Elder Game

Thanks again for the feedback on Kickstarter! I’m definitely going to use some of the easier suggestions, such as getting your name in the credits, a unique appearance item, and maybe a special border around your character’s name. And I have some other fun low-cost ideas too.

Some of your suggestions were good but would have to be too expensive… for example, to add a custom quest (I mean something with meat, not just a trivial kill-10-rats quest) would have to cost at least $500, and probably more like $1000+ depending on complexity. So I won’t bother listing those sorts of rewards; don’t want to seem too crazy.

But one idea that was repeatedly mentioned was custom NPC dialog. And I can do something like that without too much cost. So let me pitch you some ideas for NPC customization, plus some other high-end reward possibilities.

So… do these sound exciting? Or game-ruining? These are $50+ rewards, so I’m not going to use all of these, and they won’t get heavily purchased anyway since they’re more costly… but if they sound really broken or unfair, let me know:

Name an NPC: Pitch me a name for an NPC (plus gender/race if you like). Subject to approval — if I can’t use it I’ll keep asking for new names until I get one I can use.

Get Mentioned By NPCs: You can reserve your character name, and NPCs will have idle chit-chat dialog that mentions you. You can specify whether you want them to be discussing your heroic deeds, your epic embarrassments, or just general good vibes. (If your character is going to be an elf, “epic embarrassments” are probably rated R, just a warning.)

Create an NPC: Provide the name and some basic stats about an NPC (race, gender, general appearance, personality traits), including a catchphrase and any salient dialog you feel helps make the character. (Subject to editing and approval.)

Unique Crafting Recipe: one of your characters gets the ability to craft an item that nobody else will ever be able to craft. These are top-level items with unusual appearances and/or stats. They’re likely to be niche items, but very useful for certain very specific builds. (You’d get a random recipe from a pool of 20.)

Add Your Favorite Food: Tell me what your favorite food is, and I’ll make sure it’s in the game. For instance, if you like apple pie, and your character is going to be Bob, I’ll make sure there’s a recipe for Bob’s Apple Pie in the game. Your character will know how to make this food, and you’ll get a few copies of the recipe to give to friends. (Other people can find the recipes in loot, but they’ll likely be very rare loot drops.)

Rare Portal Summoning: I haven’t really talked about travel systems, but one of them is teleportation. Everyone can teleport themselves to certain locations, but it’s much more rare to be able to create a portal that lets anybody go there. (You have to find a rare recipe to learn each possible location.) This award gives you the ability to summon portals to a handful of useful locations.

Random Rare Pet: The animal husbandry system lets you breed animals to discover different appearances and better attributes. This kickstarter reward would pre-fill your stable with a rare pet, giving you a head start on breeding a specific (randomly-chosen) rare creature appearance. Some people get rare tigers, but some people get rare snails, so it’s the luck of the draw. (I haven’t talked about animal husbandry yet, but I’m excited about it — you can even sell your custom-bred animals to other players. But breeding/selling requires a bunch of skills and levels, which aren’t included with this award… this is just a rare pet, for when you get there.)

Admin Command: Once per week, you can use the “/smite” command to instantly kill another player. Remember that this is a PvE game, so this won’t gain you any dramatic advantage. However, it will surprise the heck out of somebody who’s being obnoxious in chat! (On the other hand, unusual deaths give big “Death XP” bonuses, so other players may end up begging you to kill them so they can earn the XP for your unique death method.) The slain player will receive a message that they were “kickstarted to death.” For obvious reasons of game sanity, this would need to cost a bunch, and I’d only want to give out, say, 20 of these awards in any case.

[Okay that last one sounds too scary, right? I really doubt it would be a problem, but it sounds scary...]

Why Kickstarter?

The scene is my home office, about a month ago. Sandra is acting as producer for the MMO, looking over the schedule.

Sandra: “So you’re behind schedule… by… let’s see, six months.”
Eric: “Yes.”
Sandra: “Well, we’ll just have to cut some more features to make it fit!”
Eric: “What?! You already made me cut Dark Geology. And Meteorology with real meteors! And were-tigers! There’s practically nothing left to cut now!”
Sandra: “You could cut this dungeon… the one labeled ‘a dungeon more vast than any other MMO dungeon has ever been’… I’m not sure that’s even a selling point.”
Eric: “But it’s part of my Vision for the game! It has to stay!”
Sandra: “Okay, let’s look at the art requirements. What the hell, you added more stuff to the list! What’s this, Bugbear Troubadors?”
Eric: “It subverts all the bugbear tropes while bringing them back to their classic form, of a creepy bear in the woods. But now they play a banjo! That’s gotta be in the game. It’s just got to. I… don’t think it’s worth making the game without that…”
Sandra: “But you just thought of that yesterday!”
Eric: “… true…”
Sandra: “Okay. Let me explain it in terms you can understand: Star Trek. Our credit cards are like shields that protect against being homeless. And they cannot sustain this much additional damage without a hull breach. So you either need to make more cuts, or find more money.”
Eric: “Find more money! Right!”

Why Really Kickstarter?

