Zombies: Dialog and Quests

After mulling over the ideas in this post over at nerfbat, I thought I’d tackle it as it concerns my game design.

How would I present dialog? Well, thankfully I get out of part of it in that my only NPCs are the undead and all they do is moan. Of course, that brings up an interesting idea of do I display the moans as text or just audio that gets louder the closer they are and the larger the crowd? I like the idea of audio, even directional audio, but there might need to be an option to turn on text, just incase deaf people might want to play and not play as a deaf person. It is a role playing game, after all.

But if there are no NPCs, how will there be quests?

To understand the drive of the game, you have to understand the backbone driving force of the game: the tamagotchi.

Essentially, its a much more complicated version of that simple child’s toy… but if you boil it down, so is life and my Zombie MMO is really nothing more than a Life Simulator in a world of the undead. SimRomero, if you will.

Your character will have a stat sheet where you can monitor and manage things like how much you eat per day and how that affects your energy levels and overall health. You’ll be able to see how long your food supplies will last given your rate of consumption, and a projection of how long you will last without food given your current level of health. There might also be things like progression bars toward dementia, which can be reduced by human contact or reading books or listening to music, basically anything other than dealing with zombies.

So where are the quests? In a way there will be two sorts of quest like devices in the game…

The first will be player designed, largely including trade. If you have a stash of salt, a ton of it, and you have a need for other supplies, you will be able to set up a trade mission where you will trade X salt for Y other product until you have Z of said product. Players who stumble upon your safehaven while you are offline will be met at gunpoint and offered the quest. It will jot down in their notebook what you are looking for and what you will give for it. The twist here is that since you can specify a cut off point, like say you want oranges, 6 at a time, stopping when you have 4 dozen, its possible that player may find 6 oranges, return to you and find that you’ve already hit your limit of 4 dozen and are no longer taking oranges in trade. But that’s okay, its not a total waste since he can use the oranges himself, or in another trade.

The second will be presented in a “kill sheet” style, where you can earn Xbox360 style achievements by doing things. Kill 100 undead and you might get a title. A second title might be waiting at 500, a third at 2000, and so on. Have you been well fed for the past 30 days? Title. Killed another player? Title. Killed 100 other players? Title. Survived for a year? Title. You get the idea… As part of this, the game will include online profiles of players through the website, even the ability to make message board signatures that will include your stats (like the Xbox gamer tags). And of course, the system will include an options for hiding your profile completely, or making it viewable only to people logged in and on your friends list.

It sounds overly simplistic, I’m sure, but that’s the goal of the game: simple and fun. I don’t need to be a WoW-killer, I just want enough people playing so that maybe I can quit my “real” job.

One Ring to Rule Them All

Yeah. I bought Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.

I played around in the beta, and the game played well enough, looked good enough, and showed enough potential for more than just grinding raids and killing things that I decided to pick it up. I pre-ordered and it should arrive tomorrow.

At the very least I will be playing a human minstrel on the Silverlode server named Ishiro. That may change (name, class, race or server) but it is where I will start. Now to begin building my fellowship…

RAD is not rad

Rapid Application Development is not a horrible idea. Of course, much like Communism, it is not a problem with the idea it is the implementation. When most companies get into a RAD style of work, the result more often than not is just flying by the seat of their pants. No project plans, minimal design documents… usually it is just a list of features and a deadline, or a dozen lists and a dozen deadlines, and the lists change daily.

Having worked for two years on one RAD project, and then two and half on another, I really would like to work on something with more structure, or at least be part of team that is doing RAD instead of people one guy trying to work on multiple phases on the same RAD project by myself. I go into one meeting about phase one in the morning, then in the afternoon I go to a meeting on phase two when I have to pretend that I am not aware that phase one is behind schedule… it really is quite maddening.

Thoughts of Spender

This is going to be a stretch, but maybe I won’t seem too off the mark by the end.

