Elder Game

EDIT: my HUGE thanks to the dozen people who were able to hop in (with no notice) and help test the very early pre-alpha! I’ve taken the server down now to work on the many, many glitches that I noticed as people played. :)  But please do mention any issues you noticed… I’m sure I don’t know about them all yet.

The good news is the server was very stable the whole time, and we peaked with 11 concurrent users, and no noticeable server lag (though some client lag from the rendering in town). That’s great, it means I already hit one of my stability goals for pre-alpha! Now I can work on polishing it up, and then making sure it can run unattended for a few days straight. The next, hopefully-somewhat-longer test will come this week.

Thanks again everybody, and if you have comments from the quick test, please post here!

[This is the end of day #4 of TORTUROUS DEBUGGING. I'm just trying to get the game stable and playable on a real internet connection (instead of local LAN). I've tracked down most of the critical bugs, but two remain, and they are both apparently bugs in SmartFoxServer 2X. Worst case, I may have to rip SmartFox out entirely and plug some competitor in... which will take tons of time. This is so damned frustrating and so tedious. I thought for sure I'd be able to invite people to try the game out today... no dice. But while I bang my head against the wall for a fifth straight day, here's some other things to read.]

In my last blog post about group combat, Ross Smith made an astute comment:

Right now I’m just bug-fixing the pre-alpha, which is torturous and tedious, so I won’t blog about that. Instead let me talk a bit about types of gameplay complexity.

Good Complexity versus Bad Complexity

My game doesn’t shy away from complex systems, but that doesn’t mean I’m implementing arbitrary complexity. Far from it! For instance, when I was coding the ability for werewolves to eat corpses, Sandra jokingly asked, “Can werewolves eat skeletons? They don’t have any meat on them!” and the answer was… yes. Yes they can eat skeletons, and it’s just as nutritious as a tasty gazelle. They can also eat fungus monsters, fire demons, and golems made entirely of brass.

[Editor's note: My immediate response was "Right answer!" - Sandra]

The reason? If I made it so that werewolves can only eat “meaty” things, it would hamper my ability to create content. The corpse-eating mechanic is supposed to be a quick-heal for werewolves. So if they don’t get it, what are they supposed to do? All they can do is stand around waiting to heal naturally. That’s no fun… and what’s the up side of this realism? Nothing.

But on the other hand, there’s very similar situations that I’m fine with. For instance, if you’re a Fire Mage, it’s going to suck fighting monsters that are resistant to fire. Should I remove those? No, because that down side is part of how group combat works. I want groups to encounter diverse gangs of monsters with different strengths and weaknesses, so each fight feels a little different. Sometimes there will be some fire-resistant monsters in the mix; sometimes there’ll be fire-weak monsters. I wouldn’t make entire gangs of fire-proof monsters, because that would be tedious and un-fun. But some mixed in regularly? Sure. That’s a kind of complexity that helps me achieve my goal for combat.

Now, it’s true that if I cared enough about werewolves only eating meat, I could make sure that every group encounter had a certain percentage of meaty corpses. But I’m planning for this game to have a ton of different abilities, and corpse-eating is just one of many. If I made each system as realistic as I could, I’d never be able to make content: the requirements would be too nightmarishly complex.

So I have to carefully choose my complexity. In the end, realistic corpse-eating isn’t important enough. It wouldn’t make anything more fun, nor does it lead to interesting decisions. It’s not good complexity.

Group Combat Composition

Speaking of group combat… I’m taking a tack from 4th edition D&D, where “having a fun fight is more important than explaining how every monster ended up in this dungeon.”

When I started DMing 4th edition D&D, this irked me a lot, announcing to my players, “You round the corner and see a mummy! It’s flanked by a pair of orcs, and behind them lurks a creature made entirely of gibbering lips!” You would think the first question they’d ask is, “How did these creatures end up working together?” At least, as a DM that was my first question. So I worked out complex back-stories for these random assortments of monsters… but frankly my players didn’t much care. Occasionally they would wonder aloud about particularly weird combinations, and I would drop a trivial explanation in somewhere, like “the orcs are here fulfilling a tribal obligation to the mummy’s ancestors.” That sort of thing.

