SE should read this fucking article

[Alleya]

http://www.penny-arcade.com the rant for october 10 2007. Front page for today, in other words. An article about MMO construction from an industry bigwig. SE could take some serious lessons from this. What do you all think?

So there I was, at the San Diego ComicCon, sidling past the Penny Arcade table on my way to say hi to Scott Kurtz at the PvP Online booth, when suddenly this Tycho person grabbed me and pulled me aside to rant and rave. He had an idea, he said. A crazy idea.

I should have known. Another wannabe game designer. But hey, this one has this semi-popular website and regularly trashes developers he doesn’t like. I had to stand still and listen, or risk professional doom.

Basically, he said, he had this idea for a construction game. “Like, SimCity?” I said. No, like with dumptrucks and demolition balls and cranes and architects with blueprints and everything. Like, real construction, Bob-the-Builder style.

And he wanted it as an MMO.

Great, I said, humoring him. I’m working on this thing called Metaplace, and you can make it yourself, and…

“No, no…” he said. “I want you to write up a design article. For the site. Like, a guest spot.”

Hoo boy.

OK, enough of trying to be funny on Tycho’s turf. After all, the challenge he gave me is non-trivial. And I have until midnight tonight to try to complete it. Obviously, I am going to fail.

The first question is, “What is the game?” And I don’t mean “large-scale construction.” I mean at a more fundamental level. I mean, a hundred people using the building tools in The Sims at the same time in the same plot of land would presumably qualify. It wouldn’t be fun, but it’d meet Tycho’s admittedly vague criteria. Or maybe it’s a game of resource management, and your goal is not to get buried in cement. Hell, it’d probably be more fun to play demo ball instead and get to smash buildings.

Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name. In an MMO, we nest games pretty deep, because some games are short-term and some are long-term. In something like WoW, the smallest games are things like “hit Heal on time.” Then you get ‘kill the foozle,” and above that “kill a hell of a lot of foozles” and above that “make yourself stronger by picking the right gear” and in some cases “make your guild stronger” and so on.

Ideally, for an MMO, you want your highest level games to be ones that cycle naturally, rather than reaching an end. That way people can keep playing if they want to – the game doesn’t boot them out.

Each of these games needs to have fun choices in its own right. It can’t be repetitive and dull. It’s very easy to accidentally make a system repetitive and dull, so you have to watch out.

I ended up with a tiered set of games after my doodling, and that’s when I realized that my take on a construction MMO is kind of large. At the high level, I wanted a city-level view so that there could be different locales and challenges for places to build. At the low level, I would want users engaged in setting up the wiring, grading the land, and collaboratively designing the building. Each of these is basically a game that must be made fun in its own right.

And for each game, we need to have a range of challenges. What’s more, ideally these challenges need to not be just “beatable,” but they should be “winnable with style” so that you can come back to a challenge you have already won and try to do it better, faster, in a different way, with a personal stamp on it, and so on.

This means that there’s no way I am designing all of these systems right now, not when Tycho gave me a 500 word limit and I am at word 677.

So:

Individual players or groups of players, henceforth called “firms,” take bids from a “job board” of sorts. This board consists of real estate owners who want to build buildings of various sorts. The buildings might range from houses to marinas to office buildings to skyscrapers to museums. Each bid is actually auctioned off, and they can be resold between players later (a secondary market for bids).

Each project comes with a budget based on the bid. The firm has to work within this budget – overruns come out of their hide, and if you have cash left over, you get to keep it. (There’s probably a “rescue” mechanism – projects with bonuses for time-to-completion, a fake “loan” system to keep people from flaming out, etc).

Projects happen on a real map – probably multiple maps, representing neighborhoods or cities. Each one is divided into lots based on a simple grid. Each grid square has factors like desirability, real estate value, and so on. They also each have their own heightfield and topology that will affect the building process. In fact, they may already have buildings on them.

In fact, it would be good if for each possible bid, you were given a choice of possible sites, so that choice of site made a difference. Then the location could affect stuff like what sorts of materials were required (gotta build classier in a classy neighborhood). Even better, as buildings are built and torn down, the neighborhood map changes, so building a really nice house in a depressed area will actually raise property values in adjacent lots, so that over time, the maps really shift.

Once your firm has a project, it’s time to get to work. The firm can work together to develop a plan – this consists of a blueprint, which any member of the group can work on. Basically it is a proposed layout for the building. Oh, you can just start jumping into the lot and doing stuff, but without a plan, you will likely fail. You’re going to be working with a lot of moving parts: landscaping, foundations, skeletal infrastructure, walls and ceiling, lighting, electrical, plumbing, flooring… all of these things cost money from your budget. So making a mistake is costly. You want to use the blueprint facilities, which are kind of like a guildwide forum plus scratchpad with tools, to plan as much as you can.

Then you get to the actual process of doing stuff. And here, it really depends on what exactly you are doing. If it’s grading the land (and hey, you might not want it all flat. Maybe you want a pond, or a cool split-level thing, or whatever), then you drop into a bulldozer and literally go bulldoze. The thing to realize is that each minute you spend in the ‘dozer is going to tick away cash from your budget. That said, nothing is stopping you from having your whole firm hop into bulldozers and play bumper cars if you have the cash to burn.