Monday, a man took a couple of guns to the Virginia Tech campus and killed thirty-one people. He wounded another twenty-nine. At least, those were the totals I remember from the stories I read. Immediately, before the bodies were even counted, the airwaves were full of people talking about why someone would do such a thing. Most notably, to me anyway, was Jack Thompson. I’m not going to provide a link, if you want to know exactly what he said you can find it. He certainly doesn’t need my help getting his message out there.

Jack, and he probably was not alone, came forward immediately to lay the blame heavy at the feet of video games, violence in the media and today’s popular culture. I’m sure if pressed he’d blame music and television and movies, but his favorite target is video games. He believes that violent video games are a training ground for violent action. He was blaming video games before the gunman’s body was cold, before we even knew the name of the shooter. Jack is a fool, but he’s a grandstanding fool who knows how to work his audience.

People… and I do mean to make a sweeping generalization here, because from time to time I’ve been known to do it too… seek out external sources for problems. They want to point a finger and say, “Ah ha!” They want to be able to identify a specific action or object that can be blamed for the problem so that it can be removed. But issues like these are usually more internal, more specific to the individual than can be dealt with by calling for blanket legislations and bannings.

People hate cancer. Cancer comes in three forms. The one cancer that everyone hopes they have if they get it is the kind that is someone else’s fault. Be it living next to power lines, or cell phones, or second hand smoke, or radiation they were exposed to at work, they want it to be not their own fault. That kind of cancer is, unfortunately, the rarest kind. The other two forms are the most prevalent. The second is self-inflicted cancer, the kind you get from smoking, the kind that comes from laying out in the sun too long too often, and people hate this cancer because they could have avoided it, probably knew the risk and ignored it. The third is the unknown cancer. You are in perfect health, don’t smoke, don’t lay out in the sun, don’t work with radioactive materials, live far away from power lines and cell phone towers, you’ve got no reason at all to have cancer, then one day you go to the doctor for an indeterminate pain in your gut only to find out you’ve got cancer. This is the one that scares the crap out of people.

It is scary because there is not anything you could have done to prevent it.

When there are shootings, like this one at Virginia Tech, or previous ones at other schools or other public areas, when one person just kinda flips their shit and kills a bunch of people, it is important to examine that person’s life and try to understand what the hell went wrong. But it is the kind of thing you cannot go into with an existing theory. If you approach it with the idea that video games did this to him or influenced him, then if you find video games you will assume that they had an effect. Jack Thompson would love nothing more than to find out this guy had a PC full of First Person Shooters or a couple of Grand Theft Auto titles for his PS2 because it would justify his theory. But the reality is that the games themselves are not justification, they are just evidence. The gunman is dead and can’t tell you if he even played those game. Now, of course, we know that he was an English major, and a playwrite, who wrote some very disturbing works and was even thought to be the school shooter type by his classmates. But at the time of the shootings, as all these talking heads took the airwaves, no one knew that. Now we know that he made videos and wrote things and had a sketchy medical history and previous encounters with faculty and staff, but even though from here it looks like a giant pile of “Hey! Look am me! I’m a nut job who is going to shoot people!!” you have to keep in mind that all this information, all this stuff, was in different people’s hands. No one saw a complete picture until it was too late.