Well, the above scene is exaggerated, but I really did have to cut all those things, and many more. But I guess the big problem is that the game can’t be too small or it will flop. While playing the early version, I’ve come to suspect there won’t be enough content. Not enough land masses, NPCs, places to go and people to stab. I fear it wouldn’t hold people’s interest long enough: they’d burn through everything within a month — maybe even just a few weeks — and be gone.

I want to do monthly updates for the game after it launches, but if there’s nobody left to see them, what’s the point? An MMO needs a certain scale before it can keep users hooked in.

To be successful, I think it needs to launch with more areas, more monsters, more… stuff. But I can’t afford that. So I’m working up a Kickstarter plan. If it works, I’ll be able to push the game launch out until late 2013, and hire artists to make content while I work on game systems, areas, and combat polish. If the Kickstarter was REALLY successful, Sandra could afford to work more on the MMO, too, instead of doing useful work to pay the bills!

And also, man it would be awesome to have voice-overs for principal characters… and bugbears with banjos. And I really want to do playable fairy princesses, but REAL ones, with a suite of fairy powers and a fae court… sorry, I got distracted.

I guess no matter how much money I have, there’ll always be a lot of hard calls to make in terms of what gets added. But the fact is right now, I’m cutting too deep.

Kickstarter Rewards?

So I’m brainstorming Kickstarter rewards. I’ll pitch you some of my more insane ideas later this week, but right now I’d really like to know what works for you in a Kickstarter.

There’s all the obvious things, like:

• “Gold” access (gold users have access to all the skills in the game, whereas F2P players can only play a limited set of roles and skills)
• Reserve your character name
• Get into the closed beta
• Get to vote on “what do I add and what do I cut”

Conor Brace (who’s doing the soundtrack for the game) has graciously offered to add a digital soundtrack album to the list of rewards I can give out, too. I also have a lot of crazy ideas for higher-level rewards, too — but let me get my thoughts in order before I talk about those. Probably later this week.

In the mean time, what do you look for in a Kickstarter campaign? And what would convince you to pay, say, $20? (Please don’t say t-shirts, please don’t say t-shirts, please don’t say…) I want to avoid physical items because I have no skill or experience in getting those done, and it will take a ton of time… longer than custom in-game items and systems would! But seriously, if t-shirts or other swag is what excites you, please let me know!

Working on some new content today – a new newbie town. I’ve got some new NPC tech that’s making it a lot of fun to work on. Here’s some screenshots:

NPCs can now wander around, which means the cows in the pasture are no longer stationary automatons. They can walk around, eat, sit, and so on. This really makes them a lot more lifelike... but makes it almost impossible to get a good screenshot. You can see three cows in this picture if you look closely. Each cow can be milked once per hour (per player).

As I head over to another barn, I'm informed that the moon is nearly full. That's bad news, since I'm a werewolf, and for testing purposes the moon cycle lasts 8 hours instead of 28 days. I'm gonna be a slavering monster soon... which makes milking cows impossible, among other issues.

The lady in front of this barn is complaining about a bear that's taken up residence in it. I eventually convince her that I can handle it for her. How hard can it be? I'm a friggin' fire wizard...

Holy... he took all my armor off in seconds... run away!

Group-statted grizzly bear! Runnnnn... *thunk*. To defeat this bear, it'd take three newbies working together. My hope is that little encounters like this can teach players to work together from an early point in the game: "Hey, somebody help me kill the grizzly in this barn!"

A couple of elves run the alchemy shop. In the background you can just make out a glowing globe -- that's a lore item. Let's head upstairs...

In the far attic of the shop, all alone, sits a little teaching automaton. (Elves use these to teach their children.) I'll just go say hi to him...

And now we see why the thing is stored in the attic! It's a math tutor, and it's running a word-problems training program. Yuck. But if you get the problem right, you get a piece of candy! ... well, everybody finds fun in their own way, right?

And then it happened... I became the wolf. Now NPCs are afraid of me.

Nope, still right here, moron! The "being afraid" system is tricky to work on, because it needs safeguards to keep it from annoying other players. (For instance, if another player is shopping, the shopkeeper won't run away in fear; they'll just scream.) The down side of these safeguards is that they can't run very far -- you can chase them around their shop, but not out into the wilderness. But it's really the thematic effect that matters.

More pictures soon!

I want to support optional ways to play the MMO. I think these add a lot of depth and replay value, and for little effort on my part. Here’s what I have in mind at the moment (but as always, these ideas can change easily, and your comments are much appreciated).

Optional Challenge: Not Killing Sentient Creatures

One of my first thoughts was “wouldn’t it be great if the game supported pacifism?” But it just isn’t practical. Too much of the game is about killing. A “pacifist” character would inevitably end up being just a trade mule or pure crafter. It’s not hard to be a pacifist if you never leave town…

But how about this: you can choose not to kill sentient creatures, instead only killing animals and beasts. That way you’re not “murdering” — you’re just “hunting”.

If you want to take on this challenge, you just do it. The game keeps track of everything you kill, broken up into sentient and non-sentient enemies. As long as you meet a certain threshold (say a 100:1 ratio of non-sentients to sentients), you’ll gain access to a special title, and players who examine your character will see that you’re a non-murderer. Hmm, I need a good name for that.