The same is true for each of the different sorts of tasks involved. You might have some folks doing flooring while others do drywall. The challenge is different in different cases; you have only so much money to spend, and so much time to build in, and you might by trying to hit milestones (the people ponying up the cash will want to stop by every once in a while to see if you are on track). In the case of paint, for example, the game is one of precision and efficiency; in the case of lighting, it’s about purchasing the lights and placing them and making sure that everywhere is actually lit. I have no idea what makes for a fun drywall subgame, sorry.

Yes, you have to purchase the supplies. Yes, that comes out of your firm’s budget too. And there’s tons of choices there, lots of sorts of things to choose from. Fancy Italian marble, or fake Linoleum marble? Buying in bulk may be cheaper. Whatever you have left over goes into the firm’s inventory to be used on future projects… and if you patronize specific ones of the NPC suppliers, you could eventually get deals because of your past buying history. Don’t forget to account for delivery time!

You (the firm) can divide up all of these tasks. Have someone be a purchaser, someone else be in charge of decorating. Everyone will want to drive cranes that smash existing buildings to clear a lot, of course. Maybe there’s a user-created content system for making flooring and textures, but you have to send off for the stuff to get made, and it costs lots of extra money but might put your project over the top.

Some big tasks, like lining up girders, might actually take four of five people. One at each end, plus a crane driver, whatever.

At any time, you can pull up the blueprint and compare it to reality to see how well everything is working. See, the blueprint is so you can try to keep all the players coordinated. It’s not how you are scored. Oh – and keep in mind – physics matters. Your building has to STAY UP. Depending on the lot, you might get hit with subsidence, with expensive digging through bedrock, with possible earthquakes…

OK, so now we have a whole resource management game of budget, supplies, choosing challenges, auctioning for bids, keeping your firm afloat, and actually building buildings. Or walking away from disastrous projects.

But then what? Well, your building, if completed, gets assessed. This happens in a couple of ways; one way is that the folks in your firm get a bit of experience with whatever tools they used. This makes those folks cheaper to use in the future. (Think of it as leveling up in leveling ground – each player earns XP in different specialties).

The neighborhood also changes a bit. For example, the value of a lot that lost its ocean view because of the giant condo you built will probably go down. The houses might go up if you built a community center with swimming pool. Or might go down if what you had to make was a chemical plant. This way the gaming landscape is always shifting for the future. A lot that used to be terrible for housing now gets better. Old buildings get destroyed, new ones spring up. Ah, urban renewal.

But really, it’s about keeping the customers happy. You see, each thing that you put in the building – be it unpainted drywall, really nice stippled leather wall coverings, tacky plastic shades or teak flooring, will be invisibly generating fields of data. And we’re going to let loose a bunch of little AI people, the folks moving into the building, in there. Think of them like a bunch of small Sims type people running around trying to find the bathrooms, complaining about the carpeting, and so on. And they are going to return a verdict on how well the building accomplishes its purpose. If the family is happy with the house you designed, then you might get a cash bonus. You’ll also have more experience in housebuilding, which will cut costs for future houses (see, the firm levels up too, in skill trees based on building type).

Finally, there’s social stuff. Rankings of firms, overall, by market, over time with graphs, and so on. There’s even a social metric ranking, where people can visit any completed building, check out the stats on how it got made (cool graphs of spend over time, player participation, etc), and more importantly, take cool screenshots to post up. Buildings people admire for their aesthetics can enter player-voted architectural competitions with their screenshots, and win cash prizes for the firm, and “architectural genius” badges. The system also awards badges to firms for stuff like “best beautification project,” “coolest marina of 2009,” and so on. A good collection of badges means that they get better treatment on their bids.

And of course, let’s not forget that players need ranks too. Part of the budget is going to player salaries. The firm can adjust them, and players can hop firms if they so choose. Lots of firms will be tight groups of friends, but some might be made up of free agents, or poorly paid newbie slave labor. Players get ranked based on their cash, their awards, their skill at the tools…

Now, is this fun enough? I don’t know. Too much is dependent on the moment-to-moment gameplay of actually building stuff (can girder-laying with a group actually be cool?). It’s easy to see lots of ways to make bulldozing and demolition fun, and less easy to see painting being that way. But each of those is essentially a design project of its own. I’d prototype each one as a single-player game, and see if I can make it fun. But I don’t have room to do that in this article.

OK, I’m over 2500 words now, so I will shut up. I just want to say, this was cruel and mean of Tycho to ask for (an MMO about industrial construction??? wtf??), and involved incredible mental pain and suffering, plus the consumption of more Red Vines than is strictly healthy. So I dare him to now go build it. I’ll get him a Metaplace account, and Gabe can do all the art.

