Developing a Text-Based MMO for Facebook

A discussion about the new text based game, The Trader Game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/i-play-fb-part-1.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Guest Post: Design in Games – Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is an online, multiplayer, team-based, first-person shooter made by Valve. It has sold very well, and is still played obsessively by people around the globe. If you haven’t played it, you can buy it off steam for $20.00 (trust me, it’s worth it by far).

From first glance, the game looks pretty normal. On the most popular mode, capture the flag, the users are split into two teams of players, and the players can choose what class they want. The goal is to get the intelligence (the flag) from deep within the opposite base, and to bring it back. First person to do this three times wins. But there’s more than what meets the eye.

First, let me go over the classes. A scout is really fast, but weak. A soldier is really slow, does not have a large blast radius, but shoots deadly missiles. A pyro is quick and shoots wide-spread Team Fortress 2fire, which stays on player. A heavy is very slow, but has rapid fire (powerful with time). A demoman shoots bombs and can lay booby traps with sticky bombs, but has no real gun. A sniper… snipes, but has low health and has no weapon for close range. The medic can heal others and can give the team a power up after enough healing. Finally, the spy can become invisible, back-stab for an instant kill, disguise self as part of other team, and can take out sentries. Sentries, automatic weapons, are made by the engineer, who can also make health dispensers and teleporters, but isn’t powerful by himself.

The aspect which made the design innovative and addicting is the teamwork involved. Each class has very strong and very weak points, which forces players to not become the same thing, as death would follow. That’s the first layer of the teamwork.

The strategies which come out of this, all of which require teamwork, make the game very fun. For example, many times, an engineer will set up a powerful automatic gun, a sentry, in theMedic and Soldier Working Together sewers (basement) of the enemy base. With him, a powerful gunner (a heavy) will defend the engineer until the gun, health dispenser, and teleportation system are in place, which is when the whole team can teleport over and attack in a wave from below.

Often times, a sniper and demoman work together (whether they know it or not). A demoman can lay sticky bombs on the bridge between the two bases and blow them up when people cross to their side. From above, a sniper picks off enemies while the demoman is resetting his/her bombs. That is one way into the base which has been pretty much shut down.

Sentry guns play a vital role in the game, as they are pretty tough to destroy and impossible to get around. Many times, a medic will heal people until the bar is full. At that point, he/she will find a powerful gunner (soldiers are good, as they can shoot accurate and very powerful shots) and make him/her invincible long enough to take out the sentry.

All this teamwork and setting up can take place in the chat, but it is usually understood what needs to be done, which really makes you feel as though you are a single team, not a bunch of guys going on killing sprees who happen to be wearing the same color.

I am surprised that this kind of teamwork hasn’t been used more in video games after this game. Most co-op games have two characters who have the same (or near the same) abilities, and while they may rely on the other for healing, real teamwork is multiple people working together, as Team Fortress 2 does.

The beautiful thing about Team Fortress 2 is that teamwork isn’t mandatory. Double DashAnything mandatory in games is better left out, as it detracts from the players’ freedom and overall experience. They could have made a rule that if someone doesn’t work with someone else every minute, the entire team is stunned for 30 seconds, but the teamwork isn’t organic! The organic teamwork is created because it is necessary, not mandatory. Players will realize them not sticking together and not coordinating their moves will result in losing. They make the choice to work together, and the teamwork becomes a strategy and a choice, not a problem. Choices, as seen where there is no teamwork rule, are more fun and interesting than problems, as seen where working together is mandatory, as a general rule, but that’s a discussion for another day.

So, play the game, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. There are more modes which also organically create teamwork, such as freeze tag (you must stick together so you can unfreeze teammates) and capture points (in which you must split up into waves to conquer completely different areas on the map. There a few more that I won’t mention as well.

In conclusion, not requiring teamwork, but making teamwork the optimal strategy is what makes teamwork in games fun, and gives you a sense of freedom and payoffs after your strategy justTeam Fortress 2 Teamwork put your team ahead. One way to make teamwork the optimal strategy is to vary the abilities, strengths, and weaknesses of the different players, and to create these abilities together with the goal of making each one important in one way or another. Also, make sure there is no optimal strategy (other than to work together). For example, if doctors couldn’t make their people invincible and spies couldn’t zap sentries, it would be pretty much impossible to destroy sentries. The balance of the game tips to the side of the engineers who make the sentries, and suddenly almost everyone is an engineer, as that is the optimal strategy. At that point, teamwork and coordinating attacks are thrown overboard, and everyone will focus on building sentries. Then you lose the teamwork, the fun, of the game.