And maybe there’s a few other little bennies for doing this, like access to a special vendor with a handful of random rares for sale. Nothing big. Not being a murderer is its own reward. (Or not, as the case may be.)

Also, all undead monsters are sentient, but they aren’t really alive, so it doesn’t count as murder when you “kill” them. (This is a cheaty technicality, but I think it fits with the spirit of the idea pretty well. Nobody considers it murder to destroy these vile creatures, and anyway they can just be re-summoned, so they really aren’t dying.)

Alternate Version For Druids

For druids, we turn this idea on its ear. Druids vow to protect nature, which means they get in trouble if they kill too many non-sentients! They’ll have a lot of slack, though. Perhaps they need to maintain a 2:1 ratio of sentient to non-sentient deaths. If their ratio is out of whack, they can’t train from NPC vendors or gain other special perks.

But it’s not as punitive as it may sound — even if you can’t buy training books because you’re a dirty Bambi-killer, you can always ask a different druid player to buy them for you, since training-books can be traded. Mainly, this rule is there for flavor, to give druids a little something additional to worry about. But not to make your life a living hell because you accidentally stabbed too many spiders. So I’ll have to play with it to make sure it works out. (Druids won’t get implemented for a while, so there’s lots of time to refine the ideas.)

An Aside: Hats For Mantises

If you want to avoid killing sentient creatures, it’s pretty important to be able to tell them apart from animals! This is usually pretty easy. Goblins are all sentient, tigers are all animals, etc, etc.

But mantises, well, some are psychic mantises gifted with extreme intellect. But they look like regular mantises. What to do?

I pinged Anthony Cook (who made the mantis for me), and we came up with a solution that fits the game vibe well: hats. Lore-wise, sentient mantises were created by a mad wizard. They’re pretty insecure about their place in the world. Giving them hats seemed to reinforce that idea: they’re using the trappings of other sentient races to validate their identities.

This jaunty fella is actually a friendly NPC. That hat's too classy for a villain!

This mechano-magical "Thinking Cap" is used by the highest castes of sentient mantises.

These are "ioun stone"-type floating gems. They're used by psi-blaster mantises.

Bruiser mantises wear more pedestrian hats, like this bowler.

Optional Challenge: Harder-Core Death Penalty

After play-testing a while, I’m convinced that a certain segment of my target audience would benefit from a more punitive death system. (The default death penalty is “you get sent back to an inconvenient location”, plus some money sinks.) For some players, the game will just be more fun if there’s a little bit more danger involved.

I’m thinking that there’ll be a shrine that you can visit and enable harder-core death. It’s not really hardcore, but it’s a bit more punitive: you will drop a random assortment of items on death. They’ll appear in a special loot box that lasts for a certain number of hours.

If you choose to enable hardcore mode, there’s a minor benefit — perhaps 6% faster XP gain or something like that. I don’t want the reward to completely make up for the penalty, but I do want a little gesture to show that you’re not completely insane for taking this on.

A common fear with this sort of idea is that it will split up the population. The idea is that “norms” won’t want to group with “hardcores” because if the hardcores die, they’ll be more inconvenienced by the loss of equipment. I think that’s a very reasonable fear in a game with randomly-assembled pick-up groups, but I really don’t think it will be a big problem here, in communal dungeons with people you’ve probably seen around before. Hopefully in this game, people won’t look for any tiny reason to kick you out of the group.

Another thought: once you turn this on, you can’t turn it off very easily. And that’s not just me being a jerk. It might seem like something you should be able to turn on and off easily, but  players will actually enjoy it more if it feels like a permanent decision. That’s due to a psychological phenomenon where we rationalize unchangeable decisions and are generally happier with them. (Even though consciously, we sure don’t think that will be true.) That’s why hardcore mode is permanent… unless you send me $50 to turn it off. Mwahaha! Okay, fine, I’ll think of something else.

Yet another thought: if you don’t make it back to your items before they disappear, the items will go into a special pool and be distributed to vendors throughout the world. So your lost sword might show up in a second-hand weapon shop.

Optional Challenge: Vegetarianism

Not all challenge modes need to be super dramatic or difficult. If you want to be a vegetarian, you can. Just don’t eat anything with meat in it.

The game will remember if you’ve eaten anything with meat, and as long as you’re clean for 30 days, you’ll get access to a special title. Players who examine your character will also see that you’re a vegetarian.

Being a vegetarian is easy for some people, but for others, it can be a real challenge. Werewolves get benefits from eating the corpses of their foes. But guess what: that’s meat. Necromancers have a power that is activated by eating a raw heart. And again, hearts are meat. So this challenge will vary in difficulty depending on what skills you focus on.

All vegetarians are lacto-ovo, meaning they can consume milk and eggs. Why? Because there’s just not enough recipes in the game to support more restricted diets. I don’t want to have to add 200 vegan dishes here — the idea is that these challenge modes are supposed to be easy additions.

But hmm, you know what, if you want to roleplay a vegan, feel free. The game will recognize when you do this, but I won’t add extra recipes for it. So don’t expect it to be an easy challenge!

