectangle3D Area = new Rectangle3D(...);

Sectors[x,y] = new NavOctree(Area, Map, NavProvider.GetLinkedNodes(Area, Map));

And the Octree takes care of dividing the nodes into their appropriate leaves/branches, and linking leaves to their accessible neighbors as higher level nav nodes. Then the pathfinding...

Also, with NaNoWriMo coming up, I'll probably be pretty quiet again (between that and games that I absolutely must play: Castlevania Ecclesia, Fallout 3 (thanks to Jason who awesomely preordered this for my birthday), Silent Hill Homecoming (still!), and (gasp) WoW:WotLK, I'm gonna be swamped with writing/games, not much time for anything else, but I'll try and give the blog some love when I can. Just saying, I won't be dead...

Going to write the next year of Alexandria's storyline as a warmup for NaNoWriMo, though, so expect a brief post on that.

Toying with data structures

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:38:00 +0000

My current thinking on the pathfinding sub-project, as far as implementation, is something along the lines of:

A grid of 256 x 256 x 256 Octrees as the 2nd level of the heirarchy, each with a list of outside leaves and what other outside leaves they connect to, which gives us the ability to link each tree as a node, and find paths through each node in a relatively efficient manner.
The 3rd level of the heirarchy is using those Octrees as nodes, and inserting additional game data - teleporters, cave entrances, doors, etc, stuff only available in the live game - which would alter the edge costs in all 3 heirarchies and add additional links and edges where appropriate (this grid block links to this one via this tree, in this leaf, via this node -- teleporters are costless edges, doors require action to traverse, and so on)

I'm not really fully confident I'm grasping all of this correctly, but I figure the best way to learn is by doing, so I'll let you know how it turns out...

The Alexandria playerbase is getting kinda angsty while I'm working on projects and not paying attention to them as much as I normally would, and I need to keep a few promises on that end, so I probably won't be posting much progress for a week or so. On the bright side, next week is Silent Hill 5. I'm also kind of undecided on preordering Dead Space.

I also got my hands on Warhammer Online a couple days ago. There's stuff I like, and stuff I don't, and I'll get around to an analysis on that as soon as I put a little more play time in; I seriously doubt that I'm qualified to judge the game with two characters at lv6 and 5, but so far things are looking good.

War chars: Reikynael (R5 Witch Hunter) and Maegluin (R6 Shadow Warrior) on Chaos Wastes.

7 Million Plus Nodes...

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 06:51:00 +0000

So, there are just over 7 million walkable surfaces in the Felucca map alone of Ultima Online. After a good deal of tweaking, I've managed to get the nodes identified properly. It's kind of difficult to visualize 7 million points in space, though, so I'm sticking with the 2D visualization: 7 million navgraph nodes (3mb png). It uses Z values for color this time so you can see where there are multi-story buildings and underground caves and stuff of that nature.

Next phase is linking up all the nodes, assigning edge costs, and pushing everything into a higher level data structure to make searching faster. At the moment I'm thinking an Octree format, where the leaves will subdivide until all nodes in a given leaf can be reached by all others. The leaves will be treated as higher level navgraph nodes, and link depending on if edges cross between leaves.

So, yeah, still needs work, obviously, but it's moving along. Once I get this huge-navgraph-of-doom thing licked, I can move on to the more fun actual AI design and implementation. Yay.

More on Spore

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:02:00 +0000

Just read an article on EA's response to the Spore DRM controversy.

Seriously, I don't think they could possibly miss the point any more. 77% one-time installers vs 23% 2+ sounds OK to corporate types, until someone explains to them that the only metric there that's going to change over time is the 2+ installs side, and it's only going to go up. Given how long Spore has been out, it goes to reason that over the next year or so, a lot more people are going to be very very angry with EA.

So, let's recap. Pirates release a non-DRM'd leak of Spore before the release date. EA continues to publish with draconic DRM despite the fact that it has already been cracked. Users are already hitting against that 3-install limit. EA still thinks they're doing the right thing by restricting people who actually bought the damned game.

Seriously, I am very much in favor of paying developers for their work. I've bought about 15 games this month, and plan to buy at least one more. I resent being treated like a fucking felon because of a publisher's paranoia. From the general uproar, I think a lot of others are in the same boat.

