You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Design' category.
Brian Green has a post up asking “How Low Can You Go?” talking about the minimum amount it takes to make an MMORPG. He’s commenting on a post on a very new blog that claims a new MMORPG (that isn’t trying to compete with the giants) could be made for $2 million and take 2 years doing it. Brian raises the stakes and claims it would take $3-$3.5 million, though he allows that some savings could be made by trading equity for salary.
Note: Brian has since clarified that he’s not asserting it would take 3-3.5 million to make a moderately successful MMORPG. He was asserting that it would take 3-3.5 million to make an MMORPG with the salary figures that the author of MOGBlog was giving. I’m going to leave the post up anyway though as I have little doubt many out there do think it takes millions to turn out an MMORPG.
Read the rest of this entry »
MMORPG. Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Game. Is there any point in including the RP? Should we just drop it and refer to them, consistently, as MMOGs? Just to be clear, there’s little doubt that roleplaying matters in text MUDs/MMORPGs. I’m really just referring to the top tier (WoW, Runescape, etc) and mid-tier (Everquest 2, CoH, Eve, etc) MMOs here.
Having never designed a graphical game previous to Earth Eternal, I am finding the experience to be an education. Although there’s no fundamental difference between designing EE and our text MUDs, the restrictions we’re under on EE are incredible. For someone used to a level of design freedom that even the best-funded graphical projects can only envy, moving to a self-funded (read “small budget”) graphical project is quite the difference.
Interesting article in Wired by Clive Thompson about the pleasure that can be derived even from being very unskilled at a game. It seems that some very smart Finns over at M.I.N.D. Labs have been hooking up volunteer gamers to various biosensors and watched their biological reactions to Super Monkey Bowling, which is a mini-game in Super Monkey Ball 2, or something. I start to glaze over when there are too many monkeys floating around. Monkeys are distracting.
What they found was pretty darn interesting: When a player succeeds and knocks down a lot of pins, his or her body registers signs congruent with a pleasure reaction. That’s expected. When a player barely misses and does poorly as a result, frustration results, which is also expected. What’s a bit unexpected is to discover that when a player misses by a large margin, his or her body produces the same signs as when he or she succeeds.
As Clive mentions, that is totally the sign of a well-designed game. Expecting losing itself to be fun is probably asking too much, but if you can create such a joyously delightful experience that the process that leads right up to losing is fun, you’re probably going to do ok.
Raph Koster has a good post today entitled the above. He’s basically right on the money as far as I’m concerned, but I wanted to comment on one of his commandments.
I’ve been reading about the practice of split-testing lately, which is essentially Darwinism for content such as advertisements or web pages. For instance, say we want to increase the conversion rate we get on visitors to our websites actually creating characters and getting involved in the games themselves. We could a) use our best guess at what will be appealing, b) solicit feedback from potential users via a focus group or some other method, or c) use split-testing to actually find out what users prefer. (I’m sure there are other options, but I am not really a marketer.)
I often get asked why our games have players purchasing a currency called ‘credits’ rather than simply directly purchasing what it is a player may buy with credits; instead of buying 100 credits, why not just have players buy the widget they’re
going to buy with those 100 credits? When we first opened Achaea in 1997, this was a reasonable question, as credits were non-transferable. A player purchased credits, and then purchased other things with them. The only advantage was saving in transaction costs by letting players purchase in bulk.
Not too long after, I started wondering why we didn’t allow players to transfer credits to each other. Goodness knows they were asking for it often enough. I honestly don’t remember my rationale for not allowing it, but I quickly realized the enormous advantages to be gained by allowing credits to become a ‘real currency.’ They can be summed up as, “Everybody wins.”
My formal education is a degree in government from Cornell. After university, I discovered, to my profound disappointment, that my dream of someday opening a political philosophy store wasn’t going to happen. (”May Day sale! Communism, 70% off!”) Apparently there’s not much retail market for that sort of thing. As a result, I had to settle for the second (ok, maybe the third or fourth) best thing: Implementing some sort of political system into a game.
Apparently, the ancient game of Rock, Paper, Scissors is flourishing these days, at least to the extent that there are championships.(?!!) I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise insofar as many combat systems essentially use an RPS system but with more elements and more ways in which those elements are structured. Still, I couldn’t help but chuckle at first, and immediately IM’d the link to a friend. Then, I started reading more about the strategy of the game and it got me thinking.
I’m in the middle of Guy Deutscher’s “The Unfolding of Language: An evolutionary tour of mankind’s greatest invention” and I’m loving it. It’s about how language evolved incredibly complex grammatical structures (such as Latin’s). One of the core theories of the book is built on is the idea that language, and abstract thought itself, is nothing more nor less than the result of metaphor and its incorporation into everyday language.