Other Challenges?

What other challenge modes would you like to see in the game? Hit me with your ideas.

For now, I’m most interested in things that don’t require a lot of new systems. So the best choices are things that you could already do on your own (like take a vow of silence, or promise never to buy arrows from a shop, or something like that). Those sorts of things are pretty easy to add: the game can just track to see if you’re doing it or not.

(I’m also interested in challenges that require new systems, so feel free to suggest those too! But they’ll probably end up getting added after the game launches.)

Progress Report: Necromancy and Staff Fighting

I’m still implementing these two combat skills. Staff fighting turned out to be more entertaining than I feared. But that’s damning with faint praise, since I was afraid it would be unbearably boring. It’s about half-fun right now. I think it will become fun when I add the secondary support skills, though.

It has a 50-50 mix of offensive and defensive abilities, making it a solid second choice, rather than a primary fighting style. The same staff you use for Fire Magic can also be used for Staff Fighting, so these two skills are naturally synergistic, giving the blast-happy wizard a bit of defense and threat-management ability. (But lots of other secondary skills make sense for Fire Mages too — Combat Psychology gives them more crowd control; Necromancy gives them dangerous pets; Psi-Warrior gives them some survivability and a backup attack method against fire-resistant foes…)

Necromancy is further behind, and not playable yet, but the design is fleshed out. I have some very cool necromancer powers planned, if I can manage to implement them in my game engine.

Most of the necromancer’s skills involve raising the dead, but there’s a few attacks, too. Here’s a screenshot of me working on the Life Crush attack (which rips part of the soul out of your enemy). A cloud of smoke erupts from the target, briefly forming a death head before disappearing.

(Particle effect courtesy of Kalamona, who, btw, sells tons of amazing effects in the Unity asset store. In this screenshot, I'm just wiring it into my game engine.)

An interesting quirk is that the necromancer’s blast attacks have no effect on undead — so it’s actually a little difficult to use necromancy to kill enemy undead. (They can still have their pet undead kill them, but they can’t blast ‘em with dark energy.)

Just some notes about things… there’s lots of things happening, but I’m totally overwhelmed and failing to blog about them. Let’s see:

Title and Logo!

For now (and quite probably forever) I’m actually calling the game Project: Gorgon. That wasn’t the original intention — it was just a codename for the game — but codenames have a tendency to become real names, so I’m not super surprised. Fortunately, the name does make sense from a lore perspective — I won’t spoil anything by saying more than that — and who knows, maybe I’ll even get a gorgon monster to add to the game.

Here’s a work-in-progress version of the game’s title graphic. It references the big bad from the game’s story:

One potential game logo

Mantises

I keep forgetting to get a good screenshot of the praying mantis! Here’s one chilling in a field. I need to get some action shots, though.

"Hey. How's it going."

The giant mantis is an apex predator that thinks nothing of eating players. From a mechanics standpoint, the most dangerous thing about her is the Rage Attack — if she builds up a full Rage bar, her attack goes from being rather mediocre to being horrifically lethal. So this is a creature that’s very dangerous if you stumble into one, but if you manage the Rage bar, it’s relatively easy to handle.

But there’s another kind of mantis, created by a mad wizard, that has psionic powers… and is significantly more dangerous. More on that one later.

The mantis was made for me by Anthony Cook, who also did another new creature that I’ll introduce a little later. (Very excited about that one, too! It feels very unique to the game setting.)

New Theme Song! New Sound Effects!

I’ve hired Conor Brace to make a first batch of custom sounds and music for the game. Music definitely changes things a lot. I’m very happy with the music tracks, I just wish I could afford to get tons more music made. More more more! But this is enough for now. I have a title theme, a dungeon track, and an idyllic village track, and I can drop in more music down the road.

I knew the music would have a big effect, but I wasn’t quite as prepared for the sound effects. I’d been using stock sounds as placeholders, and I admit that in the back of my head, I was wondering, “should I really bother to get custom sound effects? These stock sounds are okay…”

But let’s just say I don’t regret the investment. :) I think it’s one of those Dunning-Kruger things, where I literally didn’t realize that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

Conor went over the game with a fine-toothed comb and came up with some great ideas on how combat should sound. He’s still making the sounds, and I’m still working on getting the sound effects coded into the game, but I can already tell this will be a big improvement in making the combat feel fun.

Still No Forum, Why?

If you’re in the pre-alpha and wondering why the forum isn’t back, there’s two reasons. The big problem is I’m scared to just put it back up the way it was, and I haven’t had time to find a better forum solution.

It turns out that the forums were hacked by somebody who knew the sign-up password. In other words, one of the people I invited to play-test ended up hacking my forum. I don’t think it was any of the active testers (based on IP addresses), but it’s very disheartening. I fixed the specific exploit they used, but I’m pretty sure this forum software is a sieve of exploits, and they may just come right back and hack it again.