You want to know a copy protection scheme that works? Serial numbers. Assuming your game has some online aspect, a simple serial is usually more than enough to deter the average consumer from giving out copies of their purchase. Take Diablo 2. You can install it with the same serial as much as you want, but if you want to get online on Battle.Net — arguably the best part of the game — you can't have two of the same serial online at once.

Is it perfect? No. Does it more or less accomplish its goal? Yes. I've bought multiple copies of D2 and it's expansion in order to play on two computers at once. I've bought copies for others. Your average gamer geek is perfectly fine with buying multiple copies of a game for something like this - see WoW's multiboxers for example.

The fact is that no DRM system is perfect, and it will eventually be cracked and pirated (and in this case, before the damned game is even out). Therefore it is in the publisher's best interest to keep licensing as uninvasive as humanly possible - if there is any at all. Slap a serial number on the damned CD case and call it good, damn it, there's no need to piss off customers to satisfy your paranoia over something as futile as preventing piracy.

I still stand by my thoughts that the best weapon against piracy is to make the game worth buying in the first place.

AI project progress

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:02:00 +0000

The first goal in my greater UO-Simulated-World project (originally aimed at dynamic quests) is to allow intelligent agents to pathfind anywhere in the UO world. To that end, I've been working on reducing UO's map/object files to a usable format that I can then reduce to a hierarchical navgraph.

It's not quite perfect yet, but here's the current progress. Going to work on getting caves, extra surfaces, bridges, and possibly multi-tiered buildings working tonight.

Current Walkmap Render (1.6mb png) white = passable, green = bridges/stairs

The Futility of DRM

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:54:00 +0000

You'd think developers would have learned by now. Cliff Harris has even done the work for them, opening a dialog with pirates and finding out, among other things, that people really hate DRM. DRM shows an inherent distrust in your userbase; it's insulting, it's annoying, and in the case of securom, it's borderline criminal.

And then, today, I ran across this article: Spore Spawns Gamer Uprising on Amazon.com | GameCulture ... Wow.

I mean, I really wanted to like Spore. I was thinking of buying it... and now I won't. I don't want that clandestine rootkit crap installed on my system. Seriously, is securing your software worth insulting your users and violating their trust?

DRM is temporary: It's only a matter of time before someone cracks your system and makes it available to anyone to download -- the thing is, they probably wouldn't have bought it anyway. Maybe you didn't convince them it was worthy of their money, maybe it's just not their cup of tea but they want to take a look at it anyway, etc.

The Spore creature creator was awesome and fun, and a unique thing. I was really excited about buying it when I got some extra spending cash. I was already sold. This retarded DRM move has essentially disgusted me to the point of not only hating Spore, but also advising everyone I know to avoid it.

This is how negative word of mouthworks. Maybe 1 in 10 people who are really impressed with your game will tell a friend or two. The reverse is what you're really worried about: Nearly every single person who meets with a negative experience or feels insulted by you will tell every last person they know, and vehemently at that. Negative publicity is probably a hundred times more virulent than positive.

The lesson? Just skip the DRM bullshit; Concentrate on making an awesome game, and let the people that play it become your ambassadors rather than your downfall.

On Demos and Shareware

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:11:00 +0000

I recently experienced something I'm seeing all too often in game demos these days. I snagged the demo of Castle Crashers on XBLA and was fairly amused by it. Sure, it smacks of Golden Axe, but it was kind of cute, fairly amusing, and sometimes challenging.

And then it pulled the curtain on me just as I was nearing the end of the first boss fight. I felt like I'd been invited up for a "cup of coffee" only to be kicked in the nuts when things were just getting interesting.

Look, I want to very carefully explain the point of a demo. The demo is what you give out to make people fall in love with your game and want to spend their money on it. It is not a way to tease, mislead, and otherwise irk the hell out of the player by showing them a glimpse of awesome followed by a wall of steaming end-of-demo crap. It's like a sales person showing you an awesome product, followed by spitting in your face, then asking "Can I ring this up for you?"

People that have done it right? id Software's early shareware approach to games had it 100% right. Show the player the experience of an entire episode of content. Let them feel the sense of accomplishment at defeating something challenging, and get to know the game. Essentially, let the player establish a relationship with the game.