I could have gone deeper into this, but I’ll leave the other aspects of the teamwork inside Team Fortress 2 for you to analyze and discover for yourself (the only real way to learn). After you’ve played it (if you can; not necessary), try coming up with your own game in which teamwork is necessary, not mandatory. If you send me your idea under Contact and Submission, I’ll read it over and give you some feedback. Good luck! I’m gonna go eat a sandvich now.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Airy Canary, Developing an Indie iPhone Game, Part I

The story behind the development of Airy Canary…an indie iPhone game…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/airy-nary-part-1.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Guest Post: Backtracking and Non-Essential Areas

For a very long time, backtracking has been seen as a cheap way to lengthen games. If you are out of time, money, or story, you have a twitching desire to send the player back to places they have already visited to find something you couldn’t get to or do the first time around(Retro did this with missile expansions in the Metroid Prime series).

This type of backtracking really crushes the freedom the player is supposed to have – if he/she wants to explore, he/she will. Forcing theplayer to do things not essential to the main path down the middle of the game will make the experience less enjoyable. However forceful backtracking can be a good thing if used correctly.

The weak kind of backtracking ruins games. In Metroid Prime: Corruption, near the end, you come to a door that requires six or so missile expansions to open. You have to go to old areas you have already visited and devour them for missile expansions and doors that were locked the first time you walked by them.

You even have to defeat some enemies and puzzles you beat the first time. This is terrible design. The weak explanation as to why you need to backtrack (you need six missiles to open this door, the five you have won’t cut it) ruins the player’s suspension of disbelief.

Not only is the suspension of disbelief hurt, but so is the eagerness of the player. When forcing a backtracking segment, no new challenges are thrown at the player! The learning curve and pacing that has carried the player throughout the game is suddenly cut and halted until you find these missile expansions.

In addition to that, frustration consumes the player, who has no clear objective and path to the objective, an important rule in game design. This point in Metroid Prime: Corruption is where I stopped playing for months.

The truth is: if the player wanted to explore, he/she would have! If you allow the player to either charge through the level or check every nook and cranny, the players who just want to advance

the story do so, and those who want to explore the world do so.

And not everyone feels the same way throughout the game! By leaving the option open for the player to choose, everyone has a lot more fun.

When I played Fallout 3, there were times where I scoured areas for little things to do, and there were times I put the blinders up and went straight forward, depending on how I felt (self-adjusted pacing). The game allowed me to do what I wanted to do, what would be the most fun for me during that playing session.

Games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 take the opposite approach of Metroid Prime: Corruption(although, Corruption didn’t have THAT many extra places to explore). By exploring the worlds ofMass Effect 2 or meeting all the deranged survivors of Fallout 3, the player can nearly DOUBLE his/her playtime! That is a whole lot of extra content.

But another important detail – Fallout 3and Mass Effect 2 didn’t really need to force you to backtrack anyways to see all there was to see: the worlds were so interesting that I actually WANTED to see what there was to do.

And honestly, if these two games forced me to explore and find hidden collectables in far reach corners of levels, I wouldn’t have wanted to explore! At that point, it is not really exploration – the best kind of exploration in games doesn’t force you to do so (but I’ll save that for another article).

It’s like the things I say in these parentheses: you don’t actually have to read them – they are just asides! But you read them anyways (at least I hope you are, or my point will be severely weakened). If I, however, told you before the article started that I was going to test you afterwards on what was written in the parentheses, the reading would have become a task!The same goes for extra, non-essential areas in videogames.

By not forcing you to talk to the wounded alien leaning against the wall, the designers are actually forcing you to talk to him.

There are more benefits to adding extra content to a game, too. Even though it costs more money, you are making each gamer’s experience that much greater when they find or do something that none of their friends even heard of before.