So I’m thinking I’ll abandon the testing forum. Instead, I’m thinking about using Facebook to get play-sessions together and gather feedback and bugs. (So if you’re interested in hearing about those, please enliken the page: http://www.facebook.com/GorgonMMO)

However, eventually I will have a forum again, one which works both in-game and out of game. Within the game, there will be literal message boards that players can use to communicate with other players, to set up trades and so on. These will be mapped to regular forum message boards that are also accessible outside of the game.

I may end up coding that forum completely custom in order to get the integration really tight. (I’ve written a forum before so I have most of the code lying around already. Which is another reason I’m frustrated at having to use that buggy forum software — I could do better!)

Everything Else…

So much more to talk about! The ice bomb effect for battle chemists is in (thanks to Kalamona for the custom effect!); the treasure system is getting more and more buff; I need to talk about how necromancy’s mechanics will work soon, too… but I gotta get back to work right now. Will catch you up on more soon!

Whoa, not getting enough blogging done! Lots of stuff is happening, let me try to catch up. Here’s a new combat skill: Battle Chemistry.

Advanced Combat Skills

Some combat skills are available right from the start. These are the bread-and-butter combat archetypes, and they keep working all throughout the game — they never get obsolete. If you want to be a swordsman, you can keep being a swordsman.

But as you keep improving skills you’ll gain access to additional combat skills. These are mostly advanced skills that aren’t quite as powerful as the main combat skills, but are much more versatile, or offer some other important advantage.

(Remember that you can have any two combat skills active at a time, so you can mix and match many of the skills. Some require you to be holding a certain item, though, and you can’t mix those: you can’t have a fire staff and a sword in your hand at the same time, so it would be dumb to pick those two skills at once.)

Battle Chemistry is an advanced combat skill that is unlocked by mastering alchemy. It’s underwhelming on its own, but great for groups of players.

The alchemist with his pet golem

Battle Chemistry Techniques

Battle chemistry abilities come in three flavors:

• AoE blasts: the way battle chemists attack is by flinging toxic chemicals all around them. This does area-effect damage centered on the chemist. They aren’t the best AoE attacker, but they do have the largest number of damage types: the chemist can fling anything from liquid fire, to acid, to chopped up bits of fish gut (a very specialized potion indeed). They can also fling modest area-effect healing chemicals that heal themselves and all nearby allies.The chemist needs to be wielding a special flask to use these powers, so they can’t use these at the same time they’re wielding, say, a fire-magic wand. The two other types of abilities below don’t require any item, so they can be mixed with any other skill.

• Mutation Injections: battle chemists can buff themselves and others by injecting chemicals that cause temporary mutations. There are lots of mutations for a chemist to learn, but it’s not easy to master them: each one is a cross-disciplinary technique. For instance, the Knee Spikes mutation makes kick attacks do more damage; to learn this one, the chemist must have skill in unarmed combat. The Extra Heart mutation speeds up your metabolism; to learn this one, the chemist needs lots of skill in Anatomy.The chemist can inject themselves and their friends with mutations before combat, and they last for 10 minutes or so. Each person can only have one mutation active at a given time, so it’s a matter of picking the right mutation for each person’s play style (or the particular dungeon you’re in).

• Programmable Golems: Battle Chemists get a “pet” golem that follows their instructions. Unlike every other pet in the game, this one doesn’t do anything on its own: by default it will just follow you around and stare at you. To make it do things, the chemist gives it a “program” of instructions, in the form “if <this thing is happening>, then <use this ability>”. Every few seconds the golem runs down its list of rules until it finds one where the condition is happening, and then uses that ability. At first, battle chemists don’t know how to give them very many commands. The player has to hunt down scrolls for the various “conditionals” and “golem powers”. For instance, a vendor might sell a scroll labeled “Golem  Conditional: Golem is on fire”. If you read this scroll, you’ll be able to give your golem rules that happen when the golem is on fire. 

“Programming”?!

The “programming” of golems is really simple, but it can still be overwhelming. That’s one of the reasons it’s an advanced skill — I don’t want newbies to be presented with something this daunting. It’s also entirely optional; there’s plenty of other things to learn instead.

While I was coding this, I kept thinking, “didn’t some other game use this exact system?” And finally I realized what it was: Final Fantasy 12 used this system. That game is otherwise known as “the Final Fantasy everybody hated, but not as much as they hated Final Fantasy 13.” Which is not really a great pedigree for the game mechanic.

Prototype of the Golem Programming GUI

But for what it’s worth, I liked it in that game — I just felt like it didn’t go far enough! They seemed to be so scared that people couldn’t “get it” that they really dumbed down the conditionals, so there wasn’t a whole lot to do. There were very few “special” conditions. After a certain point early in the game, you pretty much had all the pieces you were ever going to get. I think the designers got scared. They backed down. They wanted to appeal to tens of millions of people, so they ended up with a mediocre mechanic.

In contrast, I want to let you really get into it if you want to. I have conditionals like “if golem is standing in water…” or “if golem has been hit by a poison attack…” or “if golem’s owner is a howling werewolf…” I also have unusual “actions” like “say a sentence” or “self-destruct” or “run away”. With clever use of these pieces, you can get a lot of cool effects. That’s the point, after all: if I’m going to make you do the work of “programming”, you should be able to get great results!

