I wonder if Ubisoft ever thinks about bringing the SSI brand out of retirement.

I don’t know how many eyes are going to see this, but I’ve gotten used to never getting any good feedback from play testers. Rather than try and tempt fate and work to get a bunch of people all signed up to test, this time I’m just going throw it out there and ask that somebody please send me back their results at some point.

I’m only testing a particular addition to the game Risk this time, to see if I’ve accomplished a particular design goal.

Gambit

Click for full size.

Examine your current Risk board, and make certain it matches the board above in all critical ways. If it differs in how countries connect, or how they’re named, take careful note of that. Preferably, use Gimp or Photoshop to go in and change those details for yourself.

Preferably before you actually meet to play, make sure every player has a copy of the board you are working from, and these rules:
Using your preferred method, dole out the starting territory before anything else.
Players will plan out actions to happen at the beginning of their turn while playing the first 15 turns of the game.
There is a maximum of 1 action per turn.
Players are afforded [50/(no. of players) rounded up] units to place according to plan, while a maximum of 3 can be placed per turn.
5 players = 10
4 players = 13
3 players = 17
2 players = 25
Units that are placed on enemy territory automatically invade, while units placed on friendly territory simply reinforce.
Any Territory conquered in this method gives a the player a card towards a second pool of cards. This is considered entirely separate from the usual card, and the successful planned invasion does not count towards their being able to draw a card for their regular pool that turn. The second pool of cards can only be used as part of the pre-written plan.
Actions that can be planned in advance are, the placement of troops, movement of 3 troops one territory, turning in your second pool of cards.
If you do not own territory your trying to move troops to, it becomes an attack. If you do not have the troops there to move, it fails.
If you do not have the cards in the secondary pool to make a set, the action fails.
If you have already lost the game, your plans are considered void from that point forwards.

Raph Koster just linked to a service called The Game Crafter which seems to still be in beta in some form. I’ve made an account on there, and fully plan to release a few games on there. That will be at some point in the future though, after I’ve finished work on a prototype.

For some reason, I’m in a bright and sun shiny mood. The car is “working as intended” more or less, and pretty soon I’ll once again be able to do stuff out in our kitchen area without feeling like an invader. So all of this good will has spilled over onto my thoughts on Blizzard, and I thought I’d say something somewhat hopeful about their next MMO.

My hope is, it’ll be the Starcraft to WoW’s Warcraft 1/2. However, don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying I hope it’s a Starcraft MMO. Rather, that it will be the strong variation in principles that a team is willing to stick to, as Starcraft was.

For those who never got a chance to play Warcraft 1, the two sides were rather disgustingly similar. The core game play was still tons of fun, don’t get me wrong, but many times it felt like you were playing a recolor army with a whopping 3 different units from your opponent. Warcraft 2 wasn’t quite so bad, but the storyline campaign wound up being literally interchangeable between the races. In the end, it often seemed like the core underlying lesson from game play and story is “we’re not so different after all!”

Starcraft was different. It had three races, for starters, and even more each of them was fundamentally different from the ground up. The zerg were so iconic in their role of massed units who are individually worthless, it’s even bled over into a more common gaming vernacular and isn’t uncommon to be heard used by people who probably don’t even know what Starcraft is. The Terrans were masters of bread and butter units and tactics, with the siege tanks and nukes to keep them in a sort of “heavy artillery” role. And of course the Protoss with expensive warriors that are pound for pound better than their counterparts, and the only race to have shields giving them a huge boost to defenses.

I’m not going to say this was completely new at the time, I’m pretty sure other people had been using three armies with balancing traits before. However, within their own games, it was a total shift away from Warcraft. The Zerg were not misunderstood, the rise of a formerly human leader didn’t calm them into noble savages. Zerg just spread, it was what they did, and it was certain death to anything in their way. The Protoss aren’t humans by another name, they have a totally different history, culture and technology. Their war with the zerg however left them ready to go to any length, including purging entire worlds that they considered too far gone. And the Humans are almost always magnificent bastards, but still a diverse bunch with a metric ton of internal division and quarreling.

And when they released their expansion… they kept within the correct feel of each faction while expanding tactical options. The Lurkers provided, somewhat ironically, anti zerg defense to the zerg as well as a mobile defense strategy that formerly would have been exceedingly difficult. The Toss gained access to units that had formerly only been available in storyline, invisible super attackers with paper thin armor that melded together to form a mind controlling sorcerer type. Both fit within the flavor quite well, and each added it’s own unique spin on general combat situations. The medic increased the defense of a standard marine squad, while allowing them to stim more often, making them significantly stronger attackers, but also providing an Achilles’ heal to the formation and still keeping them rather weak against concentrated damage.

