Invisible Effort

Designing for Tier Two, Part Three

2011-11-06T00:28:00.000-07:00

Note: This post is part of a series - First Part Here

What happens if you don't introduce a fundamental weakness in a character's area of strength?

In a PvE game, the answer is typically boredom. In a PvP game, the answer is typically toxicity or simply unbalanced.

For example, how many single player games have you played, where the ranged option is so strong, that you might as well never actually melee attack? In Fable, for example, using a bow or magic combat could become so fast, powerful and ubiquitous - that comparatively, melee combat wasn't required and was actually suboptimal in a lot of cases.

In Mass Effect 1, the assault rifles particular balance of firepower, ammo count, accuracy and range meant that there typically was no point in using other weapons (outside of some extreme examples with the Pistol, which you could eventually make into an assault rifle.)

In League of Legends, Jax's main strength is to be an unstoppable one on one killing machine. When Jax is good, any kind of one on one fight is a terrible prospect and distinctly unsatisfying. Poppy's main strength is to assassinate one character without fear or reprisal, again, any kind of one on one fight is a terrible prospect and distinctly unsatisfying.

Why does this happen?

If your primary strength has no weaknesses in that field, then one of two things typically happen:

1. You fight with your primary strength - ranged combat for instance - and you win and dominate, because you have no weakness. In a PvE game, this tends to lead to boredom. In a PvP game, this leads to unsatisfying gameplay or simply OP gameplay.
2. You fight in something that is not your primary strength - and then you find ways to just ignore those fights so you can fight #1.

For example, you have no incentive to become a better melee character if your character's ranged attacks has no weakness. You simply want to find as many opportunities to fight in ranged - eschewing any case where you might have to melee - You typically only do so if you are forced to.

However, since your ranged attacks have no weaknesses, you don't have to put in a lot of thought to use them in the first place - you simply dominate and so, you have a distinctly boring experience because the best way to play, is to first find a way to use your ranged attack and then grind away with that boring route.

Why can't I introduce weaknesses that aren't in their strength?

I believe that most people intuitively understand that things without weaknesses are inherently uninteresting - The perfect hero is not a character that holds your interest for very long. However, the dominant line of thought is that as long as they have some kind of weakness at all, then it is fine. Designing for Tier Two says this is not the case - It is much much better to have a weakness built into the inherent strength of the character.

For example, let's take Fable again - The crossbow was a very effective weapon - It had high damage, low reload speeds, the ability to combo and the ability to hit multiple targets with a spell and had a range high enough to be safe - It has no essential weakness. You could even spec a repositioning spell if you dabbled in magic so that you could blink away from foes.

The ranged character, frequently had low health or terrible melee ability - However, the key question is: Does this matter? If everyone dies before they enter melee range, does low health or terrible melee ability matter? If you died in one hit in melee but usually killed everyone at range 95% of the time, is this decent gameplay? Is this even interesting gameplay where you stand in a corner and snipe away?

You see, inherent weaknesses in fields other than the one you are using means you typically play so you never have to think about them. If you have an inherent weakness in the area of expertise that you are using, it means you constantly have to overcome them to leverage your core strength.

For example, a sniper rifle or a rail-gun is the perfect example of a ranged weapon with an absurd strength (one shot kills, insane range) with equally absurd weakness (terrible reloading, single target). When you are using a railgun or a sniper rifle, you always keep these two facts in mind, even as you abuse your core strength - adding a level of depth of thought to your play experience, even as you destroy people with your strengths.

It is when your weakness doesn't matter where games start to get boring. Let's say your character is super durable and super fast in melee, but has no ranged attacks as his "weakness." Does this matter? Do you even need to think when fighting? You simply run to the person and hit them until they are dead. Your primary strength overcomes anything that could fight in it, and fighting in your primary strength has no obstacle to overcome - the result is that you always fight in melee but you never really care about what you do.

Designing for Tier Two, Part Two

2011-11-06T00:08:00.000-07:00

Note: This post is part of a series - First Part Here

Recapping - Making something memorable and non-toxic means two things:

1) Strongly emphasize one or two elements.
2) However, even in those strengths - have weaknesses in that element to highlight those strengths.

In this part, I'll talk about some examples from a variety of sources.

Color Contrast

You've seen this before - An entire black and white painting with a single element of color. This serves to emphasize both the bleakness of the black and white setting *and* the element of color.

It's fairly trite by now - but it's a good example to lead off of with.

Ninja Gaiden - Melee Master

One of the keys here, in making you feel like a ridiculous Ninja is actually due to your primary weaknesses - you are bad at ranged combat and you go squish when things look at you the wrong way.

However, it means you have to compensate with mobility, a great melee moveset, evasiveness and flexibility.

Your moves are as powerful as they need to be, to compensate for your essential weakness in those moves. Imagine if Ryu had a rocket launcher in Ninja Gaiden - now.. none of your moveset has any meaning because you wouldn't need to use any of it - This is a common flaw in a lot of games where, since you don't have a weakness to overcome, the game is far less interesting - simply spam your ranged button.

League of Legends - Gragas/Rammus/Riven

One of Gragas' strengths is mobility - he has one of the best moveblocks in the game and excels at chasing. Rammus' strength, is also mobility - he has one of the fastest movement speeds in the game and excels at chasing. Riven's strength, is also mobility - she has the most flexible movement pattern and ignores slowing effects.

How can they compete with each other? It's from the weakness in their strength that they begin to diverge and feel unique.

Gragas' body-slam cannot go through units - He will stop at the first unit hit - He is an amazing chaser/evader, so long as there are no obstacles in the way. Surrounded, Gragas cannot escape, despite the fact that he is a very mobile character. However, Gragas can go through walls, mimcking the Kool-Aid man to some extent - This gives him excellent ambush opportunities. The Gragas player needs to think about how to most effectively use his strongest element.

Rammus is similar in that he cannot go through units - He will stop at the first unit hit. However, Rammus' land-speed is three or four times higher than Gragas' overall. However, since Rammus cannot go through walls either, the paths that Rammus can take are very restricted, even though he can take them at lightning fast speeds, giving the Rammus player the need to think about the path that he takes.

Riven's mobility comes from that fact that she has four distinct surge abilities, enabling her to ignore slows and do lots of fake-outs and weaving through disparate elements - She can also attack on the move with these, providing continuous threat while moving at the same time (or defending, in the case of her last movement ability) However, Riven's mobility is highly localized - She cannot go through walls and her top speed isn't that high, comparable to 550 MS - since each movement ability also moves her a very short distance, the Riven player must chain her movement abilities together to actually reach where she goes - often trading damage in the interim.

Designing for Tier 2, Part One

2011-11-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

In a competitive environment (or for enemies in a PvE environment) - How do you design such that things are both memorable and non-toxic?

This is my personal take on it - which I call designing for Tier 2 - For this specific example, I'll be talking a lot about League of Legends champion design, since that's.. currently just what I do.

Making something memorable is actually the easier of the two problems to solve for: Find one or two distinct elements and execute them cleanly and powerfully. In Ninja Gaiden, for instance, you are a ridiculous badass with every move in existence. In Prince of Persia, you are one of the most agile characters in games. In League of Legends, you make a champion excel at one or two particular fields - typically with that in mind as their Marquee ability.

Let's take Blitzcrank, the Steam Golem - Blitzcrank excels at disruption. His marquee ability is Rocket Grab - a move that sends out a tethered fist that grabs opponents back to him. His other abilities also ramp up this disruptive element on blitzcrank - He has a melee range uppercut that disables opponents briefly and he has an area of effect silence on a relatively long cooldown.

If you need to channel a spell or stand in place for a while, Blitzcrank will ruin your day.

But wait, doesn't that sound incredibly frustrating to fight against? Moreover, what if I want to make another champion who's memorable moment is disruption? How would I accomplish that?

This is where designing for Tier 2 comes in, the essential principle being: Even in a character's 'top-of-the-line' strength - they have limitations that they need to overcome.

Or rephrased - The strongest element of a character is still limited and has obstacles that need to be overcome.

Let's go back to each individual ability -

Ranged Grab - Skillshot reliant - The opponent's can dodge - It has a long cooldown.
Power Fist - Melee-only - The opponent can kite or stay out of his range.
Area of Effect Silence - Short duration - Melee-only - Longest cooldown.

Then take a look at the abilities as whole -

It lacks a strong area of effect component disruption.
The disruption durations are very short - the opponent is only locked out from actions for a total of perhaps 0.75 seconds.