I know some players won’t understand it. But that seems to happen in every MMO, no matter how simple. (How many people understand WoW’s armor system without help from outside the game?) Obviously I want to avoid confusing game mechanics, but I also don’t need to dumb it down. I don’t want the game to have bland appeal to ten million people. It needs to have really deep appeal to ten thousand, say.

I guess the worst-case scenario is if I completely fail to explain how it works, only a few people figure it out, and everybody just goes to the forums and finds “the best program to use” and calls it quits. If that happens, eh. Okay. Hopefully I can get feedback during beta to give it the broadest possible appeal without watering it down, but you know what? If it ultimately just flops, I’m okay with that.

The thing is, it can be hard to tell what’s going to be popular during development — what’s fun to me isn’t necessarily fun to other people, or fun in the context of the rest of the game. But I’d rather go out on a limb and try something weird than play it safe and get bland results. I can’t afford to be bland.

In a similar vein, the Animal Husbandry skill might blow some peoples’ minds. In order to breed the best animals, you’ll need to understand that some traits are dominant and some are recessive.

Okay, maybe that’s going too far. Hmm… yeah, probably so.

Well, you can take anything too far… the trick is finding the sweet spot where it’s most entertaining! The golems seem to have a pretty high entertainment factor to me, and hopefully other people will agree.

Mini Golem Art

I’m really happy with the little golem. This really helped make the whole thing possible. I tried to find a low-poly-count golem that has a bottle-throwing animation, but there just wasn’t anything like that out there. Zsolnay Gergely created this model for me — thanks so much!

He’s “Kalamona” online and in the Unity store. If you’ve searched in there, you’ve probably already seen his dynamic effects pack. He also has cool monsters, and he sent me a sneak peek of his upcoming effects pack — with crazy things like hands reaching up from the ground and explosions in the shape of skulls. He even added a few at my request, like an effect for “being encased in a block of ice”.

It’s hard to overstate how big an improvement good effects make. I hope I can find a way to do him a favor in return at some point — in the mean time, check out his stuff if you’re making things in Unity.

(PS – Oh crap, I haven’t shown you guys the praying mantis yet, have I? I’ll do that next time!)

[Preview testers: there is a new version of the game up! However, the forums are still down. Please send any feedback or bugs to ericheimburg@heimburg.com!]

What Is Evil?

I’ve been enjoying the discussion about undead from a couple posts back, and wanted to add a few more thoughts real quick.

Brett said:

First, I’m really uncomfortable with the idea that ‘evil’ is defined as having negative emotions, such as sadness or discontentedness.

I don’t want to present it like that. Negative emotions are NOT evil. I don’t want to have a “Light Side/Dark Side of the Force” kinda thing going on.

Undead are evil because they feed off of negative emotions. They don’t need air or food, they need hate (or envy or whatever). They can generate it themselves (and that’s what smalltime monsters like skeletons use, mostly), or they can cause genocides to create huge waves of negative emotion and become incredibly powerful. It gives liches more of a reason to go murder every third villager: it directly empowers them.

I think it makes undead make a little more sense. I admit it’s still ham-fisted as a character motivator, but I never promised War and Peace here! :) I just want storylines to be tolerably interesting.

And this won’t be the only reason they do things. It’s just something that makes it a lot harder for you to think “oh, that lich is just misunderstood, we shouldn’t kill him.” Hopefully.

Brett also said:

What if you have a mental illness, such as depression, and you play this game to find out that the message contained within is that not only are such people sick in this world, they are innately wrong in an eternal, soul-corrupted way?

Yeah, I may have gone a bit astray in imagining that suicides always create ghosts. Further thinking about it, maybe that is just a very rare occurrence, but some people are incredibly superstitious about it anyway. Those people may be unnecessarily cruel to depressed people. That creates some story tension, because it won’t be trivially obvious which party is in the right all the time.

On the other hand, I don’t really want to go all the way down the rabbit hole here. I don’t want NPCs saying “don’t think bad thoughts, that brings on the banshees!” because that will get trite and boring. So I want to pick a few negative emotions and play with them. But I’ll try to make sure I present the negative emotions as a natural thing, not evil itself.

(I picked depression because it’s something I have a pretty good understanding of and think I can treat with sufficient sensitivity. As opposed to, say, schizophrenia, which I would more likely treat farcically because I don’t have first- or second-hand experience with it. Lots of stuff in this game is farcical — psychotherapy is practically a kind of magic — but it’s a good point that some things need to be treated with a bit more sensitivity.)

What if the only way to save a culture from being wiped out by a virulent plague is to ask a necromancer to restore the life of a researcher who died days away from finding the cure and took all his knowledge to the grave? Is that ‘inherently evil’ just because the doctor-zombie now needs constant psychiatric care from the necromancer (of all people) to keep his anger under control? Is this a subversive attack on psychology itself?

This is a wonderful scenario and I’m totally stealing it. Thanks!

Liches?

Facesofmu said:

Have you had any thoughts to implementing liches?

I think those will be pretty common NPC boss baddies in the game. Any wizard who wants to stave off death will ultimately be tempted to become a lich. They’re “lawful evil” in D&D terms. They’re smart, and some can be bargained with and even manipulated, but their greed and arrogance will make them untrustworthy allies at best.