Your sales pitch should be "Now that you've defeated THAT, we've got N more episodes with more and more cool stuff waiting for you." You should not hold the game play experience hostage. You are trying to earn the player's money, not bait them into a purchase.

Seriously, it always baffles me when games do that, and I have never bought a game based on a demo that tried to taunt me into a purchase.

Conclusion:
Shareware with full episode/story arc: RIGHT
Teaser/bait demo: WRONG

AI project update: Still researching and planning, mostly.

Taking a step back

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:37:00 +0000

Okay, so I kinda jumped the gun on declaring intent to create a deep dynamic quest system. That's still my goal, but I need to start with smaller projects and work up to higher level stuff. From research and planning thus far, it's all about AI. In the case of a quest system, it would seem to be multiple layers of advanced AI.

The top level would be the planner. It would be responsible for saying "Okay, here's the basic quest, here are the actors involved, and here's what I need to do to make it happen." To be truly dynamic, it'd have to react to what a player does, and "re-think" the quest as it goes along.

The major subsection of that is the actors. They should be able to plan and act on their own according to their needs and goals. If the bad guy needs blood, he should find a farmer and kill them, or kidnap someone. If he's hungry, he might step over to the tavern (in the case of UO, you might find him at Buc's Den). What I call "pivotal" actors in my planning are the really believable ones, with dialog, goals, and they act as major plot devices.

A smaller still subset of Actors is the basic NPC. They tend shops, go eat when they're hungry, talk to you about recent events, send you on errands if they need supplies, close up shop when it's dark. I call these guys "drones."

So, my first project, based in a UO environment, will be getting believable drones working. An NPC might hop down to a tavern for lunch, after ensuring that his co-worker is still tending the shop. He might tell you about some strange adventurer that came in the other day. A bartender might complain about how much of a slob your friendly neighborhood blacksmith is.

I'll probably start a little bit smaller than that. Possibly just setting up a basic needs system for them and giving them a grid for pathfinding through the city to their destinations.

Still doing research, but that's about where I stand at the moment...

This whole thing is being targeted at UO (Ultima Online), just because it seems like it has a lot of resources open for AI computations, and it's what I'm used to working with in the form of a server emulator written in C#, and I feel OOP should lend itself to this rather well. Eventually it may be necessary to explore options for handing over the "thinking" part of this system to a secondary computer, but for the time being I'm not worrying about that.

So, yeah. First stop: "Drones."

Deep Dynamic Quests Update (henceforth DDQ)

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:12:00 +0000

Dissecting the "overall" RPG quest is proving pretty challenging. Coming up with ways to implement something with sufficient variety and interest while managing project bloat. The most complex thing so far is the NPC; I've differentiated them into "Supporting" and "Pivotal" groups, with your pivotal chars being the major interaction points, and supporting as say, the barkeep that didn't much like the dead guy you're investigating and doesn't care.

To keep my brain from exploding I'm employing FreeMind, a piece of free Java-based mind mapping software. I'm finding it very useful in visualizing an overall concept and expanding on ideas a bit at a time. It's a nice contrast to the usual practice of working on one thing, then another, and forgetting a huge amount of the first. You can do the whole mind mapping thing on paper, I'm just using the software because I have my laptop in front of me most of the time while at home (it wars constantly with interesting games/movies for my attention).

So, yeah, useful software, and the planning is under way.

Current line of thinking is to just mind map the thing until I can't expand on it anymore, then evaluate that and cut it down to something I could actually accomplish within the space of half a year or so.

Randomly Generating Soul

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:49:00 +0000

Thanks to a post by Raph, I'm pondering a new UO emulator project: Dynamic generation of deep & involved quests. None of that "Go fetch me an apple" or "Go stab 10 pigs" stuff, that's as easy as picking from a few random lists... I'm talking stuff you can really get into and feel like the hero or villain that you want your character to be. Creating quests with "soul" out of thin air. This might work, or it might fail miserably, but either way it'll be a learning experience and probably really fun.

I'll post more as I work on it.

You could do worse...

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:21:00 +0000

As I've mentioned before, a lot of my game design insight comes from my graphic design / marketing background. Marketing and games are ultimately about the same thing: Interpreting the needs of your target audience. It's all about people, and as my girlfriend would say, "people are squishy." What else is about people... business?

