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.
Gameplay Types – Rounds, sandbox, story
A problem with many games that I have come across is the issue of replayability and length and this issue isn't limited to PBBGs but has been affecting PC and console games for the last few years. But since this is a blog primarily about PBBGs lets explore this aspect in relation to them.
Many games have a limited story due to the difficulty of constantly producing new content. Many games approach this many having 'rounds' (SK, NZ,), where after a few months or after a certain in game event happens, the round resets along with all the characters and everyone start new. Some games don't have a story and just provide a sandbox world where the players run the show (kind of like TC or RK). And then you have games that have a set story with quests and when you finish you're character restarts (like KoL) and you start the game quests again with a 'new' character, often with some new unlocked content.
So which way is the best way to your game? I really have no idea but lets look at the strengths and weaknesses of each type.
First up, round based. A round based game from my experience works best for strategy game. In a strategy game you have a set goal; Defeat your enemies before they defeat you. And because there is a set end and the fact that a strategy game can be enumerated on actions, you can make the game challenging by having players try to defeat each other can achieve high scores before the round ends. And with the knowledge of a set end, players know how long they have before they need to start attacking and defending. Through in factions, round persistent leaderboards and round carry overs, and you have a game that with minimal content changes/additions can continue to be fun for a player for several months. Offering round updates and slight changes each round and the chance for players to show off their achievements from past rounds will help retain players for a long time.
With this style of gameplay, you will likely need to split your development time between features and content. Keeping balance is important here, since you want your players to be able to play the game differently each round and see something different or new.
Next is the sandbox style game. If you are unsure what exactly I mean, think of simcity, or gta where your goal isn't really anything in game but to play and see what you can do. These games can be highly addictive (at least for me anyways) but without regular updates and in game events, they can stagnant quickly. This is because the game itself doesn't direct the players but the players direct each other. As you can see, this format can lead to a lot of player activity until most of the content has been viewed or played through. The more freedom and options provided to the player, often, the better this style of game is.
Let`s look at TornCity and Renaissance Kingdoms; both games have open ended play, the players control the game play, both have limited gameplay, but both still exist and gain new players due the high level of player interaction. This level of player interaction is often difficult to get right in strategy games and even more difficult in quest driven games. So, if you are planning a game that is a sandbox, keep in mind player interaction should be on the top of your list for features and future development.
And finally we have quests driven games. These games are probably the most difficult to keep players playing. This is mainly because everything is game and content driven. Without constant content development these games can quickly lose there appeal. Many games try to solve this by some form of 'ascending', meaning that your character and quests are somehow reset to the beginning and providing you with slightly different content or new avenues you can play. While this can be fun, there is limited playability due to the repetition of content and the lack of player interaction. Sure, many of these games have clans or factions, but much of the time the communication and new elements they add for the player isn't enough to make up for the lack of content.
So with a quest game, almost constant content development is a most. Feature development isn`t as important because the point of the game isn't what you can do, but playing the story.
What do you think? These are simply my opinions and views I have gathered through the last number of years playing web games and would be more than happy to debate or be corrected on any of them ^_^
And on a side note: I know itès be ages since my last post. So if anyone has any suggestions for posts or anything they would like to write about let me know. Fire off an email to bardic(dot)knowledge(at)gmail(dot)com or leave a comment.
Open Profiles
This is something I never understood why someone hasn't done yet (to my knowledge). Part of gaming is showing off how l33t(3l33t,leet,elite 3|_337, etc) you are to your friends. So why don't games have badges or little banners that players can put on their blogs, in their forum posts?
You first give players a way to show off to their friends their character/account details and second, you get free advertising. Make the images links back to the game and presto; You players get a nifty badge, and you get link backs.
You can also do similar things for alliances/faction/groups in the game. Opening just info even just a little would let the players build apps I'm sure to read this data and track their friends/enemies. I've played games (most notable, Earth 2025) where players take raw HTML and use it to keep track of alliance members.
May be interesting. Thoughts?
edit:
RangerSheck has written a nice article on making an igoogle gadget badge. check it @ : http://rangersheck.com/2008/7/24/an-igoogle-gadget-for-your-game
Thinking about why
Don't worry. I'm not gonna get all philosophical on ya's with why we exist, but why I and others, play web games. I have talked about this several times before on this blog, but I want to reapproach it again.
So I have been playing several games online and they are pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but they are enjoyable. Anyways, there flaws are starting to show, particularly in the multiplayer departments. THESE ARE MULITPLAYER GAMES! You think they would put a lot of effort into actually playing and communicating with others. But like most games, these ones drop the ball.
Now here is a game theory question for ya's. Do you 'force'/strongly encourage the player to perform an action, or do you wait until they decide?
Let me elaborate. If you are playing a strategy game online, why attack another player? You steal some resources. But then you are likely to be attacked in return. And you are surely losing resources for attacking/maintaining an army.
But what if you were to give the players a reason to attack the other players. Such as the only way for anyone to get military experience is to do so through attacking, and that experience is needed to develop new, better weapons.
There also needs to be more thought into the point of the game. Too many games I have played where your sole goal is to be the best player in the game, which pretty much equals "whoever spends the most time ingame wins" style gameplay.
Do I have any better idea's of the top of my head? Not relly, but an example would be give the players several different paths to play and allow them to try and reach the top in their now paths (Military, research, Political, etc). Make these paths balanced some how and make it advantageous for players of different paths to work together.