The player gets a grand sense of accomplishment upon discovering something new that he/she knows (or at least believes) very few people have discovered. All gamers have this strange belief that they are somehow better than any other gamer (we gamers are of an egotistical breed).
Extra content also personalizes the experience of the player. When the game is complete, the player has something he/she can look back on, something different than what any other player experienced. This story is his/her story, and I believe part of Fallout 3’s glory lies in the stories people told after playing the game.

Before I got to play it, I heard accounts of people stealing carrots and facing a wave of enemies, running into a shop, only to have the monster come in after you, only things that players experienced by exploring and experimenting, using their imagination. And these individual experiences motivated the players to explore even more (and it motivated me to play the game, along with many others)!
It is true that cutting non-essential areas and events build up the cost of the game, but think about what it adds to the experience by KEEPING IT NON-ESSENTIAL!

And when the player is done with the game, he/she will know that lots of content went undiscovered, leading to a HUGE replay value. In some of the best video games, the player asks what if questions (What if I had shot the sheriff? What if I went down that other hallway?) – that is a sign of good replay value and a good game, if the player is already having the desire to replay the game after the first level.

Plus you add all the role-playing elements to games likeFallout 3 and Mass Effect 2, and you have a GINORMOUS game, which you could play in many ways, with different goals, with different focuses on the characters and your stats.

So if you want to force exploration on the player to make him/her explore all of the world you created, DON’T! You will make it more special to the players who actually want to explore the world you created (and if it is as good as you believe, they will; forceful exploration is a band aid over faults of a dull story, world, characters, etc.).

You should only use backtracking if it is necessary in giving the player a strong set of emotions or a new, truly unique challenge. Lets say you go through a thriving village on the way to a mountain. On the mountain, you cause a landslide, blocking the river that used to run to the village you went through. If the designer forces you to go back through the village, seeing  the thirsty young children, the fishers out of work, the bakers whose bakeries ran on the power of a waterwheel will make you feel (in this case, guilt, or maybe even regret).
Forcing the player to retrace his steps can be a good thing if the challenge has changed in someway, too. Maybe the street of the woman you just robbed is now crawling with FBI, or you now have a tool that completely flips the whole dynamic of the level on its head.

Simply, something needs to have changed since the last time you were there, something major. Otherwise, it is just a waste of time, and will be regarded as such. Backtracking used correctly can wow the gamer, making him/her see the level (in terms of gameplay or world) in a way he/she didn’t see the first time.

There is a huge difference between games that have too little content, and too much content. Games that force you to go back through levels, looking for things or separate areas you missed the first, are weak, and their designers are lazy.

Games that allow you to go through non-essential areas at your discretion are strong in this aspect, and their designers (and producers) should be hailed for understanding the necessity for spending extra money to make extra content that they don’t really need. If Metroid Prime: Corruption did not force you to go back through areas you already went through, it would have been a better game.

By including a block in the game, it forced the players who were not intrigued enough with the world and story to spend some more time in the same areas, while giving the players who actually cared, the completionists and those who had been sucked into the world of Metroid, the green light to even more content. Logical?

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Vanessa and Her Nightmare, Best Game Design Winner at IndiePub Contest

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-bad-pilcrow.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]twOBUIhi55k[/wp_youtube]

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Guest Post: What We Want From the Next Decade

Can you believe in 10 years we have gone from games like The Sims and Deus Ex to games like Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead: Redemption? And while pretty much every site/show/blog is pitching in their two cents of the top 10 games/(game-related-topic)s of the year or next year, I wanted to do something else.

Because while every single one of these lists is absolutely perspective-based, I think there are certain things everyone who cares about games as a medium wants to see in the future. So, here are a few things I would like to see tackled in the next ten years (and I believe it can happen).

Explore new characters. I am tired of playing as the tough, smart-aleck, straight, lady-killer, white, adult male. I want to experience some new stories, some new characters with new dilemmas and backgrounds. How about someone who isn’t so tough and confident? Making the main character Black, Latin-American, Chinese, or Indian allows for a different story. I was hoping they would unmask Master Chief as a Japanese man, but that never panned out.