Oh, and if you think you can do it better, have a better design, great. This isn’t really a design anyway, it’s more like a sketch that could become a design. Not like I actually know the construction business. Given that I dashed this off in three painful hours, I am sure it sucks and has completely ruined my professional reputation anyhow. What little rep I had, anyway. Just like I thought Tycho would do if I snubbed him.

Hmm. Next time, I’m walking down a different aisle at ComicCon.

[theo]

Was an interesting read, but I can't help to think about the fact that this guy had his hands in Star Wars Galaxies. That game was a disaster <.<;

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt though and hope that all of the stupid shit in that game was not his doing.

[Correction]

He's not wrong about the design fundamentals of a game:

Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name.

Ideally, for an MMO, you want your highest level games to be ones that cycle naturally, rather than reaching an end. That way people can keep playing if they want to – the game doesn’t boot them out.

Each of these games needs to have fun choices in its own right. It can’t be repetitive and dull. It’s very easy to accidentally make a system repetitive and dull, so you have to watch out.

This is the key thing for any MMO to not hemorrhage customers. Are the choices you make interesting? Do they reward creativity and ultimately, reward that top level game of 'improve your character?'

The fact that FFXI only answers this question 'yes' in 1 out of every 20 or 30 encounters once you hit 75, and even then only once or twice every 24 hours (if that), is why this article should be relevant to SE should they ever embark on the path of making another MMO.

[Beckwin]

Can you steal boats in this game?

If not then I don't give a damn.

[BRP]

WHY AM I SO BALD?

[Moosey]

I actually find the idea of that kind of game interesting, though I think it would do better as a single player game, as opposed to an MMO.

[Norelco]

I thought the point about rewarding the "firm" as a whole was interesting. The only reward linkshells get in FFXI is the satisfaction of killing something for the first time, or killing something efficiently. In the end, most of the rewards are still individual-based. SE needs to find a way to give benefit to the entire linkshell for making a big achievement, and because of those achievements it should either unlock a path to future achievements or make their job the next time around a little easier.

[Fhqwghads]

If SE had their hands in this game, they'd make a supply truck that spawned once every 24 hours with a 3 hour window. It would pop in the outskirts of the city, with junkies and gangsters who'd take you out if they heard you. The supply truck spawn point would be surrounded by meth heads which if you accidentally bumped against would link with all the other meth heads and kill your whole firm. Of course there would be 200 other people in other firms there waiting for the supply truck to pop, most of which bot-claim it. Then, when the supply truck popped claimed and the firm who got claim bartered with it for a while, the supply truck would eventually hand over what it had and it would be something retarded like a dustpan instead of the super-deluxe awesome roofing nails which would survive eternity.

[Charla]

translation: SE only gets credit for the elements of its game mechanics that it copied from EQ, UO and possibly RO. Things that actually like BCs and sky mechanics other than Ulli are ignored.

[Septimus]

translation: SE only gets credit for the elements of its game mechanics that it copied from EQ, UO and possibly RO. Things that actually like BCs and sky mechanics other than Ulli are ignored.

Wait a second. You mean to tell me that people ridicule the worst and most deplorable aspects of the game that need to be done away with immediately when making a joke? How totally unlike human nature.

[Boyiee]

Can you steal boats in this game?

If not then I don't give a damn.

Is that game really any fun? lol

[Gwynplaine]

Interesting stuff.

And for each game, we need to have a range of challenges. What’s more, ideally these challenges need to not be just “beatable,” but they should be “winnable with style” so that you can come back to a challenge you have already won and try to do it better, faster, in a different way, with a personal stamp on it, and so on.

TAU touched upon this idea for the first time in ffxi I think. Assault, and the Ashu Talif quests for example. In many missions you can meet the minimum requirement to finish, or if you're able you can complete more goals for more points. Return more supplies, destroy more walls, match more apkallu, clear 100 enemies or clear all 300 etc. The impact it has on you however is usually only the difference of a few hundred points. So if the goal is challenging to clear in the best way, the result is that players will simply choose to do an easier assault with a static reward. And in some cases (Blitzkrieg assault), the NM required to finish in the best way seems to spawn at random. Meaning you're only able to excel at completing the assault if you get lucky, which is beyond stupid. But really who cares, because it has little impact on the player in the end. Assault points can be obtained without luck elsewhere so why bother.

The Ashu Talif quests are slightly different. Instead of rewarding you for completing more of one general goal, you obtain more types of rewards for completing additional sub goals. The extra goal rewards are typically less than great however and hold it back from having that much relevance.

Overall the effect feels like little more than a watered down experiment of how a broader system like it could be. I'd definitely like to see them design more activities like this in the future and on a larger scale. For example, KS99 wyrm. You could be able to defeat the mob and win as usual with all the chances at the usual loot. Alternatively you could finish within X amount of time, or finish using fewer party members, and be further awarded. Maybe something like an extra chance to obtain Speed Belt, 10k Conquest Points, Gil, and Experience/Limit points to everyone involved. It wouldn't have to be purely materialistic either, but that's just an example.

Hopefully they'd be willing to take it further, and leave their random blind luck factors out of it.