In the big picture, this was a good change. It just required changing the realism of the fantasy world. In earlier D&D worlds, monsters tended to be clannish and loners, but in this world monsters tend to cooperate more.

Once I was able to swallow this new kind of realism, it opened a lot of doors to interesting fights. No more did I have to say, “well it’s a gnoll cave, so of course there’s more gnolls around the corner.” Now I could throw a lot more surprises at them.

This has other ramifications, of course. In earlier D&D where you had to pick your spells in the morning before going off to adventure, it was very important to be able to predict what sort of monsters would show up. Otherwise you’d memorize the wrong spells! But 4th edition did away with most of this, which is a mixed blessing, but I definitely think one of the up-sides of this design was the diversity of combat.

You may be asking, “why not just make diverse monsters of the same race? Why not have eight kinds of gnolls, each filling different combat roles?” Well, I definitely do lots of that. But doing too much breaks the rule of identification: experienced players should be able to guess how an enemy is going to behave, and to do that they need to be able to identify the enemy rapidly.

In my prototype, I’ve got goblin healers, goblin spear guards, goblin lightning mages, goblin skirmishers, goblin archers, and goblin bosses, to name a few. (Can you tell what artwork I installed first?) But I can’t use all these goblins in the same area. Even though they each have some visual differences, in the chaos of combat it’s too tough to instantly distinguish them all.

In my prototype dungeon, I don’t use the goblin archers or goblin skirmishers. Instead, I use skeleton archers and skeleton swordsmen for those roles. Skeletons are easy to distinguish from goblins, and players will have already encountered these skeleton combatants earlier, so they’ll be instantly understandable. (Building on previous knowledge like that also helps players feel like they’re learning how the world works… because they are!)

The point is not to worry too much about why skeletons and goblins (and some other monsters) are all working together. The point is to make combat feel fun.

(Having said all that, I have to admit I’m still not happy with group combat yet. But I decided I need some actual people playing the game… and, you know, grouping… before I spend any more time on it!)

The next time I’m trying to avoid doing more debugging, I’ll blog about alternate gameplay modes, such as pacifist characters.

Quick question: does anybody know where I can buy a wolf-howl sound effect that can be used in commercial applications? There are some on soundrangers.com and I’ll use those if need be, but the clean ones (with no background noise) are 7 seconds long… which is a whole lotta howling when you’re sitting there as a werewolf. The shorter ones have too much background noise to work.

—

Development notes:

I finished the pre-alpha checklist for werewolves tonight. But I’m tempted to keep working on them. I’m thinking of adding a tracking/hunting skill that works kind of like cartography in AC2 (which is a kissing cousin of archaelogy in WoW). But that’s not on my pre-alpha checklist, so I’m managing to resist implementing it for now… I have more basic stuff to do! Like, say, making the mini-map work right, or letting you trade inventory items, or adding more than one character art set, or…

But I’d also really like to get werewolves more fleshed out. They’re one of four or five “big choices” available to players. These are things like becoming a paladin, selling your soul to a demon, becoming a vampire, etc. Big decisions, not the sort of thing that you turn off when you don’t want it. These permanent, game-changing decisions help you identify and bond with your character.

For these to work, each of them is going to need some unique systems that make them play differently. And werewolves aren’t quite in the right ballpark yet. Until I feel like it’s there, I feel kind of lost… like I don’t understand what I’m really making here. So I’m warring with the desire to keep prototyping, versus the desire to flesh out the general game mechanics so that you guys can get in here and poke around.

It’s tough. I really don’t want people to see it in a shoddy state — first impressions are important! I’m not expecting it to be any good at first… but it needs to be just good enough that you can intuitively understand that “some day this will be a real MMO.” I’m almost there, it just needs a bit more polish and a week more of bug fixing. But I might also be “almost there” with werewolves’ game mechanics… so close… maybe just this one more little bit! Or maybe a few more iterations…

And this is why so many game companies just steal other games’ mechanics. Inventing new stuff is incredibly time consuming, and you never really know when you’re done until you get there.

[This is a status update about an indie fantasy MMO in progress, code-named "Gorgon".]