When you fight Blitzcrank, even when fighting him in his area of expertise - disruption, you know his set of limitations within that field. It also allows you to design another character that excels at disruption without making Blitzcrank feel poor - because you can design another champion to excel at areas where Blitzcrank is weak at, and have weaknesses where Blitzcrank does not.

But wait - Doesn't that mean Blitzcrank doesn't excel at disruption?

The combination of Rocket Grab and Power Fist means that Blitzcrank's movement disruption is very strong - even if he doesn't actually cause lock-down and is only single-target.

Because Blitzcrank has weaknesses in his area of expertise, you are allowed to ratchet up even farther in terms of their relative strengths - Power Fist has one of the lowest cooldowns in the game for a disable of that type (2 seconds) - while remaining safe due to the fact that his kit is self-limiting, even when successful.

Design Philosophy at Riot Games: PvP

2011-08-03T14:05:00.000-07:00

I'm gathering my thoughts on a more comprehensive list of design principles but as a fun experiment, I thought I'd combine some anti-patterns into broader and more easily understood principles.

What I've discovered is that principles tend to be contradictory. You can be devoted to honesty and compassion, for example, but there are always instances where the honest thing to do isn't the compassionate thing to do, and vice versa.

1. Self-Actualization and Responsibility

"I have a large degree of control over my personal success and my failure."
"I am not overtly punished for other people's mistakes."
"My victory or success is determined primarily by things I can control."

Things that violate this principle:

- Chaos Bolt / Dodge Procs - Excessive random chance in abilities.
- Allied Forced Movement / Friendly Fire - Moves that primarily punish allies on your failure.
- Stat Donations / Self Sacrifice - Moves that make characters excessively dependent on others.

2. Actions are what are important, rather than encyclopedic knowledge

"The majority of my time should not be spent figuring out what just happened, but how I should respond to it."
"What I know about my enemy is less important than how I adapt to my enemy."
"I should not be punished for things that are impossible to understand while playing."

Things that violate this principle:

- Lack of Natural Counters - Moves that need excessive preparation beforehand to counter.
- Skills that demand a single counter-response - Moves that specifically specify what the opponent needs to do to counter it.
- Highly Abstracted Skills - Moves that don't communicate properly what they do. A wall communicates 'don't move.' A debuff that punishes you for moving does not.
- Skills that scale on non-controllable factors - Moves that target numerical statistics or level count.

3. Interaction

"I win the game by interacting with my opponent."
"My character should not be placed in a position where I am shut-out for the rest of the game."
"In a clash between me and my opponent, the one with higher skill should win."

Things that violate this principle:

- Lack of Counters - Skills with no natural responses.
- Hard Lock/Counter Abilities - Skills or abilities primarily designed to excessively punish one character type or class.
- "Shut out" Specialization - Characters that are designed to be unable to lose in specific scenarios.

...Still thinking on ways to encapsulate all the UI principles.. I mean 'Keep it Simple Stupid' pretty much does all of that.

Theorycraft: Incentivizing Difficulty by giving appropriate experience rewards, Part 1: Goals and Basic

2011-03-06T05:16:00.000-08:00

Note: Presented here is probably a rethinking of the old 'encounter' based experience system used in Pen and Paper and how to apply it to the digital games of today.

Goals:

1) Gate progression appropriately as needed to let Content trickle down in a healthy manner
2) Incentivize players to attempt to take on the hardest challenge they can at their level.
3) Disincentivize low-difficult grinding (or ease of repeat grinding)
4) Encourage exploration and experimentation of new areas to avoid stagnation.
5) Create a system in which EXP is distributed based on difficulty.

Major Paradigm Explored: 'The Encounter' as a replacement for individual monster exp.

What is an Encounter?

In lieu of granting players experience primarily on a kill/reward basis, where the act of defeating a monster is what grants the experience or rewards, one should take a larger view at the encounter or set of monsters that the player is dealing with.

For example, let's take a look at a basic case: our player encounters a single slime and defeats it. Let's say that defeating a single slime is worth one experience point.

Now let us say that the player can either take three slimes at a time or one slime at a time. For the sake of this simple example, let's assume that the player has no area of effect attacks and has to attack the slimes one at a time. This means that the player is incentivized in this system to always take one slime at a time, as taking three slimes at a time while only being able to attack one means that the three slime encounter is exponentially more difficult while only linearly more rewarding. This is due to the fact that, while the player is busy with one slime, the other two slimes have free reign to attack him. The time it takes to kill the last slime is multiplied threefold while only giving the reward of killing one slime. Hence, taking one slime at a time is the safest and most efficient way of gaining rewards per slime killed. In this system, the player benefits more from avoiding harder encounters.

However, what if rewards were given on an encounter style basis? What if, instead of assigning an experience value to killing one slime, we gave an experience value to the entire pack? If killing three slimes at a time granted the player five times the experience as killing one slime at a time, the player can then choose to be rewarded according to the difficulty he wants to challenge himself to.

This is the basic paradigm: Rewards must be tailored to the context of the encounter. Rewards given or tailored to individual discrete actions lose out on the essential context and thus promote the maximization of performing those small discrete actions.

The Hack'N'Slash Genre: A look at incetivized repetition, part 1: Summary

2011-01-16T03:33:00.000-08:00

How many of you have played Diablo 2? It is one of the pinnacle crowning achievements of the Hack and Slash genre.

However, one of Diablo 2's major gameplay faults can be summed up with one word: Repetition. Because Diablo 2 is so defining to the genre, most of the Hack and Slash genre has also been infected with similar pains.

So, a quick overview of the things I'm going to talk about, taking Diablo 2 as the specific context for analysis:

1. Non-specific loot pinatas - Non-specific loot pinatas are encounters or events that give randomized distributed loot across a wide variety of power levels. These are fun because you always have the chance of getting some godly item. These tend to be bad because you are then encouraged to always play in the area which is the easiest for you.

2. Encounter makeup - The types of encounters have both direct impacts on repetitiveness and indirect ones. The direct impact is when the monster encounters all tend to be the same horde of monsters fighting you. The indirect impact is when players optimize for 90% of the game and then use similar tactics against the last 10%. This tends to create symptoms such as making AoE spells king, even in single target encounters.

3. Disincentives to party - Diablo 2's party system was a heavy disincentive to partying in many ways. Shared loot drops, experience penalties and insufficient scaling vs. the number of players made solo'ing much more profitable overall.

4. Healing Paradigms and Attrition - Healing paradigms and attrition mechanics help force uncomfortable situations onto the player. These can create periods where the players must adapt their skills and mechanics to face the situation at hand.

5. Skill Tree and Specializations - Specializations make characters unique but often at the cost of making characters marginal in areas which they did not choose to specialize in. This often leads to the syndrome of players only having or needing one tool to deal with everything in the game.

Mechanical Complexity vs. Game Depth: Go/Checkers and Rock Paper Scissors

2010-12-26T01:49:00.000-08:00

The game of Go is played with two pieces: White and Black on a grid of varying sizes, most commonly 19 by 19. The game of Checkers is played with two pieces: Red and Black on an 8 by 8 grid. In terms of board space, Go has more open space overall.

In Go, the object of the game is to surround your opponents pieces with your own in a full enclosure. Once a piece is placed, it cannot move. In Checkers, the object of the game is to kill your opponents pieces by hopping over them diagonally, otherwise moving forward.

Go has more straightforward mechanics here: Players alternately place a piece on the board, capturing the appropriate pieces when the enemy is surrounded. In Checkers, you can move a piece forward, capture another piece, chain capture another piece with multiple hops, promote a piece by landing at the end of the board thus allowing you to move in any direction.

Checkers, overall then, has more mechanical complexity. There are more rules to memorize regarding what you can and cannot do. The moves you can make are more complicated and strung together...

...and yet Go is the game with overall more strategic depth. The game of Checkers has been solved by computers, giving you a perfect play by play of how to win (or at least draw) every game of checkers. Part of this is due to the board space disparity. 64 squares cannot compare with 361 tiles in terms of problem space.

Yet, Go is routinely played on smaller boards to practice. However, the game of Go has only been solved up to (at the time of this writing at least) 7 x 7 grid. How can this be?

Mechanical complexity does not directly translate into game depth. Game depth is created by unique interactions between you and your opponent. Each move has far flung ramifications in Go, although each individual move is simple, eventually, in the end, each individual move will matter.