So, to that end, I'd like to point out a few things that I'm particularly fond of, not from a gaming standpoint, but from marketing, graphic/web design, and business

Monday Morning Memo - Interesting insight into business and humanity every Monday. Free.
The Wizard of Ads Trilogy - Pretty much the MMM, but 3 books full. At $27 for 3 books, I'm thinking I might start leaving these as a gift for graphic design consulting jobs. Read one a day and reflect on 'em, it's juice for the brain.
Call To Action - "Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results" sounds like the subject of a spam email, but it's really quite useful, reinforcing a similarity between web and games: there are people that have to use what you're designing. A good read, and particularly so for those working on web-based games and projects.

You could do worse than reading this stuff... even if it's not specifically for game design.

Break

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Taking the night off from blogging, but I wanted to share this:

I suppose it's possible that I'm late to the party on this one, but this is really a great remix. There's even an mp3 link in the expanded "more info" bit. Making GLaDOS sing just... makes me... happy...

Excitement Over New Ideas

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:16:00 +0000

So, I wrote out a really basic story for a game last night, and it's been running amok in my skull ever since. There's a real kind of "woot!" excitement behind a new idea. My responsibility is now to not allow it to run away with me - I don't want to over complicate it to the point where I couldn't complete the project (mostly) solo. Still, I'm in that zone where ideas keep flying at me out of the blue as my brain digests the overall concept. I suppose the best thing to do is write them all down and sort 'em out later? Kind of like writing... pour everything out in the first round, and clip, snip, cut away at it until it's actually good.

Alright, off to work...

Why Write a Game Design Blog?

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Ultimately I'm writing a design blog in order to grow as a designer. It's easy to spout theories and ideas when you're shouting at the darkness, but much more challenging and interesting when you receive criticism and input from your peers.

Also, I'm writing it because I think it'd be very difficult to break into the game industry without any formal training. I've been tinkering with a private UO server for about four years, trying out various ideas / social experiments, but that's about the extent of my resume.

There's certainly some bleedthrough between my current career as a graphic designer/web developer. Coding ability, graphics, and probably most importantly an insight into human behavior and interaction. I think a lot of the knowledge from marketing and web experience design can often be applied to game design. "Don't make me think," a common thought for web interface design, sort of lead to one my earlier posts, "Don't make me repeat myself."

Much of game design, I think, just comes from playing games and analyzing them: what worked, what didn't, and why. That's where a lot of my theory posts have/will come from. You play something, then think "That was fun, but why?" or "That sucked monkey balls, but why?" Analyze the good and bad parts of the game and why you reacted to it the way you did. The more complex the game, the more you can learn from it.

Every now and then, my friends and I get into lengthy discussions about whatever game we're playing, or get into talking about what we consider to be really fun games. These tend to differ, but there are similarities. I have this annoying tendency to make assumptions about what people think, which usually leads to a quick boot to the virtual head.

Still, with just years of theory and discussion and gameplay under your belt, it's tough to compete against folks that have a degree in game design, or years of actual development experience, you know? So, among my solutions is to start this blog, and get to know the community that I'm so interested in. I'm currently following about 23 game design blogs via RSS, and I comment whenever I think I have something useful to contribute to the conversation, or a question to ask.

I'm hoping to get a few tiny game designs on paper soon, shooting for something I could develop in maybe half a year. I'll probably blog about that, too, and maybe eventually slap together a pretty eBook about it (which, i suppose, is where the graphic design degree finally pays off).

Short version: Lacking formal training & formal experience, I'm doing this the hard way.

I welcome anyone to critique anything I write. Please feel free to challenge my beliefs and ideas, it's the best way to learn. I promise not to take it personally if you tell me I'm full of shit.

Quick Note: What NOT to do

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:55:00 +0000

Just skimmed an interview with Flagship founder Bill Roper (via 1up.com) and one particular snippet jumped out at me:

"Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all..."

Overreaching is something I've often found myself guilty of in the past, and hopefully not in the future... may or may not write more on the interview tomorrow, it's pretty huge, and I'm tired.

