Study : Legends of Zork
Hey everyone,
This is a new thing I'm gonna try to do. Not quite a review since I suck at writing reviews ( I'm sorry @buildingbrowsergames - I am really bad at it. I tried to write a few that I never sent because they were bad). So instead I'm going to do something I think I can do a little better - Play a game, study it's elements, look at what was done well and what wasn't done so well.
So the first game up is a game I've been waiting a few months for and it has finally been released! Legends of Zork. As I'm sure you can guess the game is based loosely of the old Zork games. Yes, the ones where you type "North" to end north. Good times, eh? Anyways, this games is being result by Jolt and backed by EA so I had pretty high expectations. I don't know why I expected so much, but I did and I was rather disappointed. But I will explain myself through this study.
Since we need a place to start, we may as well pick the interface since that's the first thing you see. The UI for this game is pretty simple with a bar of 5 or so links across the top where when you click one you are brought to a page with more related links. This is pretty standard but works well expect in a few places but I will touch on this later. Next you have your character information on the left and despite the icons being slightly confusing, displays all the info you need for the game. And this is a flaw not because it displays everyone but all it really displays is your health, action points remain, gold and points to next level. And below that you have your friends list which is pretty useless. With no benefit to having friends or even an easy way to add them it just ends up being a quick link to your friends profile.
After the UI you have the action points (AP) system the game is based on. Wanna move somewhere? 1 point. Wanna attack something? 1 point. How many points do you get a day? 30. So you see , you have a pretty simple to use and easy to understand system that has worked for many games before. Currently there a few kinks in the system where if you are out adventuring and view your inventory (This is the UI problem I mentioned earlier is) there is no way other than the back button on the browser to go back to where you were. If you try to use the in game menus you can end up losing 3 or 4 action points. Now, whether this is intentional or not is yet to be seen but they have done something else right with the APs.
In game you can buy coconuts. With these coconuts you can buy APs. But the part they did right was that coconuts are just a few dollars. Low enough that I say "If I don't get a coffee today I can get extra turns in game". Too many games charge too much for these perks or make you pay the perks play the game properly. Not Zork.
Let's now take a look at the combat. Oh, the combat system. Such a corner stone for so many games. It seems though that the game play designers for Zork didn't consider this so. The combat here the weakest part of the game. You click explore area. You encounter an enemy. And a random number generator does the rest for you. It shows you a lot of meaningless numbers then whether you have won or loss, your loot, the the option to adventure again or head to your base. Yip-ee.
So what can be done to amend this oversight without changing the existing game too much? I think a good solution for this game since it's attempting to keep simple but would allow for those of us that more some more complexity would be to allow the user at the top of combat to assign 10 combat points to several fields. Fields such as aggression, defense, magic, wait for opening, etc etc. This would allow the players to study their enemies and figure out the best numbers for that enemy depending on their armor/level/class. You could also have a random button or even distribute for players that don't wish to do the combat this way.
So this concludes my first study. Any suggestions or aspects that I should investigate more please feel free to make them. Also, game suggestions for study's would be good. I"m just gonna go through all the games I currently play and do studies on them first so expect to see a TornCity and Renaissance Kingdoms study shortly.
An engine – Planning ahead
I have made it clear in the past that I' m interested in building a game engine and I've finally gotten this project underway with the aid of my co-workers. They will be helping me ensure the engine can be easily scalable and adoptable.
Now, this brings me to a few different crossroads. This engine will be written in AS3 and likely deployed using Flex. And thinking back to a debate we had about whether Flash based games could be called PBBGs, means I may more longer be in that realm for a while. If you ask me, what I hope to build won't likely be considered a PBBG but will be closer to an MMO.It also pushes on the game play elements I have written about in the past and may very well write about in the future. I've been hoping to move the focus of this blog more to the gameplay design part of things anyways, so this may not be a bad thing.
As for the state of the project, it is still in the early stages of planning. We (my workplace) have in the past built a multiplayer flash game using electroserver. We are trying to avoid all the mistakes we made while building that engine to to ensure that this one will be able to be easily adopted to fit our needs. And in the process of trying to ensure this is all well planned out, I have found a piece of software I would like to share with everyone. It's called StarUML. It is an open source UML platform thingy.... Pretty much you can use it to plan out your class, interfaces, inheritance, etc etc. And depending on the language you are working in, it can create all your classes for you (yes, there is an as3 thing for it).
So there's an update on where my latest aspirations are in building a game. I'm hoping in the next few months to complete this engine while I simultaneously work on the game play/store with another co-worker. Hopefully it will all work out and you will in the next few months see some progress on the game front from me.