Calligraphy Is Implemented

Yesterday I sat down to implement Calligraphy, a skill that is primarily intended to boost Sword combat damage during pre-alpha. I kept it real simple: you learn “calligraphy recipes”, which take costly inks and various random junk (such as salt or strawberries or whatever other junk I found laying around in the item table) which… get mixed into the ink, I guess? Sure! Then you get a buff that lasts one hour. Every time you level up the skill you discover a new recipe, but you can only have one recipe active at a time. Some recipes are potent but very expensive, some are cheap but weaker. Some don’t buff Sword skill at all, but some other thing, like Slashing Damage (which werewolves and axe users also do) or Max Health. So there’s some interesting but minor decisions to make, but mostly it follows the age old formula: Consume Resources -> Gain Temporary Power Boost.

I kept Calligraphy very simple so that I could see how efficiently I could implement it. I implemented the first 25 levels of content for it in one 8-hour day, which is slower than I thought it would take. I wanted to get 50 levels’ worth done. But that’s useful data! I should do the next 25 levels just to see if my pace speeds up. (But I really don’t need 50 levels’ worth of Calligraphy content for the pre-alpha, so it’s hard to convince myself to do that yet.)

Even with this very simple system, it feels kind of entertaining, so I’m pleased. Part of its charm is that you get a new recipe every level, and the recipes are unpredictable — not following any easily-detected pattern, and with enough variety to be surprising. So it’s fun to level up and see what you get. To top the system off, I created 5 extra calligraphy recipes for use in loot, so there’s a chance to find recipes when you kill boss monsters.

Meditation Is Out of Pre-Alpha

As originally explained, Meditation was going to give you buffs if you “meditate on an item”. Basically you select something in your inventory, click “meditate”, and you get a 24-hour buff (mostly pertaining to the Unarmed skill). The item you meditated on doesn’t go away, so there’s no cost. But the catch is that you can never reuse the same type of item again. If you meditate on a Strawberry one day, you can’t meditate on Strawberries ever again.

When I explained this idea, nobody on the blog thought that was sane, so I took a step back to look at it. I agree it isn’t inherently fun, but remember that I’m okay with implementing things that aren’t super fun on their own, if it increases the chances of emergent gameplay experiences. But that doesn’t mean I want downright unpleasant game systems, of course! Nobody would use them, so that’d be a waste.

The thing is that on paper, this skill is a pretty good deal. You won’t run out of items: there are hundreds of items in the MMO already and I have barely any content at all, so I’m sure the final MMO will have many thousands of items. And this skill doesn’t require expensive consumables. It just requires something unusual: attention.

All non-combat skills take something in exchange for something else. In most cases it boils down to consuming time. (For instance, Calligraphy consumes time because you need to use expensive inks with it, which requires you to farm money for ink, which takes time.) But this skill is less about time and more about remembering what you’ve used it with in the past. That’s pretty atypical for an MMO, so naturally it sounds scary and un-fun, but I really don’t think it’s all that bad.

But I’m definitely packaging this idea wrong, and the mechanics are a tad too punitive. With a different metaphor and tweaked mechanics, I think this idea becomes a lot more appealing.

So let’s call this skill… how about “Worldly Knowledge”, and it augments Staff attacks, not Unarmed attacks. (I’ve always imagined staff users as the sort of people that know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, kind of like the original version of Little John.) The skill works the same way: you find items in the world and examine them to get XP. You can examine a different item every 15 minutes, and if it’s of a type you’ve never examined before, you get the XP. If it’s already been examined, you get nothing, but you can try something else in 15 minutes, so not much is lost. The skill doesn’t have any active effect: instead, Worldly Knowledge just gives you a small passive boost to Staff damage.

This is much less stressful because you don’t need to constantly find new items to get buffs every day — once you’ve earned the XP, you keep the passive boost forever. And if you forget which items you’ve examined, it’s not a huge deal — just try something else every 15 minutes. Hopefully this will make it feel more like the collection-centric system I’d envisioned. (“Ooh is that a new item? Let me examine it real quick!”)

Like I said above, I think this will be for Staff combat eventually, but in the short term I’ll make it boost Unarmed instead. I’m mothballing Meditation until I think of a new mechanic for it.

Laptop Support Is Out

I’ve been doing “real world tests” to see how quickly I can implement things. How fast can I build a dungeon? Make an NPC? Create skill content? Etc. The point of this is planning: I need to be able to realistically plan a schedule. I still have many more tests to go, but I’m already learning some things. One is that I need to drop support for laptop graphics cards.