Curves aren't just for difficulty

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:01:00 +0000

"Difficulty curve" or "learning curve" are fairly common terms, but you don't often hear of similar terms related to story and theme. This is something I learned from playing Silent Hill 4, and is loosely related to my Advancement/Involvement post:

If your game can't get by on advancement alone, it had better have damned good involvement. When it comes to the story aspect of involvement, accessibility - what you might think of as the "story curve" - is a major factor. Silent Hill 1 was incredibly deep and complex, but it started out very simple: Your character crashed a car and his daughter ran off, and he has to go find her. This kind of thing is something that almost anyone can related to and identify with, and it gets you involved in the story. Only after it's established something you can really relate to does it start to twist and warp the story, but it keeps that basic drive throughout the game.

SH4, on the other hand, kind of just dropped you in a room, and immediately has a complex and inaccessible plot. The game relies on a lot of "what was that all about?" plot devices, and doesn't really have an overall accessible storyline, apart from "I am really sick of this room and want to leave."

Stories should be accessible, in a situation the player can imagine themselves in as the protagonist. The more involved the player is in your story, the better. Don't just throw them into a situation and expect them to relate to it.

Characters need to be believable and flawed, too, but that's an entirely different post.

UO Story Arc, Act I

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:59:00 +0000

So, I tried to go to sleep a little bit early last night, and the promised UO story arc started to form in my head. Then it progressed to "OH GOD LET ME OUT NOW NOW NOW NOOOOOW." So, yeah, I guess I made my Friday deadline after all. I'll only post Act I.

This arc makes significant assumptions about the current UO storyline, mainly that the storyline is in some way loosely following the actual Ultima series story. It further assumes that the Shadowlords in the current UO storyline will also be defeated by the destruction of the shards of the gem of immortality that contained them.

Act I: Darkness Descends

With the shards containing the Shadowlords destroyed, peace appears to return to Britannia. A festival is held at the fairgrounds outside of Britain, but even as the people celebrate, the commander of the Royal Guard seems ill at ease.

In days that follow, the shrines of the eight virtues grow cold and dim, and the people of the land begin to act strangely, even violent. After a night of dealing with crime after crime, the current commander of the guard abandons his position.

Clainin the mage sets out to discover what ails the shrines, while a new commander assumes lead of the guard. This new commander leads raids upon the Juka, Meer, and Gargish peoples, each time personally silencing those that claim the attacks are unprovoked.

The new commander orders the virtues building in Britain blocked off and set ablaze, and powerful creatures embodying the eight anti-virtues appear around the dying virtue shrines throughout the land. The three chaos shrines become stained with blood.

When Clainin returns to report on his findings, he is appalled at the actions of the royal guard. He attempts to have the new commander imprisoned, to no avail. Ultimately he himself is arrested, and tried in a mockery of justice, sentenced to execution and returned to jail to await his fate.

Update 8/18:
Yes, I just discovered Clainin's prone body in New Haven, let's just assume he's back for this.

Random Thoughts: Ultima Online

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:57:00 +0000

On Interaction (or Pride)

Ultima Online is potentially the greatest MMO out there; the level of interaction possible in UO is above and beyond what I've seen in other mainstream massives.

In UO, the developers truly have the ability to make it an interactive world. The story can be directly influenced by player actions during quests, and there is the possibility of adding new structures, creatures, and so forth, without the need to commit art resources to world building. In fact, the whole idea behind UO would seem to indicate that this was the intention: Upon the shattering of the gem of immortality, each copy of the world contained in each shard was supposed to diverge on it's own path, kinda like the idea of parallel worlds. Each shard would have had it's own unique culture. To some degree this did actually work, there was for some time a volunteer program where the event/fiction folks, called Seers or Elders, were capable of propelling a shard's unique flavor. Lately, to my knowledge, there's now just the primary storyline, each shard getting a slightly flavored version of the same events.

Ultima Online's greatest strength, from a story standpoint, is it's ability to adapt and change according to what the players do. This really should be exploited as much as possible. In a world like UO, I think one of the greatest ways to retain subscribers (by way of increased player involvement) is to really let your players feel like they've helped shape the world.

On the world-shaping point, I've often felt that players should be able to make a more profound contribution to the UO world; an example of this might be a monthly writing contest for in-game books, where the top few entries might be added to the books that spawn in libraries across the world. You'd have to submit the forms via web, and check a box to allow your work to be published in game (with all legal mumbo jumbo involved), and the writer might even have a say in what shards his or her work can appear on.