If you want to take this principle to the extreme, look at Rock/Paper/Scissors/Spock/Lizard. This game is an extension of RPS in that there are many more unique roles involved that have different interactions with the existing roles. RPSSL also has a greater problem space than RPS, having 5 choices at any given time rather than 3... However, when you play RPSSL, you quickly find that the depth of RPSSL is exactly the same as RPS, despite the fact that there is more rules baggage, memorization and problem space.

However, let us imagine a game tentatively called RPS^3, where you simply perform rock/paper/scissors 3 times in a row until someone wins best 2 out of 3. Suddenly, this game has depth, despite being utterly simplistic. Why is this? Because previous interactions start influencing future interactions.

Let's take this further and consider 'uneven RPS' where winning with scissors scores 5 points, winning with rock scores 3 points and winning with paper scores 1 point. Now each individual interaction has more depth as well somehow, despite the fact that the game hasn't gotten any more mechanically complex simply because the decisions have uneven outcomes (despite all being 'winning' states.)

There are other elements to Game Depth, but before I veer too far off course, these simple examples should illustrate to some faint degree that, despite how complex each individual move can be, it is in large part due to the interactions that you can have with your opponent that Game Depth is mostly created.

[Thought Experiment] Player motivation map

2009-10-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a thought experiment for anyone designing a game. Build up a 'user flow' diagram to determine what your players will do and why. Think about all the possible actions the players can do as well as all the possible motivations players have to do them.

For example, I'm going to take a basic eastern MMORPG.

Possible Actions:

Grinding

Farming

Quests

In-Game events

Organized Play (Team Play)

Organized wars

Socializing/Community building.

Possible Motivators:

Power

Greed

Competitiveness

Expression / Build creation

Exploring

Socializing

Then figure out what actions are "fed" by what motivators. That is, which actions will satisfy particular wants and desires of your players.

Farming

Motivators: Power, Greed, Competitiveness, Expression

Questing

Motivators: Power, Greed, Competitiveness

Grinding

Motivators: Power, Greed, Competitiveness

Organized Play

Motivators: Socializing, Power, Greed, Competitiveness, Expression

Socializing/Community building:

Motivators: Socializing.

Then figure out which action is rewards some motivations *the most* in your game so you can refine your list down. In most games, Organized play isn't the best way to satisfy power leveling. However, organized play can be the only source for some hard to acquire items. In this case, farming and organized play both satisfy greed the most in different ways.. so our refined list looks like..

Farming

Motivators: Greed

Questing

Motivators: None

Grinding

Motivators: Power, Competitiveness

Organized Play

Motivators: Greed, Socializing, Expression

Socializing/Community building:

Motivators: Socializing.

Now you have a pretty good idea of what is going to be the dominant actions that are going to be taken in the game. If you have a better idea of specific actions in your game, you can further refine this chart to determine what actions a potential player will do. Further refinements to this list can include: availability of the various actions you can take (for example, if there are only 3 quests in the entire game then questing can't satisfy its motivators because it's not available all the time). You can also figure out if you need to design more actions to satisfy base motivators, like specific quests designed to attract players who are driven by say, greed and socializing.

On creative patterns

2009-10-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

Almost all general game designs follow a slightly different pattern, I would endeavor to say that some of these patterns are far more successful than others. One of the most successful patterns I have seen is also one of the least understood and so I would like to give a short summary of it here. It involves 4 steps and roughly parallels to the 4 basic stages of learning how to do art.

1) Replication

"You start off by seeing if you can reproduce something you already know. An artists learns shadows and textures by drawing off of life."

In all forms of art and design, the first initial step is to replicate something you've seen. Replication is an exercise in both vision and execution. You have to see what is important or innate about the game and simultaneously be able to execute it and carry it out exactly.

Without being able to replicate something exactly, you often get the strange feeling that something is missing if you are lacking in vision or that something feels off if you are lacking in execution.

If, for example, you are creating a first person shooting game, the first step would be to replicate a base that you know, like Doom or something. It does not have to be perfect. The key in this step is to understand what you are trying to create and make sure that you both can see what is there to do and if you can do it.

2) Variation

"Let us place the bowl of fruit in the sky, or paint it as if it was night."

Variation is when you take an already existing form and tweak aspects of it. It is mainly an exercise in coherence. By taking various related objects or concepts and putting them in the same form, you begin to see how things can interact with each other in new ways.

When you fail to do enough variations, it often feels like parts of the game don't interact with each other well because there's a poor understanding of how the various elements can fit together.

Going back to our first person shooter example, variation is when you start tweaking or adding things and seeing how the new patterns emerge. What if you could fly in Doom? (Tribes). What if it was a fantastic setting? (Heretic)

3) Innovation

"From first principles, what if we then painted the impression that a bowl of fruit left to us?"

Innovation is the introduction entirely new ideas into the scene. Innovation is mainly needed as an outlet for creativity and novelty. Only by introducing something entirely new can you achieve things that replication and variation can't. For example, if you abandon the photorealism of a painting and painted merely the effect it had on you, this would be something that perfect replication or variation could not do.

Going back to our first person shooter example, innovation is hard to come by. There are games that dramatically change the way you interact with your environment (Portal, Thief), or games that have deliberately dropped realism for artistic style (Team Fortress).

4) Refinement

"Sometimes we can emphasize our use of color by using only a little bit. A single red flower in a black and white painting is far more powerful than a painting full of color"

Refinement is simply to cut away unnecessary parts of the original form and to add elements to it that make it more streamlined. Just as using washed out colors can serve to emphasize color, removing elements that grab the players attention can serve to streamline attention. Refinement is the hardest principle to embrace as it involves a deep understanding of what your original idea was and what made it work, the realization of how coherent the idea is to itself and the ability to add new things to streamline the idea.

In our FPS example, Team Fortress is a good example of where stripping away ideas or refinement brought about an increase in playability from the original Team Fortress Classic. Gone are the grenades and some classes. Gone are several "good" things in favor of making "great" things shine instead.

[Theory] Online RPG Game Economics and You, Part 2

2009-10-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

It is obvious that in almost all online role playing games, that more experienced players who have played longer will have more money and in-game wealth than someone who has started the game. In the last post, I established that price fixing and demand will generally be decided more by older experienced wealthy players than the majority of the players around.

There is a concept of "quality" good or "substitute" good in real world economies that also apply online role playing games as well. For a designer, these represent particularly complex pitfalls with itemization. Consider the fact that there may be the possibility of an item found extremely early on in the game that is still useful throughout all levels of the game. This good can be acquired by anyone.

Goods or items that are in demand with few substitutes will have their prices determined "fair" by the most powerful players.

Consider a low level item that is perpetually useful. For example, a useful little trinket that stuns an enemy for 3 seconds. Now, since this item is perpetually useful, every player in every single wealth bracket will desire this item. The free market will then decide the price of the item, most likely, to be the highest price a player will pay for it. This will naturally fall within the "elite" player's wealth bracket.

Even if the item wasn't particularly powerful, the item's valuation will be determined by the elite player's wealth bracket. For example, let us assume that the item is worth no more than 1% of your income. For the elite player, this could be two to a hundred times greater than players of lower levels. This common low-level item then will have ridiculously inflated market value relative to the players finding it.

Such things naturally lead to: Farming.

Farming is a horrible process as it disrupts normal gameplay (advancement and progression) and replaces it with a tedious repetitive process. Players are no longer encouraged to play what/where it suits them (or where it will challenge them) but to rapidly incur financial gain by repeatedly doing a simple area.

Combating this is even riskier. Suppose that, to encourage players to move onto new areas, you decrease the amount of items/gold from monsters that are too easy for the player. Now, players have a disincentive to level. If there is so much more gold/wealth to be obtained from killing this set of easy monsters for a low level item that can't be found anywhere else and sells for millions because elite players will pay millions, you'll see players actively make the choice to either not level or the choice to roll dedicated farming alts designed to farm this area.

With too many people farming the same resource, the rise of automated gatherers and high competition naturally occurs. If there is high collusion between player groups for highly desirable items with only one location to be obtained then you may have entire gangs of players "camped" out at a specific spot to acquire. This problem is worse if said location was originally intended to be an area for new players!

[Theory] Online RPG Game Economics and You, Part 1

2009-10-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that this has definitely been done before, but here's my quick musings on multiplayer game economics.