I hate this decision, actually, because I always loved how you could play WoW on mid-range laptops when it first launched. But it takes me three times longer to make content for 2009 laptops versus content for 2008 desktop PCs! I guess it’s true what they say: you have to pay for quality. In this case, I pay with my time. To optimize a scene, I have to compile it, get it onto each laptop, see how it runs, then tweak, compile, and re-test, over and over and over. Each of the low-end laptop cards are different, too, so in one case I need to cut down the number of splat-maps used in terrain, but in another I need to cut down the number of polygons, and in another it’s draw-calls.

It just eats up time like you wouldn’t believe. And it’s dumb to spend my time on that, especially while the game is full of placeholder graphics! But even when it has real graphics, I’d rather have 3x the content instead of laptop support.

So I’m giving up on laptops. New high-end laptops from 2011 will be fine, and older laptops will probably work in ass-graphics mode, but I’m going to stop testing on laptops entirely.

Combat Psychology Is In

It turns out I have the tech — and the icons — for Combat Psychology already, so I’ll implement a bare-bones version of this combat skill. This gives Werewolves in wolf form at least one other combat skill they can use. In the big picture, Werewolf+Combat Psychology isn’t a great combo, versatility-wise, because there’s too much overlap in the skills (both can suss out vulnerabilities, for instance). And it’s pretty damned surreal to imagine entire packs of roving psychologist-werewolves… but it’s good enough for pre-alpha. There will be lots more choices in the final game.

Up next time: lessons from SWTOR, my own thoughts on non-invasive storytelling, and an introduction to some of my monster races.

I’m still slogging through the code. Not going as fast as I wanted — there’s been lots of interruptions, but also I’ve just had a hard time drilling through the rest of the tedious stuff needed to make the game workable for pre-alpha. I have the ADHDs pretty bad, and some days no amount of pushing myself can get me to work on something that’s boring. (Yet another reason a coding partner would be ideal… but not really practical given the budget at this point.)

But it’s getting there — I’ve slogged slowly through some of the boring stuff and can make decent progress again. To get back on track, I’ve punted some of the combat skills, as well as lots of the quests and other details for now. But I’ve been finishing up systems that are lying around partially-completed. One of those is Pathology.

Field Autopsies

Classic MMOs have a window of combat text spewing nonstop throughout the fight. I don’t want to do that for several reasons. First, displaying reams of text is clumsy in Unity, and it’s hard to manage it. Second, some MMOs really just provide it so that third-party tools can analyze the text… but that seems like a weird relic from bygone text-MUD days. The question is, why do players want a text log? The biggest reason is to see how much damage they did, who killed the monster, what their DPS was, that sort of thing. So I’ll answer those questions in a gamey way with the Pathology skill.

You’ll need to find a field autopsy kit to practice your Pathology skill. This isn’t standard-issue newbie-town fare, so it will require some effort to find. (Although in pre-alpha, it’s easy: the crazy guy in town just sells them for 50 bucks after you do his initial quest.) When you have this kit in your inventory and examine a corpse, you have the option to “autopsy” it.

When you autopsy, the game makes a skill check — that is, it rolls virtual dice and compares your Pathology skill to the monster’s anatomical difficulty. (Animals are easier to autopsy, people are harder, demons are harder still… that sort of thing.) Depending on how well the autopsy goes, you learn different info about the death.

The easiest thing to discover is how the monster died. This is based on the very last attack the monster received. This is mostly just for flavor, but it has a couple of minor game-mechanic details I’ll get to later. Another easy thing to learn is who dealt the fatal blow to it.

If you’re more skilled at pathology, you’ll also get a little report of how much damage each player did to the monster. If you’re really good at Pathology, you can see how much armor damage each person did to it. (Remember that there’s both a “health bar” and an “armor bar”.) But if you botch the autopsy, the corpse is ruined and you can’t figure anything out.

Only one player can autopsy a given corpse. After it’s done, though, anybody can view the corpse to see the “autopsy report.”