On Accomplishments (be they good or evil)

I think a lot of work could be done to really allow people's characters to feel more heroic/evil (which is a whole other post entirely). You don't really feel like a hero when you escort some geezer to a fishing pier. I'm all for the little quests where you help out NPCs, but I think the really cool stuff lies where you can really get involved in a quest, trying to follow the path of a virtue - or antivirtue. Imagine your PVP players being Knights of the anti-principles: Valai, Knight of Hatred. Or, perhaps, deciples of the Shadowlords, who embody the anti-principles. Perhaps you would quest to gain the title "Child of Faulinei" or "Knight of Falsehood." Mind you, Knight of Cowardice doesn't really sound so hot, but hey, someone might dig that.

UO has great potential for players to play both evil and good roles, and the evil side would seem to be neglected - you don't see Lady Minax sending out a global message to all those with negative karma to meet her somewhere to plan a raid on the good guys. It's silly to assume that everyone wants to be a hero - being the bad guy is one of the things that make some games great (take Fallout for example, and selling your wife into slavery).

On Skill Gain (making 99999 plate arms = boring)

The skill gains in UO are, simply put, boring and repetitive. In absence of a leveling system (don't get me wrong, I prefer skill-based vs. level-based), it would appear that UO's skill gains are intentionally boring. Sure, you can craft items to order as a blacksmith, but no one wants your goods until you're maxed out (and sometimes not even then). There really needs to be some investigation into why it's necessary to force players to do this kind of repetitive chore - it's given rise to automation programs that are more interesting to code in and optimize than doing the actual skill gain itself.

On Items and Equipment (they're PANTS, why can't I wear them?)

As much as race-dependant stuff can be cool, it's generally not cool to players if you restrict what they can and can't use in an item-based game. There are robes and pants in Ultima Online, for example, that can only be used by elves. Why? What logical reason could there be for a simple tailored item like a robe to only be usable by an elf? Does the fabric hate humans? Things like this really only frustrate players. If there's a good reason for it, sure, but not just because you need something to differentiate the player races. Enchanted elven longbow? Sure. Elven pants? That's just stupid. Same goes for armor only wearable by females: Did it ever occur to you that some (really strange) males might WANT to wear that female plate? Not that I'm encouraging this, but there's no real reason not to allow it, unless you're afraid of lawsuits from parents of boys who suddenly start wearing bustiers.

Aaaanyway, I'm mulling a UO storyline around in my head, probably won't be done by tomorrow. Monday's my "deadline," so we'll see how that goes.

I have more thoughts on the state of UO and what could be done to improve it, but I think I've done enough damage for one post, so, until next time, stay away from the studded bustiers!

Yo ho ho

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:08:00 +0000

Obligatory pirate joke title aside, Cliff Harris has posted his findings and thoughts from a few days ago when he asked pirates why they do that thing they do. It's all very interesting and parallel to the kind of thing NIN's been pulling since their departure from "the man."

All in all it looks like people just don't like it when they are:

Charged too much. (overpricing)
Unable to get at things easily. (digital distribution)
Told what they can and can't do. (DRM)

You can even reduce digital distribution to a usability concern: Is the user experience of buying your games online optimized so that they feel confident about purchasing from you online? Marketing books like Call to Action (I own two copies of this) show that if there's either too much friction or insufficient forward momentum in the purchase process, people will often abandon it - in this case, possibly in favor of just sending an IM to their friend along the lines of "Hey, can you ZIP up that game and send it my way?"

I guess we're moving into a time when the user is king, and to say otherwise is to invite your own demise. I'll get into game packaging and episodic content in later posts...

Scaling Games

jsylvanus+blogger@gmail.com (James) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:54:00 +0000

I was pondering tonight how one might create a scalable game, as to have it be fun and playable on anything from an HDTV (wide), to a CRT monitor (normal), to lower res and random aspect ratio devices like iPhones and other mobile devices.

Controls must be simple, limited to directional and maybe 1 or 2 function keys.
3D would be good, sprite-based would be better purely for compatibility reasons, though this needs more research (not sure if 3d is even an option on mobile devices).
Real-time action is possible, while slower or turn-based would be preferable.

This being said, I had recently concepted a basic interface that would actually fit this model fairly well. Perhaps I'll make a weekend project out of implementing the interface in javascript.

Unrelated, I'm thinking of writing up an Ultima Online story arc as an exercise. Possibly by Friday?