Multiplayer economics is often a tricky subject because the designer doesn't know what factors, incentives or disincentives exist. However, there are some wonderful key factors here that I feel have been ignored in the larger scheme of things.

Resources are created for "free" but they are never permanently consumed.

For example, there are two primary sources of obtaining in-game wealth. The primary source of income in a game is any system in which the game gives the players currency. This includes the reward of gold or money or items that could potentially generate gold and money. This is the first major break from reality, as it represents an unlimited money supply which must be addressed.

The secondary source of obtaining in-game wealth is the trade of items of value with other players in exchange of items for wealth in trading systems. This is the main "economy" problem that players speak of. The main problem with economies in general is the fact that if in-game wealth or gold is generated at too fast a rate from "nowhere" then there is no point in trading for it. The game then needs to revert to a Barter system, where items are primarily traded for other items.

Improperly managed resources/economies can lead to trade "lock", where no parties are willing to trade.

A barter system would be fine as a secondary currency, but only *if* there are sufficient units of lower denominations available to make "change", so to speak. I would gladly trade my sword of vorpal destruction for your shiny shield of gold. But if my sword is vastly superior to your shield, I would need something extra to compensate the difference in value. However, if there is no agreed upon secondary currency, then the trade cannot continue and the barter system will break down as everyone is locked with the items they possess.

The primary failings of both the money based and the barter based systems is the fact that the supply is essentially infinite and with no external systems, there is an infinitely growing supply of items. This problem is sometimes exacerbated by the introduction of real money trade in the system in games that are dependent on micro-transactions for their cash flows.

The rate at which resources are obtained, inevitably favor those who are more powerful.

The second major fallout in multi-player game economics is from the rate at which wealth is acquired. Naturally, as players progress through the game, they obtain more powerful and more desireable items. They also receive increased rewards to discourage players from taking the easy road. There is also usually an increase in "cost-of-living" expenditures such as perishable consumables and item costs in general (as barriers to player growth) and thus neccesitating a rise in the ability to obtain in game wealth.

I'll give an example here, as that may have been too wordy. Our level one hero finds one gold on a slime. This is fine because his sword only cost 5G. If our hero gets one gold a kill, he can obtain his sword in 5 kills. Now, if the next more powerful weapon costs 100G, our hero will need to kill 95 slimes in order to obtain his sword. But what is usually termed as "fair" in an RPG is that, as our hero acquires more power and defeats more powerful enemies, he should be rewarded more gold as well. That is, our hero can now kill demons and get hundreds of gold per kill. If we only awarded our hero one gold per demon kill, our hero might as well just kill slimes instead as they were much easier.

However, with an increase of power, also comes the increased ability to gather wealth. A high level player in online rpgs can gain gold perhaps tens or hundreds of times more than a new beginning player. This creates a serious discrepancy in the wealth accumulation of the system as now, the vast majority of the wealth in the system is controlled by proportionately few people. In real world economies, this would rapidly lead to: Price inflation and Price fixing.

On "Cheating"

2009-09-29T23:59:00.000-07:00

There are a myriad ways of form to cheat in any game but what can the designer do about it?

Sure, he can curse and scream and ban offending players from the game. That's always an option. Granted, identifying cheaters and banning them could be a prohibitively hard thing to enforce. This is especially prevalent in online multiplayer games since interactions between players can intensify any possible motivations to cheat in the first place.

A clever designer will be able to add enough disincentives to cheating that their numbers can be curbed to the extent where cursing, screaming and banning players becomes a tractable solution for taking care of the rest.

Cheating #1: Illegal duplication of rare items

Duplication of rare items typically occurs when there is a powerful or highly desire-able item and supply cannot meet demand. This is usually the case for almost all powerful items since everyone wants the "best" items and weapons and armors.

In this case, common disincentives to this is..

Break the market/Soulbinding

Make extremely powerful items only usable by the account or person who found it. Then you can make a second tier of less powerful and less desirable items and have those trade-able and "common' removing the incentive to cheat/duplicate items.

Infinite Supply

Simply make extremely powerful items common so that everyone can have "the best" gear. Then you can focus on the rest of the game

Cheating #2: Automated Play

Automated playing or "botting" is a way where clickers and automated tools play the game for the character instead of players themselves. This is a form of cheating where the time investment by players who do use automated tools can be several times greater than the actual players themselves.

Allow Automated Play using In-Game tools / Or automated gains while offline.

You can, in effect, cancel a large portion of 3rd party automated tools by simply allow automated play in-game. Give the players a bot system in game or a way of acquiring experience and resources by being offline. In this manner, automated play becomes less of a chore.

Make Automated Play suck

That is, a large portion of the incentive to do automated play stems from the fact that the most rewarding thing to do in the game is also the most boring. Kill the same monsters 99,000 times. If you take away the benefit from the boring same monster stuff and put the benefits somewhere else (like say, completing quests with random objectives or complicated movement puzzles/questions), then there is essentially no gain in using automated play tools.

Cheating #3: Maphack

If your game has some sort of random generation feature, a maphack tool can be extremely powerful. Consider the most famous example, Diablo 2, where maphack was used by a huge portion of the player base. Usually maphack usage arises due to the frustration between horribly designed random levels, the neccessity to get to one place from another with speed and the incentive to go somewhere fast.

Re-evaluate your network protocol

You can make maphack impossible by checking your network protocol very carefully and ensuring that the player can't have access to more of the map than he is allowed.

Re-evaluate your random generation

Part of the reasons map hacks are used are because your random levels don't make any sense. Why should the player bother stumbling through a thousand dead ends? Having clear signals and paths for players who want to get to one place from another instead of stumbling through random garbage is a great disincentive to maphack because you don't need it.

Re-evaluate why players keep going from one place to another.

If players are constantly trying to go to one place from another, you might want to ask yourself why they won't explore the immediate surroundings. If players are in such a rush, perhaps demotivating the players from getting there (lowering the benefits of being in that area) or increasing the benefits from carefully exploring is a better fit.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Part 2: Solutions

2009-09-28T03:02:00.000-07:00

"Frustrating" to "Interesting"

Thereare common methods to making a frustrating fight more interesting. Thekey in many of these is interaction. One of the most important principles is interaction between the game and the player. We aren't watching a movie here. The player has to be actively engaged in the experience. Many signs of frustration are simply the fact that they are artifical barriers that the player can't do anything about. The enemies have a little more health and so the fight simply takes longer. These barriers are non-interactive and only serve as pure impediments.

In a racing game, you could make the automatic car non-responsive as all hell. That would be "difficult" because now the player will have a harder time getting first place. Compare that kind of difficulty versus a racing game where the only cars you can drive are manual. That would be more difficult but the player actually has an avenue to interact with.

1. Clear cause and effect - "Oh, the dragon roars before he does his flame breath.

A clear cause and effect relationship lets the player learn the patterns in the encounter. If the causes are unclear and the effects devestating, then the player might be confused as to what he is actually going to see. If a player doesn't know what hit him, there's very little he can do to actually learn.

Subtle hints can be a good idea but remember not to go overboard. The more likely a player is to miss a hint, the less he should be punished for missing it.

2. Directness - "The dragon isn't just a walking sack of hit points."

Directness is critical to ensuring player interaction. Players don't want a longer fight. They want a more intense fight. A boss encounter that lasts an hour and a half with the player being in no real danger for 89 minutes is not fun. Once the player has perfected his strategy and his actions, the encounter should end relatively quickly.

A corollary to this is that there should be some path to victory that is within the player's grasp. If you set out to design your encounters with no real solution, your players will bend almost every rule and probably break your game/fight in order to overcome your encoutner.

3. High Player Interaction - "If I block, the flame breath does much less, and if I hit his leg he limps a little!"

Make all actions, even the ones that aren't optimal, do something for the player. If the player can't dodge the thousands of shards sent his way, at least make his block action mitigate damage. If the player can't hit the monster at exactly the right time, at least reward him with a little bit of damage. Nothing is worse than demanding flawlessness in your player.

"You have to hit this boss at this exact instant or nothing happens."

However small, the player should feel the effects of his actions. Have the boss bleed, or bellow taunts or scream in agony. Have a health bar or numbers pop up with damage. You want to avoid the scenario where the player has hit the boss 1000 times, only to die before the 1001th hit which would've killed the boss but the player gave up because he had no idea how many hits left he had to go.

4. Guidance IF the player needs it - "That flame blast looked like it hurt. Pay attention to his roar and prepare to defend yourself!"

