f13.net forums - Tear apart our design ideas...

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April 24, 2024, 11:07:04 PM

we're back, baby

well round table sounds more professional than "sitting around our office lounge with pen paper and laptops, shooting the bull with game ideas." :P

Quote from: LordDax

In the beginning of the power cycle, the dragkon starts out weak but gains power as his period reaches its halfway peak point, this in turn empowers his acolyotes. But due to the division of energy between fighting the celestial battle and ruling the "earthly" realm, their power begins to fade after xxx period of time. The flow of the mystic life blood of reality begins to seap into another dragkon empowering them and affecting their alcoyltes, leeching it from the previous dragkon and their followers.

What do you guys think? Is it feasible to continue down this line of thought?

Depends on how easy it is to work around this. Briefly, if the prize is worthwhile enough, a sufficently large guild will have multiple people try to acheive overlord status on a continuing basis. Yes, the particular player account it would be linked to would change, but a lot of guild accountts are already shared.

Worst case, a guild could try to have a different qualified candiate for overlord for all 12 (or whatever) of the mystical months.

So, how would you prevent this?

Xilren

Good question. I'll bring this up, and post soem of our brain storming later today.

Why would want to play in un-uber time? I personaly would cancel my account until my 'month' or if cycles fast enough just not log in in weak state.

Quote from: sinij

Why would want to play in un-uber time? I personaly would cancel my account until my 'month' or if cycles fast enough just not log in in weak state.

This post makes my brain hurt.

But after figuring out what he was saying... he does have a valid point.

Alkiera

Quote from: sinij

Why would want to play in un-uber time? I personaly would cancel my account until my 'month' or if cycles fast enough just not log in in weak state.

I blame lack of sleep. What I was trying to say is that if you have 'power-up' and 'power-down' states that are time-based why would you ever play in 'power-down' state. I'd personally just log-in when in 'power-up' state since like most people out there I hate playing with disadvantage.

Excellent point. And to all the gamers of like mind like this, what would possibly entice you to continue to play during the "power-down" periods? Although powered-down would be more of returning to normal instead of being blessed by Lifeblood. But your thoughts and comments regardless. Faster advancement, situational events, ???

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And to all the gamers of like mind like this, what would possibly entice you to continue to play during the "power-down" periods?

If it makes my power-up state come sooner. Still I'm likely to just macro it off and complain that game is boring and you have to macro to get to fun parts.

I guess if you made it so that the power-up and power-down periods were not too disparate then it would be ok. That way you can still fight back against the enemy enough for it to matter. If you stayed away entirely then you would lose too much ground to make up if your enemy put up resistance. You have to make it more about dealing with the different states than waiting for the power state to come into play.

The way we were thinking is that, just like in modern globabl power struggles, if the weaker countries act independently against the powerful one they get crushed. But when they combine forces and resource the sum of their parts is equal to or exceeds the dominant power. This would also possibly help player/player organization interaction if they hoped to get a decent shot at the big cheese. We are also thinking about maybe, if you can convert some of the acolyotes of your oppenent the ruling dragkon loses some power because of the lower Faith. But we are hesitatnt that there might be alot of bullying and new player recruitment just to padd the ranks and leech Lifeblood.

Hrm. Reminds me of the dragon cycle from the Taltos books.

One way to make people who aren't top dog log in is to make positions 2-12 mean something. If your clan is currently number 8, make it so that you can do things to push yourself ahead of whoever is #7... and make being #7 mean something over being #8.

Reminded of Salvatore's Dark Elf series, where Drizzt's home city worked like this... each of the families vying for position, not always with #1, because that would be suicide... unless you happened to be #2, or maybe #3. The others fought with those just above or just below them in the peking order.

Alkiera

Maybe instead of a straight power-up/power-down cycle you could have certain abilities enhanced and some others diminished.

Maybe the dragkons are crustaceans and they need to molt periodically. Right after they molt, they are nimble and fast and so their attack statistics are maximized, but they are soft and vulnerable so their defense statistics are minimized. Right before they molt, their shells are hard to the point were they are nearly impenetrable, but also very hard to move. Then their defence statistics are maximized and their attack stats are minimized. Make all the dragkons of a particular stripe molt simultaneously.

Then again, maybe I've been looking at my son's Yu-gi-oh cards too much.

If someone logs on and can't do something constructive and at maximum efficiency, they lose the incentive to log on.

The only solution that I could consider would be a phasic system where attacking/defending/building strengths cycle. At this point, you'd always have something constructive at a high point.

Of course, this still forces a style of gameplay... something that really detracts from fun.