There was a guy at my high school, he was a creepy kind of dude. Very tall, shaved head, ROTC gun nut kind of fellow… not that all ROTC guys are nutjobs, but I’m trying to paint a picture here… in addition, he was standoffish, not a whole lot of friends. I didn’t really know him that well. After graduation, during that first year when I was going to college and working full time, I woke up one morning to a horror story. This guy I didn’t know very well killed his parents and his sister. Sure, he was weird and a loner, but kill his family? His brother had escaped, jumping out of a second story window. This guy got caught, they piled up the evidence against him and his accomplice and threw him in jail. About a year later, I hired a new kid to work in my department down at the Kroger. It was the brother. After working with him a while, one night while closing up, I asked him about it. He paused, then after a couple minutes he finally spoke. Now this isn’t an exact quote, I mean, hell, it was nearly 15 years ago, but… “My brother killed my parents and my sister, and he tried to kill me. There is no question he did it. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. No one really expected it. He was weird and all, but the truth is all the stuff they found in the garage, the knives, the bows and arrows, the kerosene and stuff, it wasn’t his. He kept all his stuff in his room. The stuff in the garage was mine. Nobody ever asked me if it was though. Isn’t that funny?” And I clearly remember all the newspapers from back when it happened talking about all the things they found, the “indicators of violence.” But this kid, the brother who got away, he just liked target shooting with the bows, collecting knives and setting things on fire. Dangerous? Sure, but he was no killer.

I remember at the time thinking of a quote, that really doesn’t apply if you consider the context of the story that it comes from, but the words, the phrasing, fit. It comes from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:

“And last—if it helps any, just think of me as a very crazy fellow who went berserk one summer day and never was right again. It’ll be a little easier on you that way.”
-Jeff Spender

And I thought of this again on Monday. Maybe this guy had his reasons. People will view his tapes and read his words and look at the pile of evidence and try to understand it. And maybe somewhere, somehow, it will make sense. But maybe it won’t. Perhaps it is impossible to know why he did it until you are afflicted like him, troubled like him, and if you are that troubled, that afflicted, would you act the same? Even if it somehow made sense, would you really want it to? Would knowing all the hows and whys lead us to the magic moment where his life could have been fixed if just one action had been taken, and one person could be blamed for not seeing the problem? I’m not sure that’s a road I want to go down.

You really can’t prepare for the extreme. You can’t prevent it, you can’t legislate it. You can try to keep the middle ground large and even, but nothing we can do can stop the determinedly broken from doing what they do, not without compromising the rest of us.

I think perhaps I’m better off believing that he was just a crazy fellow who went berserk one day and never was right again. It’ll be a little easier on me that way.

Next week I’ll return you to our regularly scheduled game design and commentary; book, movie and TV reviews; and the rest of the usual random crap that comes from me emptying my brain onto the internet…

I Hate Spam

The canned meat food product substitute is okay, and should the world go zombie overnight, you can bet your ass that I will be down at the Safeway hoarding the precious little tins of yummy life sustaining goodness. But when it comes to the internet, I hate Spam.

My blog here isn’t awfully popular. Even so, I get on the order of a hundred spam comments a day. Thankfully, being the slightest of blips on the radar means that my spam filter catches 99.999% of them. Once a week or so, I’ll have a few make it through, and I delete them within a day. One day, if I ever get an audience, I may have to install more protection as Akismet may not be enough. Sadly, it probably won’t matter since there are people like this out there.

Of course, emails are another story. I get over five hundred a day. Again, my filter gets alot of it, but some makes it through every day.

Then there is the joy that is fake websites designed to get you to click ads. Jeff Freeman has a run down of a particular offender related to gaming news.

And finally, there are the people out there who click on this junk… if you need viagra, see a doctor, don’t click a link in an email or on a website. Same goes for all the other drugs… and for loans, go to a bank or other lender, not something from your inbox especially if it is not actually addressed to you! People… PEOPLE! Please… pay attention, be responsible.

Buckwheats for the lot of them.

Zombies: Crafting

How exactly would one go about building a game where the player can do anything they want?

Well… you can’t. Seriously, unless you want to be Second Life 2, you have to exert some content control over what the players create. That’s why I have come up with a two pronged assault…

First: a lengthy beta period. The original people brought into beta will serve two functions, the first being to test the game for bugs… but the more important function is to “think shit up”. Want to build a weapon by attaching an ice skate blade to a hockey stick? Sure, sounds good, recipe inserted into game and now everyone can get an ice skate, a hockey stick and some duct tape (or string) and make this new weapon.