I imagine I’ll add more options to the report over time, like being able to see how enraged the creature was during the fight, and so on. And when it’s fully fleshed out, I’ll make a custom GUI for it. Right now, the autopsy information is shown as clumsy text… but it’s completely usable for pre-alpha, and maybe all the way through early beta. (I’m hoping to put off doing too much more GUI stuff until the new Unity GUI system is released in Unity 3.6. Otherwise I’ll just have to redo it later.)

Other Death Verbs

You can do a lot of things with a dead body in this game. Necromancers will want to harvest organs, sages will want to study the corpse’s anatomy to learn combat tips, that sort of thing. There’ll probably be a dozen different ways to use a corpse by the time beta arrives. I think that’s fun, but it does presents a management problem: who gets to do what?

To prevent griefing, I’ll implement the usual MMO rule that says only players who killed it (or their group members) can loot it/harvest it/etc. But that just prevents griefing. How do I help players manage corpse activities effectively? That’s the harder question. If one group member only cares about loot, but another person wants to practice autopsies, and the group’s werewolf wants to eat the corpse to boost their metabolism, who gets to do what?

Obviously, eating a corpse would make it difficult to autopsy. So you’d want to autopsy the corpse first and then eat it. And if you want to harvest body parts for your necromantic rituals, that would make the autopsy much more difficult. It might make the corpse less filling when eaten, too! So different players will have a different optimal order for doing things with corpses. The game should help players organize that behavior to make it easy… I haven’t really figured out how that will work, though.

I’ll probably start with a classic round-robin system, so that each player takes a turn getting first-pick of the corpse, and once they’ve done whatever they want to with it (loot it, autopsy it, etc.) then if there’s anything left over, other group members can jump in and do whatever to it, first come first served.

(For pre-alpha, there’s no checks at all — any jerk on the server can loot any corpse! So obviously there are lots of baby steps before I get there. But it’s something I’m thinking about.)

Art Diary: Video Test

Here’s a very tiny video — I’m trying to figure out the best way to do video footage. This is just me stuck in wolf form, killing a wussy goblin.

Lots of bugs! The goblin has no loot (oops, he should have — I forgot to fill out his loot table), so I just autopsy the corpse. That’s a bug too: as a wolf, I shouldn’t be able to use a field-autopsy kit! Instead, I should have the option to eat the corpse. Also, the floaty numbers aren’t sizing right, and it’s hard to follow them. Yet more bugs to figure out.

But I do love the mental image of a wolf killing a monster and then doing an autopsy, only to discover “Huh, this goblin was mauled to death by a wild animal. Weird!”

I am finally getting back to work on Project Gorgon, and after a few days of “Oh my god this is a full-sized MMO what the hell is wrong with me” terror, I got back into the swing of things. So what am I working on this week? The four combat skills in the pre-alpha. They are Fire Magic, Sword, Unarmed, and Werewolfing.

Now for pre-alpha I only really need one combat skill to prove you can kill things. But I went overboard and am doing four. The final game will also have a ton of auxiliary skills that add to the combat skills — for the pre-alpha, I’m just providing one auxiliary skill for each one.

I picked these because they help me flesh out the tech. (The werewolf system in particular is a huge special-case-fest that has helped me stretch the system’s boundaries dramatically.) But I want even the most mundane combat skill to be unique and flavorful… hopefully a bit of that flavor will seep through even in this early form.

Let me know how these sound. Fun? Terrible?

Unarmed

Every player starts with Unarmed skill and can Punch things. However, if you punch a tiger, that’ll go about as well as it would in real life. Unarmed represents martial-arts skill, and it’s hard to get good at martial arts. It’s easier to kill a tiger with a sword than with your bare hands. Unarmed is not really a starter skill — however, it can be useful as a second skill. Punching doesn’t require any energy, so you can keep punching right up until the bloody end. This makes it handy to mix with Fire Magic, which uses a lot of energy.

Unarmed gets more dangerous at higher levels, but it’s never as good at murdering as, say, Sword. But it has great special abilities, like stuns and knockback kicks.