We finally formalized the authority/ranking/player relationship structure so here it is:

1)Eternity (the all powerful force, basically Time personified)
2)Celestial Dragkons (16 members of our 'Content Evolvement' team)
3)Overlord
4)High Dragkin (dragkonic mutated humans)
5)Mutent'il Ken (enhanced mutanted/evolved humans)
6)7 House of Hratko (human house that war for dominance)
8)Common populace
9)Mangini (Outcasts)
10)Zamost (greatly enhanced and evloved beings but greatly oppressed by law)

A more indepth description of each rung in the ladder to come soon, but feel free to tear that apart in the mean time.

You need to dump that "Dragkin" term right now. It just smacks of non-creativity. In fact, dare I say, it is a down right 4th grade-ish wordplay mishmash of dragonkin. Saying it aloud is cumbersone and ends up sounding like "dragon" anyway which seems to tbe the word you are trying to avoid for some reason.

Quote from: LordDax

Let me see if I follow this. Rungs 1 & 2 are out b/c those are dev functions, so players can really operte on rungs 3-10.

3 is the high end political/econ/war game we've already touched on, but if only one person can be Overload, that run might as well not exist for 95% or better of your playerbase. Its smacks of designing content of the catass ala high level raid zones with locked content that requires a huge guild of powergamers to do, or the original Jedi system. IMHO, you shouldn't design too much content that only benefits these folks b/c it's a much much lower ROI. Besides, all too often the dev's focus gets skewed by too much attention on this high end game and the bulk of the simple day to day gameplay suffers as a result. The low and mid game better be fun else who cares how great the end game is?

So, need more details on rungs 4-10, especially, how would someone change the rung they are on b/c most sound like their tied to your character's race? Is that changable (i.e. everyone starts at 8 and you can move up to 4 or down to 10 via gameplay that actually changes your character? What does the rung structure actually allow/disallow you from doing? Need context.

Xilren

Xilren is correct. players will start out at rung 8 and depending on their actions will move up or down the ladder. At the proposed timeline for the onset of the game rungs 6-3 have not been created yet by the people of the world, so players who fufill certain requirements can end up becoming the first of the higher caste. And since 4&5 are mutations there will be some interesting events that occur before those rungs are created. More to come on this later. Oh and rungs 9&10 while lower on the chain, they are not without their own suprises. In fact the Zamost might even have an anti-overlord trump card....

Quote from: LordDax

9)Mangini (Outcasts)

As a warning, this is close to a word that has a rather negative connotation around here. 8)

Alkiera

The plural of mangina?

Quote from: shiznitz

The plural of mangina?

If Harry Houdini was a mangina, perhaps?

Quote from: LordDax

We were hoping that a thread like this could come up with a better plan than a team of 25 guys(and 2 girls) sitting around in a room doing it by ourselves. But like all game studio start-ups we could be part of that 80% that flop, so there may or may not be a point to this anyway.

First problem. You have a 27 person team in pre-production. Even if nobody is making a dime, you have a budget problem. You have too many hands and too little design space. The actual number of ideas you will be able to execute in a game is small. I have a dev-lead friend currently in preproduction for a major, money-is-not-an-issue, studio. At 6, he feels his design team is too large. Having your production staff too large is an extremely common problem in software design generally, and a frequent cause of project failure. See Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, also Eric Bethke has a nice book on game production.

Don't discount good production techniques, they are the cause of many software project failures, particularly in this industry.

Second Problem.

Quote from: LordDax

Allright with all that out of the way I think one of the key factors about keeping gamers playing a MMOG is a decent underlying evolvable plot. We've all played our share of MMOGs (and regular games with good plots), so what were some parts of the plot line that kept us coming back to the game?

I'll bet you've played PnP RPGs. When you got tired of D&D, and decided to build your own game, you began by designing your game system; one that would let you create the setting you wanted. But with PnP, you are the hardware and the software. With computer games, those things have to be built before you can firm up any design or setting. Message boards are littered with the flaming rants over unfulfilled promises that turned out not to be technically possible.

The key issues with MMOs are Customer Service and Technical Polish. These things aren't as interesting as plot and game design, but they are what break the majority of MMOs that do get out of Beta. If you are going to pitch a game to investors, you will need to talk about hardware requirements and launch and maintenance costs, bandwidth expense, all of that. Story is all gloss. Which brings me to....

Third Problem.
You are writing storyline. You don't want that now, you need to know what systems you can support before you write the storyline. The following makes the point better than I can, I think.

Pulled off this Corpnews Thread:

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HRose wrote:

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MahrinSkel wrote:
For the first year the team is small while we work on "plumbing", the AI and the servers to support it, but the team hopefully won't stay small.

What about the client? It sounds completely off your line of sight.