You're still striving to be the best, but it's just cut the gamae population in third and given you a chance to play the way you want to play and would hopefully be worked in such a way that just because you have no life and spend 12 hours a day playing the game doesn't mean you're going to be the best.
So, what are you guys think? Encourage/force cooperation, interaction, conflict, or just wait for the players to decide to do something
Framework for PBBGs? – DB Planning
Good day all.
I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I am looking into creating a framework for PBBGs using PHP. This is not only to help myself create games but to make it easier others to start to create their own games.
What the first problem you think of when you think of making a framework for games? For me it was databases. We all approach these differently, and will want different info to be stored. After a bit of thinking, the easiest way to do something like this would be to put objects of data into the database and have your code know the schema of the info.
Doing some searching it seems Google beat me to the punch with this idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable
So this gives me the impression its plausible to do what I'm thinking, but is it really efficient? Can it be done is such as way so that each call isn't grabbing ALL the info related to a player. The goal would be to return a query then to deserialize it. And not to perform string manipulations on it during the query.
Let me give an example of the problem of having all of ones data in a single object.
You have 5 stats, experiences, weapons, armour, magic, a guild, quests, inventory, gold, friends, mail, an attack history...
I think you start to get the point. That's a large amount of info when you only want your players names and id. I can think of a number of problems for using a large scale solution like bigtable, but is there a way to keep a similar structure on a smaller scale?
To make descent framework for games, the DB needs to be incredibly flexible and this is the only thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a solution.
So for you all DB guru's out there, what are your thoughts? Can it be done? I will try to put more thought into it over the weekend.
Also, does anyone know of any good database stress testing tools?
Can Flash be used for PBBGs?
In short, I think the answer is yes and I will explain myself as I write this post.
This post is in response to a comment by jmucchiello on another post. He has suggested that I write this, and since I have been looking for topics, here it is.
Lets define what a PBBG is.
A persistent browser-based game, or PBBG, is a computer game that satisfies the following two criteria:
- It is browser-based. The game is played over the Internet using only a web browser.
- It is persistent. Progress in the game is achieved over multiple playing sessions.
PBBGs merge the depth and longevity of an application-based game with the accessibility and portability of a browser-based game. PBBG can be spoken as pee-bee for brevity.
And by extension should not involve being continuously connected to the host system
AIR + PBBGs
With the release of AIR for Linux, Adobe has given us a very interesting piece of software for us to play with and attempt to work into our games. Myself, working mainly as a Actionscript developer, find this app to offer a wealth of potential to us.
For those that don't know what AIR is, it simply put is a desktop widget system. But it much more than that. It offers the user the chance to interact with your web content from their desktop. Just imagine a player getting a notification in the corner of their screen that they have been attacked in game, or that their research has completed or they have new mail. Imagine that they could easily respond or perform a new action using the same interface such as reply to the map, check their status, or attack back.
This could be a big step for game design.
But I'm more curious as to what everyone elses thoughts on this is. This AIR widget of course wouldn't be the core of your game. But just a way to always let your players interact with the game.
Current state of PBBGs
I am sad. Of late, I've been signing up to a late of different web games that promise to be unique, addictive, fun... So far these games have lied to me. Or the developers of these games are lying to themselves. The majority of games out there seem to largely be TornCity clones (Does anyone know the first big game of this type? TC was the first I noticed). And not even creative clones. Just clones. Sometimes with a better interface. Sometime with a worse one.
Then you have your strats. Clones of Tarvian (Again, anyone know the first game of this type in it's genre?).
Oh and I can't forget the slew of games that have maps that you control your character on. Some of these games are pretty damn cool, but again, the vast majority are clones and just suck.
Here's what I do. I go to the voting sites and sign up to the top 5 games if I haven't played them before. I give most of these games two or three days of play. And sadly only one of the new ones I've start (Omerta) has kept my attention.
Am I the only one with this problem? I know PBBGs are difficult to design (I've actually pushed my own development back again to learn more advanced PHP), and I know that coming up with original, and fun idea's can be difficult, but com on! We are a large community. Or the last few years I've considered PBBGs to be the one last adventurous computer gaming platform, but it is starting to seem to me I may have been wrong.
So, let us bring this post to a point: What are your views on this? Where do you think PBBGs are now and how does the future look? Are we cursed to just clone each other, each time using slightly better interfaces and tech? Has gameplay advanced stalled? And if it has, do you think it's from laziness of developers or technical hurdles?
Ranger Sheck's PBBG Design Blog
Through the comment left by Ranger Sheck on the previous post here at OpenBracket, I found a link to an extremely nice site focused on the design of PBBGs. Ranger Sheck's home page is a blog about designing PBBGs in just the same vein of discussion as this blog. Some of his most recent posts include a post on interface design, statistics, and a nice javascript library for maps. I strongly suggest checking the site out and following it. To prove the authenticity of Ranger Sheck's discussions, he is working with a team to design a role-playing PBBG called Pioneers of Aethora. I have been playing it recently and find it a quite satisfying game though still in development. As a side note, the game is being written in Ruby through the Rails framework. This is compelling for me as I am just beginning to learn Ruby on Rails and hope to write about my learning experience as it applies to game development right here at OpenBracket!
PS: My name is Jake and I am the 'new guy.' I will be posting a news article on a PHP PBBG engine soon as well as discussing database design. I look forward to a discussion with our readers here! And thanks for bringing me on board, bardicknowledge!