On one hand, you don't want to give all the boss strategies away. On the other hand, it is highly important that if the player keeps failing, that the game realizes this and tosses him a hint or a clue to help him progress. If all else fails, remember to give the player guidance and suggestions if he's clearly doing it wrong or struggling to succeed.

"A clever example in the game Eternal Darkness was the Guardian boss. The player can only defeat this boss with magic. If the player insists on using guns to fight him, the Guardian boss simply laughs after 1-2 minutes with the phrase 'No human weaponry can defeat me, mortal', giving the player a subtle hint as to what he's supposed to be doing."

5. Options - "Man. I just can't defeat this dragon. Maybe I should look for some gear that increases my fire resistance?"

Options make more sense in RPGs where wearing the correct gear makes certain scenarios a lot easier. Being able to find/collect fire absorbing gear against bosses that primarily use fire makes the fight trivial. Essentially, if the players can't find a strategic way out, they should feel like they have enough tools/items at their disposal to "try." Whether that be armors that mitigate specific types of damage or just a wide range of spells/tools designed for niche purposes, options exist to give players hope that perhaps they can find some tool that will make their encounter a lot easier.

Without options available, the player can only continually bang his head on the same roadblock that's been bugging him continuously.

Afterword, my rule of thumb on attacks:

Here's my rule of thumb for toning down difficultencounters to interesting ones. For every single move/encounter/attackpattern the player might face, you get to choose 2 out of the 3...

Highly Damaging/Effective
Hard to Dodge
Hard to Predict

If something is hard to dodge and hard to predict, then it shouldn't punish the player too badly because there's very little he could do about it. If something is hard to dodge and highly damaging or effective, then the player must be able to predict that it's coming. If something is hard to predict and highly damaging, then the player must be able to dodge the effect once it occurs. If something is highly damaging, hard to predict and hard to dodge then you might as well just kill the player outright because you're not giving him very many opportunities to interact.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Interest, Part 2

2009-09-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

"Interesting" Hard Signs

It's hard to define what is both "interesting" and hard and yet not "frustrating" for the player. The idea is that the difficulty should not feel artificial in any way shape or form. If the player has been doing well up to this point, he should continue to do well.

"The player is doing well taking a hit every once in a while. Then suddenly, the next enemy (who acts the same as all the other enemies) instantly kills him because it does 3 times the damage of an ordinary enemy. This is not an interesting way to make things difficult. Making that next enemy say.. a ninja who moves 3 times as fast is *more* interesting than simply making him do 3 times the damage."

Exciting / Ambiance / Tone - "A DRAGON ate me... Aliens came up out of the vents and melted my face."

In some cases, you can make frustrating difficulty "feel" interesting by giving it the correct ambiance. The guy with that dagger deals 3 damage to me. But that guy over there with the BIG ass hammer over there dealing 30 damage to me "feels" intuitively correct. Even if the two don't differ meaningfully, it feels right and is more likely to be interesting than frustrating.

I mean, getting killed by ninjas is almost always a fun experience the first couple times around. No shame in that.

Eventual player success - "You know, I think I've almost got it... I just need one more try."

The player should not feel that this new difficulty is a giant roadblock. That leads to people quitting games. This is perhaps the hardest of the factors to nail down as it involves identifying potential roadblocks before you know about them and designing mechanisms to aid the player in succeeding. After all, one can exactly deduce if a player might improve on a section.

Things like artificially reducing difficulty if the player is doing badly might be a good idea but eventually may lead to players feeling coddled. Games have tried scaling difficulty systems based on how well the player is doing. The core here is that the players must always feel they are able to improve to the point where they can overcome this difficulty. Therefore, in the design of the game, the player must have options open available to them to improve.

If a boss relies on a player expertly sniping something from across the way and that is the only way to defeat the boss, there is a kind of hopelessness if the player doesn't feel his accuracy can improve to the extent that the boss demands. If there were more avenues to defeat the boss, this feeling would be discouraged.

High degree of control over the situation - "The player can do whatever and they all contribute to success."

The core of any game is that the player must feel competent, or at least, capable of performing the tasks asked to them. Their actions should feel meaningful. If the majority of the players actions result in him being damaged or not being effective at all then the player will not have a motivation to actually fight or think. There's no motivation there. Since all actions taken are meaningless, why bother attempting to figure out new actions?

The players actions should have some effect over the situation. Otherwise, why is he the player?

This also applies to defensive abilities. If all the attacks that the player faces are undodgeable then why should the player bother learning to dodge? If the enemy has a continuously streaming beam that never lets up, why should the player bother learning to hide? There's no incentive to perform defensive maneuvers because there's no point. It doesn't help.The players attempts at being defensive should be meaningful. The arrows should be dodgeable with clever movement. The sweeping gatling gun should let up its barrage of bullets to give the opportunity for the player to strike. Dodging the attack should present the player with a possible openings.

Clear signals and a clear path for the player to take - "Obviously, I'm supposed to aim for those glowing spots on his chest that the boss is trying to shield with his arms."

If the player doesn't know how to progress this usually leads to frustration. If the player doesn't know what to do against a monster's attacks, it might as well be unblockable for all intents and purposes. If the player doesn't know what he is supposed to do because there's no clear signals.. he will give up or, if he is especially dedicated, suspect there is a trick.

Nothing is more frustrating than not knowing what the hell you're supposed to do. You begin to suspect if the designers even had an idea in mind when they designed the encounter.

"Natural" difficulty - "Oooh, this guy is tough to hit because he's fast. I'm going to have to aim a little better."

A fairly decent way of making difficult encountersfeel interesting is to make the difficulty based on the environment or the context. Aliens that storm up to you point-blank aren't very interestingor difficult. Now, imagine if that fight took place in a pitch blackroom with only your flash light with the aliens crawling on the walls,*that* fight is more difficult *and* more interesting even though theymight not be any faster or any more damaging. Making the player fear and panic can be a interesting way to add difficulty, especially if the enemies encountered don't move in a normal pattern.

A second way of adding "natural" difficulty is simply making the monsters behaviors more complex. Enemies that are highly unpredictable aren't difficult but enemies that are just outside of the player's skill level to affect can be intensely difficult. For example, if a guy carries a heavy shield and can only be hurt by hitting the areas where the shield doesn't cover. That's a form of adding health and endurance without actually doing so. A monster may be weak and fragile but incredibly hard to hit, pouncing from wall to wall. That's a form of difficulty that has nothing to do with simply increasing damage or numbers.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Frustration Part 1

2009-09-22T23:59:00.000-07:00

"Frustrating" Hard Signs

When a game is difficult but unfairly difficult, it can often be frustrating to the player. Many signs of frustration can be attributed to a sense of powerlessness from the player's side as if he has no choice but to accept the punishment the game is doling out for him.

As a designer, one of the main questions you have to ask yourself is "How can the player overcome this difficulty?" If there's no answer besides "Suck it up" you might want to question your design a bit more.

Let's go over the points in the recap:

Unavoidibility - "I just can't dodge that one attack."

Unavoidable problems are almost always a mistake in design because the player can't do anything about it. These kinds of problems, especially if they lead to death or boredom, can become death knells in your game simply because the player has no choice in the matter. If he dies due to an unavoidable attack, he's always going to die. He just has to pray he never runs into the problem in the first place because there's no solution.

If you do have unavoidable problems in design, make sure that they do not directly lead to death or boredom. Unavoidable problems in this case should mean putting additional penalties or constraints rather than punishing the player because he did nothing wrong. These are good to some limited degree.

Note that unavoidable attacks due to the player doing something bad aren't truly unavoidable because the player has the option of not doing that horrible mistake in the first place and therefore don't fall in this category.

Round-aboutness - "So first, make your way uphill in the snow 6 miles. And then uphill back"

Nothing is more annoying in frustrating difficulty when you simply give no option for the player to efficiently plan his goals. When you make a problem difficult by giving the player a convuluted method to achieve something, this is a difficulty that the player has no way of getting around.

For example, let's say that our challenge for the player is to collect 6 golden mushrooms. Now, if the player was allowed to collect them in any order, it would be wise for the player to efficiently collect mushrooms that were close to each other. But if we had the arbitrary restriction of picking them in a set order (especially a set order that made no sense, tediously making the player go back and forth in the longest path possible) the player no longer has the option to plan his route.

Thus, this level of "increased difficulty" is only frustrating.