From here it isn’t too hard to extrapolate how this could be related in MMO form. Mostly it just means that there needs to be no overlapping classes between races, and each race’s classes need to be internally consistent. I was thinking of inelegantly demonstrating a possibility using WoW’s classes, but after lining them all up separately they still made more or less equivalent groups.

So let’s consider something along these lines:
Race A:
Heavy defense warriors
Not much healing, mostly self heals
Good buffs

Race B:
DPS heavy, but almost entirely made of paper
A HoT based healing class, who is also made of paper
Locational buffs

Race C:
Burst damage heavy, mostly ranged types
A standard healer with some medium armoring
Strong debuffs

I’m not saying this would be a perfect MMO, or my perfect MMO. I just think it would be really nice to see Blizzard do something along those lines again. Also, I think it would be a lot of fun to get back into a PvP system where the combatants were honest to god different from each other. Tactics would need to be worked out on the fly based on who you’re fighting. The emphasis would also return largely to tactics, as certain races would be completely decimated if they tried to zerg, while others are probably just going to get picked off one by one if they don’t work together.

I’m still on the lookout for a C# coder willing to partner up with me. My primary emphasis being that they be fast.

If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, please let me know. Either in a comment here, or at my gmail account, sara.pickell

I’m so fucking tired of having to teach myself design tools. Earlier tonight I felt like getting some hands on experience with fps level design, since I don’t have HL2:EP1, I can’t use Hammer, so I reinstalled Unreal Tournament 2K4, spent some time re-aquainting myself with the game’s style pace and weapons, then opened UnrealEd. Holy fucking shit people, can you make a program any more intimidating on first opening. What happened to the days of Starcraft map editor where if you just wanted to build something incredibly fucking basic it didn’t take a degree in nuclear fucking physics.

Okay so I’m clicking in the workspace and it’s just moving the viewport around, grand. I manage to make something… fuck all idea what, but supposedly some sort of terrain object. Well gee, camera tool makes things pan, lets try the vertex editing tool, that way I can grab vertices and drag them around… and queue several minutes of me dragging the camera around to no effect on the fucking object. Greaaaat. So online I go. Atari’s forums have an entire section set aside for 2003/4 editing, awesome. Stickies, even more awesome. Every tutorial being a broken link, not awesome.

And I wouldn’t fucking care if it wasn’t the same damn shit every fucking time. “Hey everybody we have this great new engine,” well awesome, I’ll check it out and suffer from your incomplete wiki and nonsensical tutorials and shitty code commenting. Fucking awesome. Hey want to move a sprite forward at a speed of .00025 milimeters a second? Well then now’s your chance to take a refresher course in trigonometry! Don’t have seventeen years of C++ under your belt? That’s okay, every scripting on language on Earth throws all those conventions painfully ingrained into your consciousness to the wind and feels just fine making you learn an entirely new syntax to do all the exact same shit.

Better hope you learn well from reading shit on forums, and like asking questions of random forum strangers. Maybe if you’re really lucky you’ll get to catch them on IRC and deal with them pontificating their opinions on the merit of your present goal without any fucking clue what the hell it is you’re trying to make.

*sigh* I’m just tired right now. Physically tired, and tired of fighting the same fucking battle all the time. I’m sure if I just spent more time with any particular sets of tools it’d eventually become as easy to use as Maya is for me now. But god damn, every time I want to start on something it’s some new fucking two year project just to get to the point where the fucking tools are usable.

And the Aurora toolkit, which I was finally starting to get, crashes every god damn time as of last patch and they are NEVER going to fix it.

So according to Blogger this should be post number 333. Although somewhat auspicious all on it’s own, it’s not really what I’m here to write about today.

I’ve mentioned before that I felt a similarity between game design and music. At the time I didn’t really have the words or the experience to describe what I meant exactly. I think I may have gotten a little more under my belt now to be able to define it more clearly.

The first thing I’d recommend is that you find and acquire, my preferred method for such is iTunes, Moonlight Sonata, by Ludwig van Beethoven, Nocturne No.2 in E flat, Opus 9, No. 2, by Frederic Chopin, and Claire de Lune by Claude Debussy. Since I’ve managed to stumble across all of these, I doubt they’re too far down the classical music rabbit hole. Now just listen to each of them, but turn the volume up fairly high, you want it to be comfortable to listen to, but also to be able to hear more than the melody. What you’ll probably notice is that there is a subtext to the music, most notably in Chopin’s work. For the other two, this subtext is the play of the resonance of the notes, how long you can continue to hear a particular note’s influence on the sound.