Second: the design tool. We won’t allow players to design their own models directly, but they will be allowed to submit suggestions. Suggestions will consist of two types “Assemble” and “Dismantle”. The dismantle submission will be accomplished by having the player drag the item model, for example: an ice skate, into the model window and then in the provided text box explain “I would like to be able to remove the blade from the ice skate.” The game designers/admins will review the suggestion, and if approved will create new models for an ice skate blade and an ice skate shoe without blade, and then add the new dismantle recipe to the game (and to the patch notes, “Ice skates can now have the blade removed from the shoe”). For the other side, they’d drag the models for the ice skate blade and the hockey stick into the design window, align them as desired, attach them with tape (or string) and then in the provided text box explain “Would be used as a weapon.” Again, the designers/admins would review it, if approved they would need to add the new assembled model, animations for using it, alternate uses for it if they think them up, item statistics if they are required, and slap it into the game (and the patch notes, although since part of the fun of the game is to figure stuff out, assembly notes might be intentionally vague).

This way, you give players the ability to create what they want, but we retain control of what goes in the game and how, mostly so we can prevent player_x from inventing yet another in a long line of freaky sex toys. Sure, it is labor intensive, but since I plan for the game to have no bugs, my CS people will need something to do. 🙂

Together Alone, Alone Together

Over at the nerfbat, Ryan adds another lesson, this one about Solo Content not being a bad thing.

He is right, in his way. Solo content isn’t bad, and personally I think that every game should have solo content. But to what degree?

One of the major issues you will run into here is that solo content will actually affect your entire game design and reverberate through your community. Take World of Warcraft as the 800 lb. example. Pre-Burning Crusade, soloing to level 60 was easy. Anyone could do it given enough time at the willingness to do so, with any class. But, if you only played solo content, you were viably limited to solo and small group content. Even if you did instances now and then, or even were hardcore at the five man instances, when it came to open PvP or the battlegrounds you were completely outclassed by raiders. The gear obtained from raids was head and shoulders above the rest of the gear in the game, to the point that raiders could have nearly double the hitpoints, resistances and damage output. Unless you were a perfect assassin type circle strafing PvPer, you almost could not win. Most games on the market are like this because of the weight that items carry, they are item-centric designs.

Post-Burning Crusade, it got better… the “crap drops” from “trash mobs” and easy quests were nearly equivalent to raid gear from the Pre-BC era. Of course, as people explore the raids of BC, the disparity is re-emerging because the game is designed for raiders to get better rewards than anyone else.

Of course, you could try to solve this problem by giving soloers and raiders the same gear rewards… but then your raiders would complain, or they simply wouldn’t bother with raiding since the organization and trials of doing so earn them nothing better than they could get in a group on a lazy Saturday afternoon. As a non-raider myself, I would not mind this in the least, but there are people who would.

The flaw here is in attempting to cater to many play styles AND have those play styles interact. Each style is rewarded differently, and those differences become glaringly aparent when the styles clash.

The solution? Smaller, more focused games… or move away from item-centered designs. I really think that the Xbox 360 is on to something with its achievement system. Games need kill sheets, titles and trinkets. Adornment to show that you’ve done raid X or killed monster Y or cleansed the world of Z hundred creatures or completed quest chain A or defeated W other players in combat. We need more rewards that don’t affect game balance, things that show what you’ve done without making you capably better than players who haven’t.

The Alliance is Bored

Lately, as I play my new blood elf hunter, I have been frequenting the Tarren Mill and Hammerfall.

Tarren Mill is under attack!

Why yes, yes it is. Tarren Mill is being slaughtered, probably as you read this. A group of well geared level 70’s are sitting on the hill (or worse, sitting in town) killing all the NPCs. The master tailor is dead, so are the quest givers, and the innkeeper… everyone, all gone. You get maybe five minutes to do your thing after respawns before they wade in again.