Arbitrary methods - "You have to wait for the gold button to be depressed, then you shoot somewhere else."

This problem is often due to the designer trying to be far far too clever by half. Instead of making the player's abilities do something, they want the player to solve some specific puzzle that they have in their heads. The problem is when that puzzle follows the designer's internal logic without actually paying attention to whether or not it makes sense.

It might be a terrific puzzle that they have to shoot the gold button and then a weak spot. The problem is, is this any kind of game at all? Why would a game has something so outside the normal realm of thinking? What kind of difficulty is encouraged by this behavior?

Lack of signals/instruction/hints and/or Lack of time to gather information - "The bosses weak point is not glowing, marked or even hinted at anywhere. And then he kills you if you shoot the wrong part."

This usually goes hand in hand with the above problem. If you tell the player there's a weak spot or a set of instructions they have to follow, it's "too easy." Or is it? If you tell the player absolutely nothing at all, more often or not, the first sign something is wrong is confusion. Frustration quickly follows.

What is worse is that designers usually feel like punishing the player for not picking up our their subtle hints. However, this just exacerbates the original problem. When players are trying to figure out a problem, they shouldn't continually punished because they're trying to figure it out. That's like whipping someone for taking too long on a convuluted riddle that you asked them in the first place without giving them any hints.

You can either be subtle or you can aggressively punish mistakes. You can't have both.

Artificial difficulty - "Oh, that gun we just gave you?Doesn't work. Oh, by the way, if you don't have *this* level of gear,you're dead no matter what you do."

Artificial difficulty is the recourse of a lazy designer trying to make his game harder. Instead of thinking of interesting challenges he just gives the boss more health or makes him do three times the damage. Giving monsters arbitrary immunities or invincibilities to "cheap" attack by the player. The problem with this type of difficulty is that it really doesn't encourage the player to do anything. They can't do anything about the problem's magnitude.

There really isn't anything interesting about an artifically difficult boss. He just takes longer and he's just not as fun to fight. This may be a tough problem to identify because it's very subjective as to what makes a proper encounter. The key question here is "What makes this problem difficult?" If the answer to that is simply a sheer matter of "the enemy has high statistics and better gear" and not "the enemy fights in an interesting way" you might want to look into making your enemies more complex.

Low interactivity - "The boss kills me because he ensnares me 99% of the time."

One of the ways to frustrate players is simply take away their ability to interact with the problem. What could be more difficult right? Take away their swords and give them a toothpick. Take away their horse and make them walk through mud. That's difficult. Now they can't use their most powerful abilities and their ability to control the character is weakened.

Except for the tiny fact that, if we didn't want any control over what was happening in a game, we wouldn't be playing a game in the first place. Nothing is more frustrating than an encounter where you spend 90% of the time watching yourself get beat on while you can do nothing about it. Sure, it may be a difficult encounter but if the majority of the time is spent fighting the fact that we can't control our own character, it's not much of a game anymore.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Overview

2009-09-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest things to be confused about when designing enemy encounters in any game is the notion that somehow, the players are your enemy. This is most common in Dungeons and Dragons but any beginning game designer should be aware of this confusion.

It's all too easy to think that the player is on one side and you're on the other. It's you or him. If he wins, you lose. Thus it's easy to design encounters that are borderline impossible. Be aware that the purpose of your game is not to beat the player senseless until he gives up. There is an insignificant amount of players willing to put up with the masochism of being beat up continually while playing your game.

That's not to say that game should not be hard. Difficulty is what keeps the game fun in the first place and not a mindless grind to the next area. Game design is about delivering a fun experience and difficulty is a key part of that.

There is, however, quite a significant difference between an "interesting" hard and "frustrating" hard.

"Frustrating" Hard Signs

In this category are all the things that could be deemed unfairly difficult. There is a certain level of challenge to them but none of them are particularly the type of difficulty that makes a game fun.

Unavoidibility - "I just can't dodge that one attack."
Round-aboutness - "So first, make your way uphill in the snow 6 miles. And then uphill back"
Arbitrary methods - "You have to wait for the gold button to be depressed, then you shoot somewhere else."
Lack of signals/instruction/hints and/or Lack of time to gather information - "The bosses weak point is not glowing, marked or even hinted at anywhere. And then he kills you if you shoot the wrong part."
Artificial difficulty - "Oh, that gun we just gave you? Doesn't work. Oh, by the way, if you don't have *this* level of gear, you're dead no matter what you do."
Low interactivity - "The boss kills me because he ensnares me 99% of the time."

"Interesting" Hard Signs

It's hard to come up with a difficulty that is "interestingly" hard but the key here would be, if the player is losing, would he still be having fun? If the player is having a difficult time in the game, is it a fun time in the game?

Exciting / Ambiance / Tone - "A DRAGON ate me... Aliens came up out of the vents and melted my face."
Eventual player success - "You know, I think I've almost got it... I just need one more try."
High degree of control over the situation - "The player can do whatever and they all contribute to success."
Clear signals and a clear path for the player to take - "Obviously, I'm supposed to aim for those glowing spots on his chest that the boss is trying to shield with his arms."
"Natural" difficulty - "Oooh, this guy is tough to hit because he's fast. I'm going to have to aim a little better."

"Frustrating"to "Interesting"

There are common methods to making a frustrating fight more interesting. The key in many of these is interaction. Even if a battle is particularly hard, you want the players to feel like they have control of the environment and their character.

Clear cause and effect - "Oh, the dragon roars before he does his flame breath.
Directness - "The dragon isn't just a walking sack of hit points."
High Player Interaction - "If I block, the flame breath does much less, and if I hit his leg he limps a little!"
Guidance IF the player needs it - "That flame blast looked like it hurt. Pay attention to his roar and prepare to defend yourself!"
Options - "Man. I just can't defeat this dragon. Maybe I should look for some gear that increases my fire resistance?"

Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 3: Restriction Variants

2009-09-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

Restrictions: To deny the usage of a skill in certain scenarios.

Restrictions on a spell or ability don't show up in RPGs as often as they do in card games. This is generally due to the fact that the complex interplay in cardgames must be distilled into a faster quicker paced game.

However, restrictions can be another way to provide a powerful ability and force the player to solve mini-problems.

Let us take the following skill

Impale
2000 mana
Deals half the target's health in damage.

Variants

Type Restrictions: Limiting the target selection of the skill for balance.

In Magic, many spells simply cannot affect a certain subclass of targets. Many black spells cannot affect black spells due to the fact that unholy magics tend not to be so effective against unholy people.

In an RPG, this would be similar to something like the warrior not being able to use Impale on people wearing hevy armor (most likely other warriors.) This is an interesting balance as people wearing heavier armors tend to have higher hit points overall and thus limits the possible abuse of the skill.

Timing Restrictions: Limiting the time in which a skill can be cast.

In Magic, the basic difference between an instant and a sorcery is that you may only cast a sorcery when it is your turn. Therefore, you cannot wait to react to an opponent with a sorcery. You must decide to cast it now or never.

In an RPG, this would be similar to the warrior not being able to use the ability after taking damage for a second or two. He must either immediately lead off with the attack as soon as he can or else wait until the opponent is defensive and recovering to unleash his attack.

Conditional Restrictions: Limiting the circumstances in a which a skill can be cast.

In magic, there are quite a few spells that say you can only play a card X when some condition Y has been met. For example, a card that deals 10 damage to a player if the player has exactly 10 life.

In an RPG, this would be similar to spells that could only be used while the opponent is under some sort of effect. For example, perhaps the warrior can only impale his targets when they are stunned or dizzy. In this manner, the player must decide the best way to get his target to be stunned or dizzy before being able to use impale.

Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 2: Cost Variants

2009-09-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

Cost is the essential part of a skill that controls how many resources a skill will consume.

A resource could be represented by health or mana.
A resource could also be represented by time, as in the casting time of a skill.

For today, let us take this example:

Strike
200 mana
Deal 200 damage to target.

This is a very simple ability that deals direct damage.

Variants

Echo: Exchanging a time cost for a resource cost.

Echo is an ability in magic that allows you to cast a spell cheaply, but for the cost that you must pay an additional cost next turn. It essentially allows you to break up a spells cost over two turns.

In an RPG, this would most likely translate to a spell taking either more or less time to cast in exchange for costing more or less mana as an alternate mode. For example, the longer the warrior holds down the strike button, the less mana it will take. A quick strike takes a lot of mana while a long strike consumes none.