In terms of player-liches, I haven’t got it all sorted out yet. I want players to be able to walk down the road to lichdom as they develop their necromantic powers. For instance, a high level necromancer may die and suddenly spring back to life as a lich — without their explicitly deciding to do so. That may lock their powers and alter their behaviors somehow (maybe an “evil words filter”? Nah, way too heavy-handed…) until they regain control of their humanity. But I don’t think they’ll ever be “true” liches, stuck as evil monsters for all eternity. At least not when the game ships…

Right now the game is supposed to have three “big choice” areas when it ships, and more will get added later. The initial ones are “becoming a werewolf”, “becoming a druid”, and “selling your soul to a demon”. A fourth one could be “becoming a lich”, but it feels thematically too much like selling your soul to a demon. So I need to think more about how those experiences differ and why each is fun.

Undead going rogue?

Facesofmu said:

If I had to go to great lengths to make a robot, I’d want to make damn sure it would do what I needed it to. Would an undead need some sort of mind control or coercion to keep it tame?

A necromancer’s undead have free will, but they can’t explicitly betray their masters, ever. Eventually some undead may be able to wrest control back and flee their masters, but they can never turn around and kill them. Instead they run and hide from their former master so they don’t get re-assimilated.

I know it’s always poetic justice to see the necromancer destroyed by his own creation, but ehhhh… let’s skip that one. As several people pointed out, if necromancy has too many down sides, why the heck would anybody practice it?

Pet Classes!

Let’s switch to game-mechanics talk for a minute. Necromancy is a “pet skill,” meaning that most of its combat power comes from minions that follow your commands. There will be two other pet skills at launch: Animal Handlers and Weather Witches. These each have different amounts of out-of-combat prep work needed, and also have different amounts of combat versatility.

Animal Handlers spend a ton of time with their pets, raising and training them. Ancillary skills like Animal Husbandry let them breed pets to get the best genes for fighting (and best colors and appearances!). Animal Handlers have a lot of versatility because they can summon different pets for different problems, but they have to spend a lot of time out of combat raising these pets. (Hopefully this is a fun activity for them, though! It’s aimed at people who think raising and breeding virtual animals sounds fun.)

Necromancy is somewhere in the middle: you have to do a bit of legwork to create undead pets. These pets are primarily damage dealers with a few other abilities thrown in. They aren’t permanent companions; when they die, you may have to hoof it to another part of the zone you’re in and raise some new ones. Necromancers need to collect lots of body parts to research new forms of undead, which can be a time and/or money sink.

Weather Witches control the weather in very short-term bursts. These are brief pseudo-pets, such as whirlwinds that fling an enemy away for 15 seconds, rain squalls that drown out fire beasts, and so on. Weather Witches are a controller class and their pets are very versatile, but not very damaging. They don’t have to do much prep work besides carrying a few spell components around with them.

That’s the plan, anyway. Necromancy is probably the first of the three that will get implemented, followed very closely by animal handling. I have both of those skills planned out, I just haven’t had a chance to implement them yet! Weather Witches are much less designed, and may end up being punted until after the game ships.

Technically, lots of other skills use the “pet system” — for instance, Fire Magic has a “Fire Wall” pet that just stands around and burns things. It’s implemented as a pet internally, but since it’s a wall, it can’t follow you around. It’s more like a trap. I think pseudo-pets like that are pretty fun.

[Reminder to pre-alpha players: if you have time please give the new build a whirl! Thanks!]

Can you take a second to like Project Gorgon on Facebook? I just need a few more likers to get a non-hideous URL!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Project-Gorgon/292424904144198

Thanks!

Note for pre-alpha testers:

Also, I know the forums are down, and I’m sorry about that; they were infiltrated by a robot hacker program and I had to shut the whole thing down until I have time to reinstall. The experience has made me really want to write my own forum software — in fact, I already have a nice clean forum written for a different website, but I haven’t had time to make it general-purpose so I can use it. Every forum package out there is just… so damned bad. So bad. Hate them.

I will get it back up soon though! I’ve successfully resisted the urge to write my own forum. For now.

Lots of new stuff in the next update, which has taken forever, but should be noticeably awesomer. Will get you details on that soon, when it goes up!

Still working hard on the MMO, but not much new to show yet. Soon! In the meantime, let’s talk a bit about the back story of the game.

“Oh No, It’s the Undead!”

Early in Diablo 3, you meet a Necromancer. And your character basically says something like, “Hmm, you don’t see many of those around town!” This is the saddest reaction to necromancy ever.

Necromancy should be evil. For one thing, they muck around with your dead relatives, which tends to piss people off. But that doesn’t seem to be enough these days. Hell, in the Diablo universe, necromancy is practically a noble profession.

So what went wrong? Why do modern games not have scary evil undead? Partially we’re just used to it. (“Yeah, he uses skeleton pets. They’re basically like any other pet class, but bonier.”) But I think a bigger part of it is our TV and movie culture. Most zombie flicks don’t suggest that it’s Grandpa inside that rotting corpse: it’s just a meat puppet. So if you can get over the shock of seeing Grandpa’s rotting body, reusing his corpse isn’t so evil. It’s almost a noble act: you’re up-cycling useless flesh into something productive!