So here we have subtext, but there is also speed. Depending on performance in the Moonlight Sonata certain notes will be rushed through while another just on it’s heels will be drawn out for some time. But each variance in speed creates a different feel to the note, where the same sound let to draw on might be poignant, moving quickly it can be a foundation for a longer phrase that is collectively more effective.

One of the best things about listening to piano music at a higher volume, though, is that you can hear the soul of the instrument. The vibration of the hammers striking the chords and filling the area with a sound that you can feel in your chest. Even if you can’t feel it yourself, you can just hear, even through the recording, that it felt like that in the room as they were playing.

And I choose these songs because they are not merely good, they are great. Each one is a communication of the soul of the player into the world. A sort of indescribable truth made for a short while into an almost tangible reality by the composers writing and the performers drive and talents. My concern for games right now is that we have so few who even seek to be great. In MMOs in particular the rallying cry is some sort of need to be a greater commercial success than WoW, and my primary contention is that such success isn’t even a worthy goal, and more likely than not self defeating. To be perfectly honest, I have yet to see a major studio aspire to greatness, indeed most of them seem to aim consciously for some level of “just good”.

A game designer has the ability to create the sort of powerful performance that catches us so tightly in music. And we see an occasional glimpse of that in games like Iji, Shadow of the Colossus, or Facade, but compared to the power of Beethoven’s music even those don’t quite make the mark. Which isn’t to say we haven’t had any designers that were important, or pretty fucking good, just that I haven’t seen any that crossed that unspoken line into the realm of truly great. Most importantly though, it’s valuable, in and of itself, that we push ourselves to reach those heights.

But for now I have to go back to my spot in the cheap seats and wonder. Is it really so unfair to not care about the next big thing, but want, or better yet demand, greatness. To rail against the state of affairs not because I think it’s bad, but because it could be so much more.

The prompt for Game Design Concepts: Level 3‘s challenge. I took on the hardest, black diamond, difficulty, and this is what I have so far.

Green Circle

As above, and the players may not engage in direct conflict, only indirect.

Wartime Reporting
players are reporters – 2 – 4 recommended
players begin with $10 and no fame points and no informant cards
shuffled Common Informant cards are placed in a face down stack to the right
shuffled Command Informant cards are placed in a face down stack to the left of that
shuffled Front Lines Informant cards are placed in a face down stack to the left of that
the deck of event cards in chronological order is placed above those three stacks on the table
Players cut the deck of Command Informant cards, whoever gets the highest value going first. The deck is reshuffled and play then proceeds clockwise from there.
At the beginning of a turn, a player may choose to invest in an informant
To draw from the Common Informant cards costs $10
To draw from the Command Informant cards costs $50 and requires 5 fame
To draw from the Front Lines Informant cards costs $50 and requires 10 fame
In the middle of your turn, you can choose to write a regular story, gaining 1 fame and $5 per star of your current informants
or you can choose to write an exploitation piece, gaining double the worth of one of your informants, but forcing you to discard them.
Players can then end their turn
A set of turns beginning from the first players turn and ending with the last players turn is called a round.
Starting on the first round, an event card is uncovered at the end of every other round. Players gain two extra fame if they can meet the requirements on the card before another event card is turned up.
Event cards begin with “The Resignation of Bismark” (End a turn with $10 and 1 informant), ending in “All’s Quiet on the Western Front” (Have at least six Front Lines Informants, or over 80 fame)
Play ends when all event cards have left play.
The winner is the player with the most fame at the end.

20 Common Informant cards – 14 1-star, 6 2-star
18 Command Informant cards – 8 3-star, 5 4-star, 3 5-star, 2 6-star
18 Front Lines Informant cards – 6 3-star, 6 4-star, 4 5-star, 2 6-star
Event Cards (rough)
Resignation of Bismark, The
Germany Breaks Alliance with Russia, Establishes Alliance with Austria
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassinated
Austria Declares War on Serbia, Russian Troops Mobilize
German Troops Roll into Belgium
British Expeditionary Force Arrives
The Miracle of the Marne
(Space reserved for several events from Asia)
The Sinking of the Lusitania
The Arab Revolt
Bolshevik’s Success Closes Eastern Front
United State’s Declares War on Germany
Paris Under Fire
Summer Counter Offensive
Peace Declared
All’s Quiet on the Western Front