APC: Exchanging a resource cost for a cooldown cost.

Alternate Playing Cost is a mechanic from magic that allows you to discard a card in return for paying no mana for it.

In an RPG, this would translate to a spell taking less mana or casting time cost, in exchange for putting itself or some spells on a timed cooldown. Let us say that the strike spell costs no mana at all, but leaves the warrior in a awkward position and therefore unable to use any other attacks for a few seconds.

Trap: Situational costlessness.

Traps are a mechanic in most magic that allows you to play a card for no resources if some condition is met by the opponent's actions.

In an RPG, this would translate to "reactionary" spells. Let us say that strike spell costs no mana and is instant when the warrior encoutners an enemy who can dodge his attacks.

Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 1: Cooldown Variants

2009-09-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

Cooldown: A period of time in which, after the usage of a skill, the skill cannot be used.

Cooldown is an important concept in balancing skills. The 3 main things cooldowns attempt to achieve in skill mechanics are...

1. Powerful.
2. Situational.
3. Limited.

For example, let us take this spell as our base example.

Prayer
1000 Mana.
5 minute cooldown.

Prevents all damage for 5 seconds.

This is an extremely powerful ability to become invulnerable for 5 seconds. However, one can see where this would be too powerful if there was no cooldown period (the ability to become immortal as long as your mana sustains you) and too useless if it was balanced strictly by cost (Imagine you had the ability to become immortal for 5 seconds but leaving you powerless by draining all your mana.)

Hence, the cooldown allows you to make a skill available to the player with the knowledge that it has a sufficient time and resource cost and remain balanced.

Variant Mechancis:

Flashback: The ability to use a skill while it is cooling down.

Flashback, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to "re-cast" a card after it has been cast for the slight cost of removing it from the game.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to use a skill while it is cooling down, exchanging a small cooldown. For example, our prayer spell above. Let us say that while the skill is "cooling down", we were able to cast it again while it is cooling down, in exhange for not being able to use again the skill for 30 minutes or an hour.

Buyback: Trading mana for cooldown

Buyback, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to recover a card after you have cast it for some extra mana.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to cancel a cooldown for a specific skill by paying an additional mana cost. For example, for our prayer spell above, let us say that the cost to cancel the cooldown of prayer is 1000 mana. The player could then cast back-to-back prayer spells at the cost of 3000 mana, giving the spell additional flexibility if the player can pay for it.

Dredge: Randomly trading one cooldown for another

Dredge, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to recover the use of a spell by giving up the possibility of several spells in the game as a whole.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to cancel a cooldown by giving a random skill the same cooldown as it has. For example, let us say that our player has two spells, Prayer and Heal. If he chooses to cancel Prayer with this mechanic, then some other random skill would acquire the cooldown that Prayer had. In this case, if he had 3 minutes left on the cooldown of Prayer, cancelling it would move that 3 minute cooldown to Heal.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 4

2009-09-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

Again, the intro recap:

Part 4: Solutions and various money controlling mechanisms.

Hyperscaling - Making whatever money the player has obselete by scaling the prices.
Money Sinks - Making available convienient ways to get rid of cash like gambling.
Nickel and Dimes - By making boring processes of acquiring money have penalties to acquisition.
Supply Control - By slowly expanding the shop selection.

In Part 3, I described various problems of dealing with the player which stemmed from either poor price control, poor fiscal policies (monsters drop too much gold) and poor inventory control. Let's talk about a few common methods people use to fix that.

1. Hyperscaling

Let's say that in the beginning, you could buy a powerful set of armor for 100 gold. When the player moves on to the next area, however, you don't want someone who has saved up 1000 gold to be instantly able to buy everything in the next area. However, you can't take away his hard-earned gold either.

What do you do? You hyperscale the prices. If a piece of armor costs 100 gold in the first area then a common way to both reward and control players who have saved cash is to make that next piece of armor cost 1000 gold.

You see, the player could've saved up more than enough money to buy 10 pieces of armor from the first area. That's great and the player should be rewarded for his effort. So he is rewarded by being able to buy the next armor quicker... but at the same time you've quite covertly changed the spending power he has. He was infinitely rich before in the first area by being able to buy his armor 10 times over. Now he's essentially broke again.

And the cycle continues: The player gets rich in one area or zone and then he moves on the next zone. He finds that the prices are high compared to the previous zone and now, instead of being rich, he's only of average wealth.

You haven't taken any money away from the player but you can make sure that no amount of farming in an early zone can make farming in a later zone easy.

2. Money Sinks

A money sink is essentially a non-essential fun thing that is designed to bleed money away from the player.

Money sinks also make the players feel their money is more valuable as there are more things to spend it on.

There's a plethora of ways to do this, here's just a short list of the possibilities:

Cosmetic Goods: Dresses, Nice boots, etc.
Gambling for Random Items: A sick thrill in which you might get a really good item.. or not.
Temporary Bonuses: Teleporters, fast movement or just the ability to use something really powerful for a short while (Like strength potions or potions that increase speed)
Access to secrets like unlockable characters, new combinations to try out or bonus and optional areas.

3. Nickel and Dimes

This is a method where the most popular method of gaining money also comes with a cost. For example, if the player fights monsters to gain money then by making his armor and equipment slowly wear away so they can't be used forever is nickle and diming the player's money away.

The trick is to set up some sort of drain on the player's money if he is spending an excess amount of time acquiring money. By making weapons cost ammo to fire or by making potions and necessary mundane things cost a lot, the player's primary resource for acquiring money also has it's own costs attached to it and you can slowly bleed a player out.

Note that this should only be a serious drain if the player is hellbent on acquiring lots and lots of money. Players probably don't need to repair their armor if they are moving through the game at a quick pace as he's doing what we want them to do. By making weapons and armor wear out only if the player spends an excessive time slaying monsters, you can do a targeted bleed on the farmers. This would mean that durability should be a three mode model.

There's 'Good', which most weapons and armor should be in. 'Wearing out' which should happen after the weapons and armor has been used for a while and 'Broken' which should happen if the player refuses to repair his equipment.

4. Supply Control

There's more than one path to take in this instance. You can either give the player a very limited view of what he can buy in the game and thus cut off any motivation to go out and acquire a ton of money...

...or...

You can limit the amount of times the player can buy mundane things like healing potions and neccessary goods like ammo forcing the player to move from area to area because he can't find the neccessary items he needs to survive without progressing thruogh the game.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 3

2009-09-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

Let's recap from the intro:

Part 3: Then what are the common pitfalls of not balancing money correctly?

Making money do nothing - The "I am a millionaire, but no one sells anything useful."
Excess of money trivializing money - The "I have enough money to do whatever I want. No limits!"
Paucity/Unevenness of reward - The "Why do I bother doing quests for 3 pennies when I can kill a sheep for 12,000?"
Making money overpower the player - The "I just bought my level 99 weapon at level 3 and now the game is EZ-mode."

1. "I am a millionaire, but no one sells anything useful"

Some designers, out of a misguided sense of balance, limits all conceivably useful things to quest rewards and rewards for doing deeds and actions. Generally, this is an okay move...

However, you must ensure that money still has a purpose. If the only purpose of money is to get 99 potions and 99 hi-potions and then you're done shopping then money essentially has no point in your game. Consider just not having money entirely or loosening your restrictions on what money can buy.

In this case, if you fear that something might be too powerful that it shouldn't be available in stores, think again. What if it was extremely expensive? What if there were several different "tiers" of that item that grew more expensive as they scaled in power? Why shouldn't the player be able to purchase this with money?

Additionally, consider simply making more options available for the player to purchase. Different cosmetic effects or style choices can be rewarding by themselves even if they don't affect the overall power level of the game. Or consider making money a convienience fund for the player by allowing them to skip sometimes annoying and boring parts of your game with money.

2. "I have enough money to do whatever I want! No limits!"

In this case, the designer's prices are too low or money flows too freely. If the player has unlimited resources available to them early on without restriction then all attempted gameplay balance by scarcity flies straight out the window. Look over at the amount of money the player is acquiring and drastically cut it down. Or introduce lots and lots of money sinks so that money doesn't overflow the game economics.

Now, for the player, this isn't a problem. But for the designer, a player with infinite resources can throw the entire game out of whack. High prices and money sinks should be in the game to drain the player of resources.