And we need more variety in gender, too. Almost every hero in games is male, and most of the ones who aren’t are hyper-sexualized, rather dull, cliché characters. And using characters of different sexual orientation can be a good way to teach people about the issue and equality. Hopefully someone is listening right now, because it is really sad that this pattern has been going on for as long as it has.

Not be afraid to tackle real-world problems. This is beyond just naming the enemy after a terrorist group. The Twilight Zone episode, “Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, tackled the Red Scare (extreme fear of communism in the US) just years after the period, and I think if a designer has something he/she wants to say about an event or just the times, and it is meaningful in a game format, it should be there.

Does that mean we should make a game to cover every major even in recent history like 9/11? No. But if a video game can take something like 9/11 and enlighten the player in some way, it should be done (but maturely). (By the way, I am not supporting a 9/11 game – I don’t think there is any reason to make a game on the topic – nothing much I have to say on the tragedy – kind of black and white)

More artistically mature production choices. Just because a game sold well doesn’t mean it needs a sequel, especially not so soon after the previous game (Call of Duty, I am especially talking to you).

A sequel should only be made if the story and/or gameplay can be expanded on, not just to give more of the same old crap, even if it means missing out on a lot of profit. I can think of many of the best books and films that never even got a sequel, and that is a sign of artistic restraint (I would kill whoever announced Citizen Kane 2).

I also want developers to branch out a little more and innovate. All of the low risk/high reward wii games, annual (identical) sports games, guitar hero games, and mindless shooter games are weighing us down, and I am getting sick of seeing them. Do something new, something that will leave a mark on the industry, or do nothing at all. I want to see something new somewhere in any game I play. Is that too much to ask for?

And just a note, we have been making a lot of progress in terms of scheduling releases, but we can still improve. Instead of all the games coming out around the holidays, the games come out at both the beginning and end of the year. It would be nice if good games came out all year round (there is a wide open, uncrowded spot for those three/four months).

Half Life 3.

Haha, just kidding (sort of).

People to focus less on glitter, more on games.

This is especially true since we have no idea what this next decade will bring. With the Wii on its way out, the Move and Kinect just coming onto the scene, and the 3DS ahead of us (and who knows what else), we as an audience need to focus less on the wow factor and more on the fun.

Virtual reality doesn’t matter unless it enhances the gaming experience and allows games to tackle new ground with new possibilities. I would honestly not care about any new systems boasting the new technology if I knew the games were going to be all the better for it.

So, to developers, make systems that make it easy for designers to make amazing experiences for the player, because that is what grows our industry and pushes games further on their evolutionary path. The future technology is not what excites me, it is the future games and stories they can tell and the way they make us think and act.

Maturity.

If we want to be able to tell stories that cross into our real world, we need to show some maturity. That means not being racist or sexist or demeaning to any group (it is depressing that I have to even mention this), and I am speaking both to developers and to gamers.

I’ve started to hate playing online games, where there are always a few mocking others for race and sexual orientation, or have anti-Semitic images and unmentionable body parts for their profile picture.

These are the people that give gaming the bad name, which is insane, since I have always thought gamers were supposed to be a little more open and accepting than that (what do I know). But the crazy thing is that video games themselves have been known to have sexist, racist, and other demeaning material (even the big games). I would kinda like to move past that, if you don’t mind.

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

The Fun and Challenges of Building a Successful Tank MMO

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-wargaming.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]LBUIK3pA8qM[/wp_youtube]

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Thump Football, Developing A Game On Top Of A Real Football Game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-thump.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]uPyASGnVtGU[/wp_youtube]

Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Post: Emphasis on Story in Horror Games

I am a huge horror fan – my favorite author is Stephen King, I love horror movies (the original Scream is my favorite, above Blair Witch Project and Halloween), and I tend to embrace being afraid (I’m a freak like that). But for some reason, horror games have kind of fallen short for me. I think developers realize this, and I have definitely seen some movements in the right direction (I’ve seen some in the wrong direction too), but overall, I have been most disappointed with the stories in horror games.

Why would a horror game be released with a lackluster story!? That is one of the major attributors to the horror, yet it is often just used as an excuse for the weird goings-on. I think horror games could tell great stories through the gameplay, which could revitalize the genre, and make games scarier, even after the player puts the controller down.