All combat skills have non-combat synergies: skills that help make it more powerful. For the pre-alpha I’ll implement Meditation as the synergy for Unarmed. Meditation is very simple: you pick an item in your inventory and choose to meditate on it. This gives you a Combo that will work for the next 24 hours. The combo you learn will be based on the item you meditate on. So if you meditate on a piece of armor you might get the combo “Punch, Punch, Kick” to deal extra damage. If you meditate on a sandwich you might learn “Kick, Kick, Cobra Strike” instead. I’m not yet sure what the exact system will be, as I haven’t implemented it yet.

But here’s the important thing: you can never meditate on the same thing twice. You can meditate on a Starter Sword one day and an Apple Pie the next, but once you’ve meditated on something, it’s useless for further meditation: no Starter Swords or Apple Pies anywhere will work. However, ordinary items work just as well as rare items, so it’s not like you need to hoard special things to meditate on — you just have to constantly find new things to use. There’ll be thousands of items in the game so this shouldn’t ever be a severe limitation… but eventually it might be something you need to keep in mind.

Dhalsim knows how to optimize his Unarmed skill.

Meditation will have other uses (for instance, it boosts your Max Power for the Psionics combat skill), but for the pre-alpha I don’t think I’ll get any of the other uses implemented.

Sword

Sword skill is a good baseline combat skill. It does average damage against most enemies, and it can chop through armor just as quickly as it chops through flesh. Its special powers are centered around keeping an enemy from building up enough Rage to use their dangerous Rage Attacks, which makes the skill both offensive and defensive.

I’m still trying to get a handle on Rage Attacks — figuring out how often they should go off, how violent they should be, that sort of thing. So I’m not yet sure how important it is to be able to stop Rage attacks… but I’ll get things in the right ballpark eventually.

You learn new Sword abilities just by leveling up in the skill. There are also some secret techniques that can be purchased from trainers, but those are very rare for Sword.

For pre-alpha, Sword’s synergy skill is Calligraphy. (Historically, Chinese and Japanese martial arts are tied closely to the art of calligraphy.) I’m not sure how Calligraphy works yet, though. I was planning to do Blacksmithing, but that skill needs more tech than I have right now, so I grabbed Calligraphy from the list of skills. However, the design notes for Calligraphy make it seem extra-special dumb. So I’ll see if I can think of something else… I’ll let you know how that goes.

Fire Magic

Fire Magic is the easiest offensive magic to learn. (That’s true because the placeholder text on one of my NPCs says so. And hey, sounds canon to me.) For a while I was worried about “how can I make fire magic fun?” Then I hooked up the explosion for the Fire Burst spell, and realized: no worries. Exploding stuff is inherently satisfying.

Fire Magic does good damage and it has range. However, many things are resistant to fire, and fire magic is highly Rage-inducing, which means your opponents will get to use their Rage Attacks more often. (Of course, if it’s a melee monster that dies before it reaches you, it doesn’t get to use its Rage Attacks. But if you’re fighting an archer or a tough meleer, you’ll need to use some tactics.)

You learn new Fire Magic spells by researching them. This is just a crafting recipe: you plug in some raw components, click Research, and it tells you if you learned a new spell. There are quite a few Fire Magic spells to discover — I’ve already coded eight or nine varieties of Fireball alone. For instance, the Long Range Fireball is great for pulling. The Superdense Fireball makes enemies more vulnerable to fire, and the Agony Fireball does less direct damage but more slow-burning damage. You’ll have to figure out which ones work for you.

Fire Magic also has a few strategic spells like Fire Wall — a stationary fire pit that burns anything that gets close.

For the pre-alpha, I’m going to use the Lore skill as an auxiliary for Fire Magic. You increase your Lore by examining weird items and fixtures in the game, reading lore books, that sort of thing. It’s an exploration skill: the more you explore the world, the more Lore you’ll have. Lore boosts your mana pool so you can cast more spells. (That’s not what Lore is intended to do in the final game… it won’t even be directly related to Fire Magic. But since it’s already implemented, I’m hooking it to Fire Magic for the time being.)

Werewolf

In this game, a werewolf doesn’t have a convenient “manimal” form. They can only transform into a super-large, super-violent canine. Most NPCs are too afraid to talk to a werewolf in wolf form. Wolves also can’t wield weapons or tools. But one thing werewolves are good at is murder — preferably murder with friends.

