And I suck at keeping track of things. For a while I’ve had a piece of paper with the email addresses of volunteer testers. (Don’t ask why paper, it’s a stupid story.) Anyway I lost the paper and it wasn’t very complete anyway. I think a few dozen people have asked over the months, but now I don’t know who you are. (Unless it was in the past week or so.) I’m sorry. Please tell me again!

Please email signup@eldergame.com and mention these things:

• Do you want in the PRE-alpha (happening this month, but is not much more than an engine and a few token quests and areas), ALPHA (happening in 4-6 months, with lots more content), or BETA (happening late this year, with final art)
• If you want to help in the PRE-alpha, what day is best for you (and what time range, if you know it)? I’ll need to take the server up and down during testing and will want to figure out what the best day is for it to be live.
• Your email address (if not the one you email me from)

Thank you!

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My death penalty is lenient. My game is first and foremost about exploration, so I need a penalty that makes it easy to explore. Actually, my death penalty may be the most lenient in the MMO universe, because there’s actually benefits to death: you earn Death XP, which is useful for many things, like necromancy.

I’ll have a minor money-sink, too, but nothing very painful. I really want people to be able to wander the world, try things out, and figure out how the game works. The game is really complex, and the fun is in figuring all these little systems all out. If you felt compelled to read the internet to learn how everything works, rather than exploring for yourself, you’d miss the most important part of the game. You’d be left with the stupid grinding part that every MMO has. I would have failed.

So yes, Project Gorgon has a very lenient death penalty. But at the same time, I sometimes want games to challenge me, especially when I’m working in a small group to accomplish something hard. I like the feeling of overcoming tall odds — and getting that feeling of accomplishment is much easier if the stakes are high. A high death penalty does make the game feel more epic. Can’t I have the best of both worlds?

I think I can, yes. The trick is that my graph up there represents a death penalty as a single axis, but actually death penalties have many factors, such as:

• How much time is lost before your character is “back to normal” again
• How much of your resources are lost to death (items, money, etc.)
• How far you have to travel to resume playing

It turns out that even a lenient death penalty can be pretty painful in particular circumstances. The trick is to fiddle all these variables just right so that you get more nuanced behavior. I can at least give it a shot!

I’ve played with lots of ideas, and I’m still working on it. Not every idea pans out. I thought for sure I could build upon the unusual fact that my game knows how you die: it knows if you were arrowed to death, or burned alive, or poisoned by a snake, or whatever. Every kind of damage has a “cause-of-death ID” attached to it. So I figured if you died by the same cause too many times in a row, or too often, the penalty would go up. That would fix zerging. But that was dumb because… fuck zerging, that’s not even a real problem. It’s a PvE game, and important PvE monsters can’t be zerged like that — they heal too fast.

So I had to stretch a little further. What exactly should my death penalty accomplish and what should it avoid?

The Death Penalty Traps

There are a couple of well-understood “death penalty trap” scenarios that I must avoid in order to be successful. (These are the reasons that games have been gravitating to lesser and lesser death penalties for years! They hurt business.)

• You log in to just chat with some friends and end up getting killed while running from town to town, and lose something valuable that is hard to get back. Odds are you’ll rage-quit over this: you weren’t expecting to be punished.
• You are soloing monsters and having a good time, but then you have some bad luck and get killed a few times too many, and now your character is too weak to keep fighting these monsters. Now you have to go to some earlier place and get strong again. Chances are dangerously high that you’ll just give up instead, and may not come back to the game.

I need to avoid these and similar scenarios. Hence the very lenient penalty when you’re exploring. But I still want to get a feeling of accomplishment when people do hard things.

The Death Penalty Benefits

The biggest benefit of a high death penalty is when grouping. You’re working as a team, you’re greater than the sum of your parts, you’re kicking ass and overcoming tall odds! The death penalty can help make the odds feel taller. I still don’t want an EQ1-esque “lose all your items” death penalty, because that makes people too afraid to try new things. But I want the danger of death to give your successes a little bit more shine.

The other good thing that death can do is bring scariness into the game. In most MMOs, there’s a definite lack of scariness, because anything that can kill you is about the same. A 50-foot dragon and an 8-foot ogre represent the exact same stakes: “either we win or we die.” There’s nowhere else to go.

Death penalties are a somewhat unorthodox way to make some creatures scarier. I want to play with that idea, too.

Travel Time: The Classic Casual Death Penalty

My main death penalty is travel time. When you die you reappear in a central area in the zone. If you were just out exploring, this is no biggie — you can go explore somewhere else. If you were trying to complete a particular quest, though, you’ll have to hoof it back. This is pretty typical for MMOs.

But in dungeons and other difficult-to-reach spots, this penalty is more painful. That’s because my dungeons aren’t instanced — they’re like EQ1/EQ2 dungeons: shared areas. Each one is a large labyrinthine place that’s big enough to support several groups of people exploring at the same time, with monsters respawning over time. (This design has many great social benefits that I’ll talk about later, but also, my server tech just doesn’t do instancing well.)