There tend to be a few cliché stories in horror games. First, there is the searching story (most of the Silent Hill games). In this game, your character spends the entire game searching for a girlfriend/daughter/whatever. It has been overused in all genres. In Mario, this type of story is used because the designers want everything to be simple, so as to focus on the core gameplay, but that is not what designers are doing with horror games. Why do they use this rehashed story? Sure, it may have other details attached to it, little twists, but there are so many other stories that we can tell with the horror genre.

Another cliché is to not include any real story at all. Basically, a bunch of weird crap is going on, and for some reason, you have to fight it. It sets up the gameplay, but doesn’t contribute to the experience at all. Although we can still scare the player in a horror game with this weak or absent story, we cannot horrify the player.

This is something that many horror writers can do exceptionally well – horrifying the reader. Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe can freak the reader out, without the tool of cheap scares in their toolbox. How do they do this? Well, so far, psychological horror novels have been FAR better at psychologically scaring their audience than psychological horror games. The written word has an advantage, though, as we can see through the character and into their mind.

In a scarecrow scene in Batman: Arkham Assylum, you walked down a hallway, a lurking dread inside of you. You looked around for the Scarecrow, who was nowhere to be found, when you morphed into a young child, a young Bruce Wayne. A blink of the eyes, and you are now in an alleyway. A gunshot goes off, and you realize where you are – the past. Your mother screams, and her screams are only hushed by another gunshot to the chest. The shooter flees, leaving you alone with the corpses which used to be your parents so very long ago. And there stands a young child, looking down upon his parents, now truly alone.

This was an amazing scene, and didn’t even include any gameplay. Shivers ran through me as I played through it, and for the first time I truly understood the backstory of Batman – as I turned the young boy away from his dead parents. In every iteration of Batman’s origins, I have never felt this impacted. This is what horror games can do. We can read into the past, the soul, of characters, learn their motivations, their fears. Story is important, and characters are important to story.

So what kind of characters should we create? They should be identifiable, yet fresh. The player should want them to succeed from the heart, know them, and yet, not quite understand all of them. There is a quirk to the protagonist, something strange – the unknown. But the motivations should go beyond, “rescue the girlfriend”. Read some Stephen King, and you’ll get some ideas.

I’d also like to see some new themes, some new settings, for horror games to take the genre somewhere it hasn’t gone before. Games like Silent Hill have done the isolated creepy town, games like Resident Evil have done the zombies, games like Clock Tower have done the haunted mansion, and… well, I guess almost all horror games have included at least one of these three topics. The most original horror game I have seen in years was Dead Space, and it is one of very few. How about a game that takes place in a POPULATED town that includes interesting characters, events… there’s a lot you could do with an open-world horror game like this. A game in a prison. A detective-horror game. Spiders. Think of the stories that come to mind just by switching a setting or subgenre. People wonder why the horror genre is failing, and I look back and see a long list of copy-cat game series that have barely stepped outside the back door, while horror novels have out the back and through the cornfield.

Horror games have a LONG way to go before they can match the horror felt after reading The Stand or watching The Exorcist (more well known as film than novel), and I think improving the stories we tell are the best way to catch up to where literature and film has gone. Before touching a horror game as a designer, one should be familiar with works of the genre across all mediums (the Naughty Dog developers watched many movies and read many tales before designing Uncharted, one of the best series of all time). Our industry is an infant compared to the other industries, and there’s a lot we could learn with their progress, from Dracula and Frankenstein to The Shining and Silence of the Lambs, from Resident Evil to whatever lies ahead. The horror genre of games has long been seen as a mindless, primitive genre, but I think we can transform to the smartest genre of games, which it has the potential to become.

I plan on writing more specific articles about horror games in the future; this is supposed to serve as a more general introduction, so tune back in for more later on! If you dare…

So, what are your thoughts? Favorite horror games, movies, films? Horror game ideas? Thoughts on the upcoming Silent Hill: Downpour?

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.

Free Game Sounds…

Hey folks,

Someone posted a link in the gamedev.net Announcement forum for Free Game Music/Sounds. Seems like an interesting collection and you can use them for free in your online and mobile games 🙂

Check it out here 🙂
http://www.nosoapradio.us

Enjoy 🙂