During the full moon, you’re stuck in the wolf form for three straight real-world days. Outside of that time period, you can change back and forth voluntarily… well, you can become a wolf any time you want, anyway — changing back requires a skill check, as the wolf spirit doesn’t want to be repressed. At higher level this is only a mild hindrance, but at first you’ll get stuck being a wolf for hours at a time! (In the pre-alpha it’s always easy to change back, though, to make testing easier.)

Werewolf attacks do good damage, but are hampered by armor — it’s more difficult for them to kill heavily-armored foes. If two werewolves fight together, they can use Pack Attack to boost each others’ damage output — the more Pack Attack skills used in rapid succession, the more damaging they are.

Werewolves also have some techniques for sussing out enemy weaknesses, which they (or, more likely, their non-werewolf friends) can take advantage of — anything from Fire Vulnerability to Seafood Allergies. Some weaknesses are easy to take advantage of; others are quite difficult or even impossible. (The fiction is that the wolf is studying them to figure out what will kill them best… though this ends up being pretty surreal. How did the werewolf discover this kobold has a fear of snakes? I have no idea! And… I’m honestly not too worried about it, either.)

I plan to add two skills related to werewolves in the pre-alpha. First is less of a skill and more of an annoyance. Beast Talking is the skill that determines if you can speak. For each word you say, it does a skill check — if you fail, that word turns into a snarl or growl. Newbie werewolves will have to practice talking a while before they can even chat. (This is really just for flavor — it’s a shallow skill that’s easy to level up, so it’s just a … a thing. Verisimilitude… which is code for “me having fun” and making sure the chat system is versatile.)

The other skill — the useful combat augmentation skill — is Howling. This is as simple as it sounds: you Howl. You can do this anywhere outdoors, but the higher up you are, the more effective it is. It’s also more effective if more wolves howl with you. So you’ll want to find a tall outdoor spot, say at the top of a hill, and then start howling. If other werewolves hear it and want to join you, they can. The more wolves howling in the same area, the more effective the boost is.

After howling, for the next several hours (depending on your Howl skill, the altitude, and the number of wolves), you get access to special Combos. These are randomly picked, so some days your combo will be “Bite Bite Claw”, other days “Claw Bite Pounce”, etc. If you have enough werewolves in one spot, maybe you can even unlock multiple Combos… not sure yet.

I actually coded the whole “turn into a wolf during the real-world days of the full moon” system before realizing how useless that is for pre-alpha. Pre-alpha will only last for a month! So I’m going to speed up the process so the moon goes through a new phase every day, making every eighth day a full moon.

Whew!

There’s some other skills in the pre-alpha (such as Mycology and Gardening), but these are the combat skills. I wanted to add a few more, but then I realized “what the hell am I doing? Four is already three more than the minimum requirement.” In fact, one of the reasons I’m posting this is to help put a stop to feature creep. No matter how cool they might end up being, the Psionics and Taming skills can wait!

Let me know how these sound. Everything is fluid so I’m sure they’ll all change over time. What I’d most like an answer to is this question: ”when you think of <skill X>, what is the most fun thing you can imagine doing with it?” And if you have suggestions for other synergy skills, I still need more of those, too.

Art Diary

The werewolf combat icons are wonderful. I love ‘em. Here’s a few:

My regular job — the one I’ve been doing half-time — has had a crisis and I’ve had to switch back to doing it full time while we deal with an emergency. This will probably delay my plans for 3-5 weeks, I’m guessing. Frustrating, but the up-side is that afterwards, I will be able to take a chunk of time and work just on the MMO for several weeks. Working full time on the game is much more efficient than part-time work on it, so this delay has a silver lining.

Lessons from Star Corsairs

Dave Toulouse’s discussion of his indie Flash MMO “Star Corsairs” was informative. He shared sales and distribution numbers for it here.

In a nutshell, he worked on it for 5 months, launched the game with the last remains of his savings, and then promoted it hard for two weeks. He earned $273.31 in those two weeks, which wasn’t enough to keep him fed, so he’s had to go get a day job. He’s still hopeful it will pick up more steam as time goes on, but he couldn’t wait any longer.