So if you die deep in a difficult dungeon and have to work your way back down to the bottom, that can be a big time penalty. If you’re lucky, some other group will have cleared the path recently. Otherwise the rest of your group will have to return to the surface and then fight back down again.

To make this penalty stick, I have to be very stingy with resurrection abilities. Otherwise I lose the penalty! (This is what happens in most games that try to use travel time as a penalty — the designers are so desperate to give out useful abilities to healers that resurrection becomes dirt cheap… they end up throwing the penalty out, almost by mistake.) So my resurrection powers have long reset timers, and resurrection items are rare.

You may still quit over something like this — “we were almost at the bottom and then Andy died and we had to start all over, wasting another hour!” But your tolerance for it will be higher. You came into a group-combat area, so you knew the stakes were going up. And if you ever want to give up and go do something else, you always can. It’s not like you ever lose levels or items from dying. So the penalty is still very lenient and casual-friendly.

But I have one last trick up my sleeve…

Death Curses: Making Bosses Scary

The most powerful bosses in the game are supposed to be scary and horrible. These are the stuff of legends, after all, so you should know what you’re doing before you fight these monsters — and the game is happy to teach you how. There’ll always be in-game lore or explanations of how to best defeat them. Unlike most of the game, the big bosses aren’t about “keep trying until you learn how things work”; they’re about “figure it out before you go.” One way I make this work is with curses. They selectively bring back a harsh death penalty.

A curse is just a debuff… one that lasts a long time, possibly even permanently, and doesn’t go away if you die. The main way to get rid of a curse is to kill the thing that cursed you. As long as you win the fight, no biggie. If you lose, that’s a problem. Hopefully the group can finish it off for you. If not, you’re going to have to work your way back and try again.

These curses range from losing 20 from your max health for the next 10 game hours to being stuck as a giant bee for the rest of your life.

But don’t worry too much about being stuck as a giant bee. Hey, bees can slow-fall! Of course, bees can’t talk to NPCs or use weapons… but you’ll never have to worry about dying from falling off of tall places!

Heh, but seriously, there are always at least two ways to remove a curse. You can kill the thing that cursed you, or you can find an alternative cure. If you’re stuck as a bee, there is a rare loot-item from insects that can cure you, if it’s made into a potion by a high-level alchemist. (I admit that this part is tricky to get right… these back-up solutions need to always be rare, but never be so rare that they seem dishearteningly impossible. It’s hard to make the economy work out that way, but I’ll see if I can pull it off eventually. Or maybe it’s just one of those “medicine is almost as bad as the cure” things: you stop being a giant bee, but that curse is replaced by a more mild curse that lasts many days. Dunno, still poking at it.)

These scary curses are just for the big bads — the ultimate bosses of the game universe, which take a long time to build up to. But much weaker curses are fun for occasional changes of pace when soloing, too. A few trash monsters have curses, but these aren’t too scary, because you can just kill any creature of the same type to remove your curse. If a Goblin Necromancer hits you with Fragile Skull Disorder, causing you to lose 20 from your max health and power, you can fix it by killing any Goblin Necromancer anywhere in the world. And even if you don’t bother, those curses only last an hour or two — long enough to notice its effects and be annoyed, but hopefully not long enough to really piss you off.

Death Penalties Are An Art

I think that most games don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what they want their death penalty to accomplish. I know this because I’ve worked with lots of MMO developers, and they just… don’t really think too hard about it. They rightly assume that the game needs to have a casual-friendly death penalty, so they copy an existing MMO and call it a day.

They don’t consider the down sides of those existing death penalties. I mean, how often have you been about to die, and had a super-healing potion ready to drink, but thought, “nah… my life is worth less than this super-healing potion, I’ll just die instead.” My bank vaults are often full of powerful survival tools because it never feels worth using them. If death never has a sting, you shouldn’t bother giving out save-your-bacon items, because nobody will use them.

That isn’t to say we need entirely new death-penalty systems, because I don’t think we do. But MMO designers need to think about death a lot more instead of just slapping something in and calling it a day.

That’s one of the joys of making my own MMO, because I’m more than happy to try new twists on things and see if I can improve upon the problems of what’s come before.

If you don’t even try new stuff, it won’t ever get better.

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But while I work on mundane stuff, let's look far ahead... way ahead by like six months or so... and look at some features I want to add eventually.]

Player-Made Dungeons: Meh

I have mixed feelings about player-generated content in traditional MMOs. Generally, players aren’t very good at making content, so you have lots of trouble sorting wheat from chaff. This is very difficult because players don’t grade based on how awesome content is, they grade based on the difficulty-to-reward ratio of the content.

And when MMO developers think about this idea, what they usually come up with is a full suite of dungeon-creation tools that let players remix existing dungeons in new ways. This is a ton of work, and is generally pretty dull. After a few years of updates, MMO developers have usually already attempted all the obvious things that can be done with these dungeon pieces. So usually all you’re getting is a custom story script. That’s not worthless — I like quests with good stories — but it’s also not worth all the effort it takes to make a dungeon-creation tool!

