vael:
Demi asks a very irrelevant question:
How do you make your game better than the Sims? Because someone, somewhere, probably has (or could) make a mod where you steal people’s souls. But that has shiny 3D graphics and multiplayer and etc. etc.
Given your experience with browser-based gaming, I have no idea why you would ask this, except as a question of just how good I can make the game.
There is no reason to compare the gameplay of 3D games to browser-based ones unless the BB game is trying to act as a 3D one. Game 3 isn’t even like Sims in any way. I don’t really know what 3D game it could be like, because it’s not designed as a 3D game. So, how could I make it better than the sims? Erm, I don’t know, by existing?
popular because you don’t stare at them for two hours making things happen. You play a minimal amount of time and get results, come back and do it all again. The reason MonBre failed was because it didn’t do that, it let you play as long as you wanted. People either got burnt out or subconsciously were like “wtf?” and quit, because no one cares about text and even ‘nice pictures’ as you seem to have an infatuation with, for more than 5-10 minutes.
And no, Sims wouldn’t have that. They tried multiplayer and it failed hard, no one has made a soul-stealing mod, they definitely haven’t and won’t because the gameplay mod community sucks for sims 3, and even if it did exist it would be so bare and baseless.
Ok so let’s pretend The Sims wasn’t a terrible example and go with the one I thought of much later: Oblivion. Oblivion has soul stealing spells, you steal shit, whatever. You go ahead and dick around. You talk to people and etc. The thing is that Oblivion already does that kind of gameplay in a way more satisfying way than normal text could do - though I admit exceptional text could far surpass it. I just don’t know if “EBZ with no restrictions” would be *as good* as EBZ is - because those restrictions let them create the kind of amazing content that exists in the game. They don’t need to write 50 storylets about you stealing the souls of all the NPCs.
I’d say most people would have given up on Oblivion by now if it didn’t have so many options for player created content and etc. - something Popmundo has socially if not in the actual game’s world (at least not on the level of player created races, quests, areas, items, texture enhancements, etc.). The other people would still be playing it because they can sit down and go nuts in the world, which is the whole “players creating their own story” thing. But that’s a lot harder to tap into in a primarily text-based game in the browser, because people can only do what you code for them to click on/type in. Players can only create the story of “I go around stealing souls” if you make that story for them. While you say, in theory, that your design would overcome these exact barriers that you mentioned would be in EBZ, they’re just as prevalent - if not moreso because of the larger scale of the project.
I’ve been reading #AltDevBlogADay (which seems to post more than once per day, not that I’m complaining) and there are a few interesting articles of varying relevance. The first, The Fewest Number of Swings in a Fight, is about weapon design in games and you can take its lessons in terms of mechanic design as well. Basically, there’s the mathematical design (MurCity) where you have the fast weapon with low damage and the slow weapon with high damage and the ranged weapon with certain limitations. Then there’s the creative style where they have these crazy backstories and powers and the math comes later.
Cats have nine lives is just about how death is implemented in games and it’s just something good to read if you plan on having death in your game. Off-topic but even so.
Nobody Gives a Shit is about being an indie and what that means for your priorities. I think this one is important because a one man team has to be even more careful with his resources (time and money) than a team with a handful of members. The take home from this one, since it’s mostly about larger game development and especially consoles, is that you should make the mechanics of your game first and create something playable, if small. Then create the content. I.e. EBZ has been playable from the very beginning, even if all the content wasn’t there. All the mechanics were in place from the very beginning.
You could say that’s what you’re trying to do with MurCity, but after a year? in development (will it be a year this summer? or two years? My memory D:) you still have plans to add more mechanics like groups and golems and farming and all of that stuff. For Game 3, rather than creating a massive world and adding the Soul Steal spell later and etc., create everything you want in a confined area. A demo, if you will. Build a little tavern, with the soul stealing and poetry and everything else established from the very beginning, and don’t worry about how they’ll work out in the larger context of the game. Just make the mechanics work in the confined area and tweak them as new areas create new problems. I doubt you’d need as much tweaking, if you KNOW your mechanics are great in the confined space. In as little time as possible, put together something that would make someone go “this is good, I’d like to see more”.
This doesn’t change the fact that you have to create all of this content and any player-created stories are still variations on the possible stories you’ve set out, but there’s another problem with EBZ that you’d need to avoid: the very beginnings of EBZ aren’t fantastic. You quit and asked why you should care, and I played it for a little bit longer and said “go play some more, you’ll care” and now that we’ve been at it for a few months we love it. It grows on you because the good stuff really only comes into play once you’re established.
But that’s because the game’s mechanics are relatively weak, the presentation is low-key, and your enjoyment all comes from the story. Take a game like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope for iPhone, and all they are is a neat little mechanic that makes you want to keep playing. Because the mechanics are simply and physics based, within five seconds you’re either interested in playing more, or you don’t care. Game 3 won’t be as simple or easy to pick up as that, especially because it’s text-based and not an iPhone game (both are limitations these days) but if you can grab people at the start, then you’ll keep them around long enough to experience the cool stuff. If they decide they don’t care within five minutes of signing up, you’ve lost them, because that would mean the good stuff doesn’t come until later.
Also remove anything that could be seen as grind from the game. Content gaps and repeating the same uninteresting stuff are killer. I don’t know how you could deal with player choice to grind (i.e. me grinding low-level persuasive stories to progress faster) but that depends entirely on the situation.
Hopefully this is somewhat coherent. I just pumped this out while waiting for the next bus so it may not be very well organized or persuasive.
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To respond to the bit of the post that I quoted, the fact is that you do have to compete with other games even if they aren’t in the same medium. Unless the game really, seriously takes up absolutely no time to play which could be a bad sign anyway. If someone can play a shiny, 3D textured (though it could be 3D too), high definition version of your game on their console/PC, or even worse on their handheld, then you are screwed. Presentation does mean matter, as does convenience, and the other thing is that a full-fledged game has a budget and a team and a lot of other things that you can’t compete with. Flash-based Portal isn’t quite as good as the real thing. Text-based Portal would be atrocious. There’s a definite something to be said for physically sneaking into a building and stealing stuff compared to clicking a button that says “sneak in” and then one that says “steal stuff”.