The lessons seem to be:

• It’s really hard to get attention for your indie MMO
• You’d better plan on having the game live for a while, because at first it’s not going to have many players

I admit I haven’t paid a ton of attention to the publicity aspect of my MMO yet — I mean, this blog has kind of become a publicity blog in its own way, but aside from that, maybe I should start doing promotional efforts more aggressively right now. That feels like a whole separate job that I don’t know how to do (and don’t have time to do), though. I’ll be thinking about that aspect of the game.

Lessons from Lego Universe

I played Lego Universe for a few hours, and it seemed pretty nice. It didn’t quite hit all my buttons to make me pay for it, but I think it’s a pretty tight game. So I was surprised to hear it was going away. It just went free-to-play in August! They spent millions on this game, and they have 2 million sign ups, but they weren’t able to figure out a satisfactory revenue model for their target audience. The shuttering of Lego Universe means over 130 people are losing their jobs, too.

The game had an unfortunate development history, but I didn’t know any of that history when I played it: it just felt like a pretty decent little MMO. I didn’t realize an entire 130-person studio was riding on its success. So it feels like another game like Tabula Rasa: the final game may not have been a million-dollars-a-month moneygasm, but I’m sure they were making more money from it than it cost to run the servers and keep a small support team on it. But they needed the game to pay for 130 peoples’ salaries, plus pay back the millions they spent developing it. In the end I think it’s a lot less about the game, and more about how it just cost too much to make and run.

The lessons there seem to be:

• Don’t overspend/overstaff your MMO
• Don’t take too long developing it
• Find a way to earn money from your target audience

Pre-Alpha 1 Comes When?

I think both of these games’ lessons point out that I need to get something playable ASAP. I’m supposed to be testing this month with “Pre-Alpha 1″, which I scrambled to get working by the end of October. Now this emergency has pulled me away from the game entirely for a few weeks, so I guess Pre-Alpha 1 will be in November instead.

I also worry that Pre-Alpha 1 is not “playable” enough. I’ve been so focused on making sure the server architecture works that the content isn’t organized yet. So it’s basically a tech demo, with various vendors and items and monsters and quests lying about, ready to be used to test bits of the technology. It’s not really a game at all yet — more like a big pile of game parts that haven’t been quite assembled together.

The #1 goal of Pre-Alpha 1 is to make sure my server technology is stable, but in order to do that I need a dozen players logged in, all at once, playing for over an hour. If I need people playing the game for an hour, it stands to reason I need at least an hours’ worth of gameplay! I actually have that much content, more or less — I just don’t have it all connected and glued together. So if I just connect some of the quests and pieces a little bit, I think I can get that working. Hopefully that will happen by early next month, but it will depend on when I can get back to work on it.

Art Diary

Although I’m not coding on the game this week, some of the art I’ve ordered is coming in. Check out these combat ability icons. They’re being created at 64 x 64 pixel resolution, but are also designed to be legible at 32 x 32. That way, if you have a gigantic screen, you can see them in big-size, but in a little window, they’re half-size.

It can be very tricky to get icons that look good at both 32 x 32 and 64 x 64 — you need a balance of legibility (so it’s understandable at small size) and detail (so it looks good at large size). So I’m very happy with the look of these so far. Here’s just a couple (mixed and matched from different combat styles):

[This post is about 'Project Gorgon', an MMO in development.]

I needed something for the Lore skill to do. It’s a prerequisite skill (meaning lots of skills will require it), but it felt stupid without a job of its own, too.  So I decided they could research Words of Power. These seem pretty fun so far.

Words of Power are randomly-generated sequences of phonemes. (For example, ‘Twimjot’, ‘Fledbydpal’, or ‘Chruggomdye’. The’re gibberish, but not completely random letters, so you can kind of figure out how they would be pronounced.) To use a word of power, you just type it into the chat window. When spoken aloud, the word’s power is triggered and the word is used up, replaced with a new word. Words of Power only ever work once.

If you have a high Lore skill, you can research Words of Power via the crafting system. When you attempt the research, you can choose items to sacrifice. The more valuable the sacrificed items, the bigger your chance of success. If the recipe works, you discover one of the current words, along with an explanation of what it does. Their effects range from strong buffs to potent debuffs to killing yourself instantly, turning into a harmless animal, and a large number of other random effects. I’ve only implemented a few effects so far, but I intend for this to be one of the dumping grounds for any crazy effects I think up.

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