Deliberately. Once you start building the client and generating content, your burn rate goes up by an order of magnitude, and the clock starts ticking on when your graphics are going to look dated. Since experience shows that you never have significantly better AI and server code than when you make your first playable demo, and since working on servers is comparatively cheap, *and* since the server technology is the wild card in whether or not you're going to be able to deliver (WHO and DE were cancelled because their servers were not going to be ready, and apparently that was also a factor for Wish), it seems prudent to build the foundation *first*.

The game is going to be built around some truly cutting edge AI systems, so cutting edge they do not yet exist in a form usable for gaming. Some portion of what we hope to do with the AI is not going to work, we want to find out what it will and won't do for us before committing major resources.

--Dave

The foundation is what you need to build, before you design a story to go on top. Story is infinitely adaptable, and limited only by your wit and insight. Code is much less flexible.

The story info you want for investors is a one line zinger and a short paragraph that tells them what you want them to think about, and does the least to constrict you when it's 18 months down the road and they are trying to fit your game into the mental box you sold them.

That means a sentence like "We want to meld the flavor and appeal of World of Warcraft to the EverQuest subscription model". And the paragraph talks about The Alliance and the Horde battling it out in exciting yet vague terms.

Shadowbane has many useful lessons to teach about building MMOs, and one of the most important is the following. If it isn't in the code, it isn't in the game.

Final Problem.

Quote from: LordDax

Way too specific. At this point it should be "Characters will fight monsters and/or other characters and they will level (since levels are inherent in your heirarchy - personally I think levels suck, but everything you've talked about implies them). At some point characters will get special powers to modify the world as follows....". Simple concepts, which coders can get to work on to build your prototype. If you can get a working prototype up, your chance of funding goes way up.

Anyway, I've gone on way too long. I'll wrap with this. The problem with MMOs isn't a lack of ideas, it is a lack of execution.

What your game needs is a unique system of character creation. See, what you do is have female characters get pregnant, and give birth to new players. And you let people PK the pregnant female player, take her fetus, and shoot it out of a catapult. That would own.

Now get to work, your company is at steak!

Quote from: WindupAtheist

You've been beaten to the punch on both counts, sadly.

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to all the gamers of like mind like this, what would possibly entice you to continue to play during the "power-down" periods?

Ouch I think I pulled something reaching that far back.

Anyway, it seems simple to me, smear the queer. Pardon the offensive name but I never heard it called anything else. Whoever is on the upswing is the target of all other dragkon factions. (Seriously change that name!) Then whoever attacks the head faction most severely gets bumped up one month to the next power cycle. This has two effects: 1) No need to encourage conspiring of factions that might lead to dangerous dynastic possibilities. The guy fighting beside you this month isn't your friend, and he is going to try to rip your throat out when you’re in power. 2) The powerful faction is so busy on their month defending and attacking that they have no time for crafting. The other time is then just as valuable as the only time to do repairs, crafting, training (as mentioned earlier), making enough money for tribute (see below), and generally defending from the powerful faction's aggressions.

If done right there will still be those who will only play when their faction is powerful but there are just as many people who will log off for that devastating, stressful, and hectic period. But if too many of the faction’s players follow that path the bump system in the power cycle makes it possible for a faction to become dormant, that is to say always bumped. If your guild needs to gain land/recourses/power they must fight. On the other hand if a guild becomes too weak they might seek other avenues for advancement, IF you allow for bribery and inter-factional trading, oh and backstabbing... literally, the subtle knife cuts deepest.

On a seperate point, Evangolis is right, it may be too soon to be worrying about this stuff. Too many games have had fascinating metagames and absolutely insipid day to day gameplay. Here’s a rule to remember, if you wouldn’t fight/craft/mine/hunt/explore just for fun, the game is worthless. You must make the most fun part of the game the shit work. In real live you can enslave people and bend them to your will, but in a game the slaves will just leave. You must make it so that the lower class has the most players and only the diehards seek advancement. You see the secret to cat herding is making the cats into cattle, absolutely happy to chew cud their entire life.

If you don’t have the gameplay down yet stop all this talk of overlords now. If you don’t believe me go read the old developer interviews of what was going to be in Horizons, and then go play it…

If your MMOG actually survives and makes it to release, and better yet if it garners enough subscriptions to survive in the short term, you need to insincerely smile and agree with the fanboys, but actually listen to those who think you game has problems and unsubscribe.

You ego is your own worst enemy. Adopt the artist mentality, and stop seeing your efforts as a business proposition, and you will probably be narginally sucessful at best. You can code, model, and texture. You may even be able to write a good story, but in the end run, the market, not you, decides whats fun.

What differentiates your company in attracting capital to start a game?