Hammerfall is under attack!

Look! Epic mounted level 70’s are riding through town again and killing everything! The guards at the entrance to the battleground are dead? You don’t say! Oh look, they’ve accidently attacked the flight path guy, all those spawns should keep them out for twenty minutes.

But why do I say the Alliance is bored? Well, because 95% of the Horde who frequent these areas are level 25 to 35, and most of the NPCs are 40 to 50. Are there no battlegrounds for these people to fight in? Are there no towers for them to siege? Oh… wait… I forgot, the Alliance outnumber the Horde on Durotan… I’d tell you by how much, but despite all the info you can see in the Armory you can’t get simple info like population counts! But wait, players have been running a census for a long time, so while not 100% accurate, it is close… almost 3 to 1.

So far, I’m decent at PvP, but I haven’t been able to win a 3 to 1 fight, especially when I’m level 32 and my opponents are all over 60.

If you read my blog, and you want to play WoW, come to Durotan and play on the Horde side. I’m usually playing Calibre or Wayd. Look me up and maybe I’ll hook you up with a little funds to get you up and running as long as you promise to spit in the eye of any Alliance you run across.

Pete and Re-Pete

Pete and Re-Pete were paddling a canoe when Pete fell out, who was left in the canoe?
-first grade humor

Now take a moment to consider that. If you don’t get that joke, please, please… stop reading my blog. Encapsulated in that joke is the one thing that really irritates me most about MMOs. Just the other night in World of Warcraft, my group and I went off to collect the heads of some thieves. Now, when we killed each of the offending people and take their heads, my suspension of disbelief allows me to equate that fact that each of us gets a head to be taken as we have evidence of the head, or since we all plan to go back together that there is really only one head that we share. Of course, one of our group had killed them and taken their heads and turned them in for the reward two days prior.

People in EverQuest used to make jokes… “Oh thank you!” quest giver Sarah tells you. “You found my mother’s locket!” She tosses it over her shoulder into a box full of identical lockets.

I realize that designed content is limited, and players will exhaust content faster than it can be created, so I’m not sure what the answer is here… except to stop generating content. The one thing that EVE Online does better than any other game I have played is to encourage you to get involved in PvP. Honestly, unless you really enjoy playing the economy game of buying and selling goods (I have a friend who makes a billion isk a month and rarely ever leaves his hanger), or grinding the same twenty missions over and over, there isn’t anything else to do. Of course, EVE Online is a niche game.

And that comes to the real point… its one I’ve made before and will continue to make: the world needs more niche games. We need more companies who plan properly and would be happy with fifty to one-hundred thousand players, maybe less, maybe more. We need more companies who actively do NOT want to be the next big thing.

One Step Closer

The 360 takes another step toward closing the Console-PC gap with its upcoming release. Check out the details over at gamerawr.

The biggest thing to me, and the step I’m saying they are taking, is the addition of the keyboard. Frankly, voice communication has only come so far, and for games supporting multiple chat channels, like MMOs, voice is severely limited. Some games just need text, and without a physical keyboard its just too hard to do. If you don’t believe me, trying using virtual keyboards, or even your 10-key phone pad to write long messages. There is a reason people invented text message short hand. (And deep in my heart of hearts, I hope this goes toward the erradication of needless short hand.)

Should this take off as I expect it to, we could be seeing the beginning of the end of PCs as a gaming platform. Though some might think this is great, its not entirely all roses. How do indie game devs break into the console? Maybe Microsoft could start offering a program to burn viable 360 discs so that indie games could be run… but I don’t really see that happening because it opens alot of doors to piracy. Also, if game modding continues to be popular, consoles do not exactly support making mods, at least not modeling and creating textures. As, of course at this time I don’t believe Microsoft supports external game servers… the PS3 claims it will though (or will support paid hosting of game servers).

In any event, the 360 is adding something new that may have an effect on the industry as a whole. Time will tell…