I have lots of ideas about how to make player-made dungeons more exciting. But… that’s for a different game. Project Gorgon isn’t going to be able to support user-made dungeons. Maybe the next MMO…

But let’s leave aside the creation of entire custom dungeons. There are still some great simple ways to let users create content for other users.

In fact, these features will be very easy to add to almost any MMO. They play “within the rules” of the game, and require only minimal new GUI interfaces and database tables. If you’re reading this and you’re an MMO developer, feel free to use these ideas!

Treasure Maps: Geo-Caching for MMOs

First up is the easiest one to code: treasure maps. All you do is go to a certain spot in the world, “bury” an item in the ground, and receive a “treasure map” for that item. You can now give that treasure map to a friend, and they can go hunt for the treasure you placed.

How do they find it? Well first, you can write a message on the map to give them clues. (It’s a tweet-length message, maybe a riddle or some general info about where it’s hidden.) Second, whenever they activate the map, it will tell them if they are getting “hotter” or “colder” compared to the last time they used the map. Tada! A very simple way to give your friends something to do.

I can implement this in a couple hours. The way it works is that the map actually stores the info about the “treasure” it contains. So internally, the map itself has the treasure “inside” itself all the time, but only gives you the treasure if you’re in the right spot. That way it doesn’t require any special world-state variables… just a couple of extra IDs stored in the item. Easy.

But we can do better…

Legendary Treasure

If we’re willing to spend more than a couple hours on the task, we can make it a lot more interesting. Legendary Treasure works basically the same way: you go some place in the world and “bury” one or more items. But this time you don’t get a treasure map. Instead, you write a “legend” (a tweet-length message).

These legends automatically show up in taverns and message boards around the world.  Players can read your legend and see the reward item they’ll get if they go there, along with how many rewards are left in the treasure hoard. When all the treasure has been given out, the legend disappears from the message boards.

Now players can propose simple riddles to the entire server shard, with an automatically-given reward. And again, this is very easy to implement. Maybe two or three days of work for the basics.

Lady of the Lake

Here’s a different riff on the same idea. The Lady of the Lake is an NPC in a special location. High-level players can give her items to give out to others if a certain key item is shown. For instance, “if a player presents a red ruby, give them this hypno-gem.” (The guessing player doesn’t lose their item, so there’s no penalty to guessing wrong.)

You can also create “legends” for these, as above, which gives hints about what item is needed and see how many rewards are left.

And I have a half-dozen other mechanics in the same vein (pseudo-programmable “golems”, “bounties” you can place on specific boss monsters, etc.) By combining these simple systems together, you can create some really interesting content, like multi-step scavenger hunts, or guided tours of rarely-visited dungeons, or complex ciphers for players to decode.

Paying the Price

All these systems require generosity: the person creating the content has to pony up the reward! This way there’s never a problem with balance. It also means the content is always temporary: even if you bury 1000 items in the ground, only 1000 players will ever be able to experience your content. But that’s not such a bad thing. It means you get to create a new better version later.

Does requiring generosity sound like a deal-breaker? I doubt it will be. I remember when I was a high-level AC1 player, creating “quests” for newbies was one of the most fun things I did. (“Bring me Tibri’s Fire Spear and I will give you a Peerless Atlan Claw!”). And if the game helped to manage these quests, I bet there would be a whole lot of high-level people who enjoyed giving away items creatively like this. And think of the guild events!

Bottom line is that players already do this. They just don’t get any support from the game to let them take it to the next level. And there’s no good reason why not.

Easy to Code… and Maybe Even Better Overall

These systems will need a bit of polish and fleshing out: profanity-reporting, a rating system (for content creators, so you can sort legends by most-popular creators), and a way to give feedback to the creator. But this is all pretty easy stuff, and most of it can be added incrementally over time.

Most importantly, because of the transitory and un-abusable game mechanics involved, I won’t need administrators to examine content and see if it’s “fair”. It’s always going to be fair: it’s just players giving each other items. Admin intervention will only be needed in cases of profanity and similar abuse — which I already have to handle for profane chat.

And the crazy thing is that I suspect these simple tools will give us more interesting content than Yet Another Player Made Dungeon Where Every Room Has Bosses In It And The Monsters All Quote My Little Pony.

[Also: thanks to MMO Melting Pot for giving me the 2011 Piggie Award for Most Charming Games Company Employee! Though I do think that category is rigged against big-company employees who have to filter everything they say, and often have to announce commandments from on high which they don't agree with. And sometimes, they just have to be the bad guy. When I was working on AC2, I was always the Bad Cop so that the rest of the team could be the Good Cops. Hmm for Gorgon, I need to remember to hire a Bad Cop. I ain't doing that thankless job again...]

[Sandra says: Not it!]

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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!

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

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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.

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—

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.

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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.

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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!”

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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:

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