Well, I want necromancy to be hated and feared in Project Gorgon. There’s very practical reasons for this: the undead are too damned convenient. This is a very magic-rich world, and if everybody could have living-skeleton butlers and gardeners, they would. What’s to stop them?

But the bigger reason is that it’s just more fun if necromancy is evil. The game already has plenty of noble occupations. Swordsmen study calligraphy and the art of war. Druids follow the dictates of nature spirits, which can be harsh, but not evil. Werewolves are feared, and everybody agrees they’re incredibly dangerous, but they’re not inherently evil. They’re mostly misunderstood. Necromancers, though: they should be evil.

What Makes Undead Evil?

To make undeath feel more evil, let’s start by assuming the soul of the dead person is trapped inside the body. So that zombie of Uncle Mort actually contains Mort’s mind, and he’s in terrible pain. Okay, that’s a great start. Torturing the souls of the dead is always a good start.

But what about the fancier undead, like vampires? Your classic vampire doesn’t seem to be in terrible pain all the time. And indeed most fiction vampires aren’t evil at all. Here’s the test: if your son was dying, and the only way to save him was to turn him into a vampire, would you let him die? If you say “yes, it’s better for him to die,” then vampires are sufficiently evil. Few modern vampires pass this test. I want my vampires to be scary, evil, horrible things that no sane person would want their children to become.

(And it’s not enough to make vampires feed on humans. Hell, what doesn’t feed on humans in MMO worlds? They need to be real bad things.)

Driven By Hate

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to pin down “evil”. Whenever you analyze something, it stops being “evil” and starts being “misunderstood”. I need to curb that. My plan is to focus on emotions, because those create a visceral reaction, and are less susceptible to scrutiny and analysis. (For instance, if I say somebody has a racial hatred of elves, you don’t necessarily need me to explain why. He can just be a racist. Emotions don’t have to make sense.)

So let’s say all undead are powered by strong negative emotions. And while I’m at it, let’s do away with “dumb” non-sentient undead, such as mindless zombies. All undead in this game are sentient, and powered by emotion.

Most undead run on hate. When a necromancer tries to raise skeleton warriors, only the people who were most susceptible to feeling great hatred will come back to life.

These skeletons are still self-aware, and they retain the memories of their former lives, but their need to hate is all-consuming. So they twist and corrupt all their memories until they hate everything they used to love. They hate their former loved ones most of all.

Initially, the necromancer has complete control over them, but eventually many undead will break free and flee their masters. Then they make a beeline for their former family and friends. Driven by their hate, they will go to any lengths to find and kill them.

Okay, yeah, that’s pretty evil. Nobody wants to wake up in the night to find their dead wife looming over them with an axe, shouting about how terrible they are while trying to kill them. If that’s a side-effect of necromancy, you can see why it’d be very illegal.

Necromancy mostly uses hate-filled undead, but there are other kinds, mostly occurring naturally. Ghosts, wraiths, banshees, and so on are fueled by unpleasant emotions like depression, greed, agony, and jealousy. They’re all sentient, and all of them are feared, though not as much as the hate-filled ones.

Gameplay Scenarios

The purpose of a backstory in an MMO is to help create compelling game scenarios. Otherwise, I would just pencil in “they’re evil because I said so” and be done with it. What can this backstory do to make the game more interesting? Well, let’s brainstorm:

• Skeletons like to band together in little clusters to give each other emotional support: they need to keep their hatred high. When they’re not hating, they get weak-kneed and sluggish. So they give each other little pep talks about why they should hate their family, or that deer over there, or that player coming over to kill them.
• The Combat Psychology skill now has direct tie-ins to undeath. If you make a skeleton feel less hatred, you’ll literally make him weaker. Psychoanalysis can kill the undead!
• It lets us have some startling scenarios. Imagine you’re in town when a skeleton runs by and starts banging on the door of a house. “Martha, it’s me, I’m back! Let me in!” He’s preying upon his wife, hoping she’ll open the door so he can kill her. And even if you save her, she’s likely to have mixed feelings about you killing her husband…
• Maybe depression in this world is now a serious public safety issue. Most suicides are committed by extremely depressed people, and if they come back as ghosts, haunting their loved ones, they can spread more depression like an infectious disease. What would society do? Would they give depressed people more aggressive treatment, or would they banish them to the countryside? (For variety, it’d probably vary from city to city.)
• If depression causes ghosts, that has lots of practical side-effects. When the constabulary investigates a suicide, they can just wait and see if a ghost appears. If no spirits have tormented the family within three days, they start to suspect foul play.

And much more. It gives me some interesting back-stories for tombs (“the elves created an undead-proof chamber, and…”) and it helps me create undead NPCs with more compelling personalities, from tragically evil skeleton minions to cruel and vicious vampire kings.

While the backstory isn’t super weird, I think it’s fresh enough that it won’t seem like the same old thing, either. And with any luck, it will be easy to see why raising the dead is Evil.