Aside: However, it is not uncommon in the end-game of many games to give infinite resources to the player. This is generally fine and quite awesome to boot. This skips the tedious farming stage that a player might have to do before progressing to the final dungeons of doom.

Just make sure they can't become overpowered by having infinite resources to make that final dungeon anticlimatic.

3. "Why do I bother doing quests for 3 pennies when I can kill a sheep for 12,000 dollars?"

This is a case of disporportinate reward. Money as a reward is a key motivator for players to do actions in your game. Take a look at the most famous example in Mario. Certain jumps and paths that were fun to take were literally littered with coins in their path. Streams or arcs of coins designated paths that Mario could take.

In this manner, look at the money reward in the game and see which path player's are being pushed to. If the most boring aspects of your game give the most money reward, you might want to tune your rewards so that what you want the player to do should be the most rewarding path.

4. "I just bought my level 99 weapon at level 3 and now the game is EZ-mode!"

This is a case of availability. It's very nice and all that the player *can* acquire end-game items if they only saved up enough money to do so. However, it is not in the best interests of any game that the player sits there and farms away the early portion of the game. This leads to player burnout and boredom.

There should always be an incentive for the player to move on and progress through the game. This is why shops have limited availability. At the very most, dedicated players can be rewarded with items that are a tad bit more powerful than they should have at the moment but nothing like getting the masamune while you're beating up slimes.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 2

2009-09-07T23:59:00.000-07:00

A quick recap from the intro:

The logical inverse of money in a video game is cost and prices in the game.

What is the role of prices in a single player game for the designer?

It provides a way for the designer to set player power growth by limiting availability of items.
Prices can be a subtle hint as to what "Power Range" the player should buy.
Controlled/Constant reward mechanism for doing certain actions.

1. Prices are a way to control the availability of items to guide or set player growth/power.

Some items are simply too powerful to have unlimited access to and yet they are too neccessary to the game's function to do without. You don't want players to lean on certain items like a crutch 99% of the time. The ubiquitous example is healing potions. If you don't want players to have infinite life but it is also crucial that the player has something to fall back on, consider making healing potions really expensive. They are too expensive to use 100% of the time, so hopefully players will play extra carefully to conserve their limited resources (money) so they don't have to buy so many healing potions every single time.

Another example would be fast travel mechanisms, such as instant teleportation, warps or checkpoints. If the player was able to use these constantly all the time, there would essentially be no need to have any normal based travel and thus a large part of the game would be negated. However, by providing limited teleportation with a high enough cost attached to it (Say, by making a quick portal of return to town cost 10,000 gold each time), you can ensure that players have access to the mechanism without completely negating all the detailed work you put in when the player is going the scenic route.

2. Prices are a subtle hint and a tantalizing gesture to what the players should have and what the players will have.

There's two parts to this. If you make solid baseline items cheap then the player will more likely buy that armor because it is what he can afford inexpensively. Let's say we make a suit of normal plate armor relatively cheap on the player's budget. That provides a subtle indicator that this is probably the armor that the designer intended him to wear at this level.

At the same time, we can provide the next tier of armor at a prohibitively expensive price that the player can't afford (or could only afford a tiny limited quantity of). In this instance we create excitement and expectation as the player was able to preview the next powerful item he can use and giving him an intermediate goal (acquire more loot) in order to obtain it. I mean, you can't afford this shiny platinum armor of spikes just yet but wait until after you've played a little more and it's yours!

3. High prices essentially make money rewards better. It lets you drive the player in one direction with the reward mechanism.

Let's say that you make an especially awesome prize or special mount 1000 gold. Now with the price that high, if the player really wants the prize, every single action he can take that would grant him gold looks more appealing than everything else. In fact, the questlines that reward money become secondary goals that the player sets for himself in order to achieve your primary prize (the special mount.)

Or let's look back on our score analogy. Let's say that lives are rewarded every 100,000 points. Now if there's a safe low-scoring way to play and a risky but high-scoring way to play, the fact that the player only gets a bonus if he chooses the high scoring route makes that route look more appealing. It gives him the motivation to pursue the high scoring route knowing that a special bonus awaits.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 1

2009-09-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

Let's recap from the intro:

Part 1: What is the role of money in a single player game for the player?

It provides a resource to replenish consumable resources.
It provides a resource to upgrade his character's power.
It provides a way to affect the game environment.
It can serve as part of the reward mechanism.

From the point of view of the player, money essentially does these four things for him. It is imperative that none of them are made impossible by the economics of the game itself.

1. It provides a resource to replenish consumable resources.

Here, consumable resources are things like potions, durability on fragile equipment, uses of spells or even extra lives. All these things are essentially power-ups that serve to extend the player's ability on a semi-permanent basis.

These are semi-permanent because often times, a player counts on being able to "refresh" his stores of consumable resources when there is a pause in the action. For example, in most RPGs, players often go back to town to repurchase the health recovery items that they need to survive long dungeon trips. For simulation games, like Civilization, money often provides a method to temporarily speed up the production of a unit or offset the temporary shift in focus from commerce to research.

It is interesting to note that the role of score is often like money in arcade games. Mario essentially always spends his 100 coins on an extra life, while many other games like Galaga, Space Invaders or Pac Man treat score as a running balance to purchase extra lives with.

2. It provides a resource to upgrade his character's power.

These are permanent bonuses a player can purchase. Things like weapons or equipment are typically more permanent. They also provide some degree of character customization where money (a reward) is used to buy clothes or items that uniquely express the player's sense of individuality or choice.

In simulation games, money can provide a pure power by purchasing whole building very quickly or the wholesale purchase of properties to expand growth. In Civilization "rushing" a fleet of tanks with a large money reserve would often prove fatal to an opponent, but you could also "rush" a fleet of defensive infantry men very quickly if you had the resources to spare.

3. It provides a way to interact with the environment.

There are many ways in which money provides a new novel way to interact with the environment: In many classic story telling games, the usage of money could serve to bribe a judge or a guard. You could donate to a beggar to improve your character's reputation. Above all, perhaps some scripted encounters could be bypassed with a significant portion of money. In more diplomatic games like strategy games, money can often be a resource in influencing decisions.

However, the promise of money also makes the player interact differently with the environment. Consider arcade or platforming games which subtly alter the ideal path for the player by the promise of shiny coins. Many "paths" in Mario were laid out in gold coins for the player to scoop up along the way. In Pac-Man, the presence of fruit at the center of the board might change your priorities on how to move.

And remember those Pots in Zelda? Once you knew you could find rupees in pots, you became a pot breaking maniac.

4. It can serve as part of the reward mechanism.

A key part of why we play games is we receive some tangible pyschological reward out of them. Money in many times is the ubiquitous reward for completing some portion of the game's tasks. If you are doing well, money tends to flow toward the player. It tends to be the smallest reward unit that players can easily understand. 'Yay! I did something good. I get shinies!'

Money is important for a player because it gives him a sense of accomplishment that is can expressly be quantified. It is, after all, a numeric representation of wealth.

Afterthought: There are very interesting parallels between Money and Score in games for players. They serve very similar purposes for most games across the board. However, they differ in the design pitfalls that may overwhelm them, as we will see later.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Intro

2009-09-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

You've heard them under all different names: Gold. Zeny. Galders. GPs. Bronze. Silvers. Platinum.

Let's talk about the most basic reward you can give a player: MONEY.

Part 1: What is the role of money in a single player game for the player?

It provides a resource to replenish consumable resources.
It provides a resource to upgrade his character's power.
It provides a way to affect the game environment.
It can serve as part of the reward mechanism.

Part 2: It is impossible to look at money without looking at it's logical inverse: prices in a single player game. What are the roles of prices in a single player game for the designer?

It provides a way for the designer to set player power growth by limiting availability of items.
Prices can be a subtle hint as to what "Power Range" the player should buy.
Controlled/Constant reward mechanism for doing certain actions.

Part 3: Then what are the common pitfalls of not balancing money correctly?

Making money do nothing - The "I am a millionaire, but no one sells anything useful."
Excess of money trivializing money - The "I have enough money to do whatever I want. No limits!"
Paucity/Unevenness of reward - The "Why do I bother doing quests for 3 pennies when I can kill a sheep for 12,000?"
Making money overpower the player - The "I just bought my level 99 weapon at level 3 and now the game is EZ-mode."

Part 4: Solutions and various money controlling mechanisms.

Hyperscaling - Making whatever money the player has obselete by scaling the prices.
Money Sinks - Making available convienient ways to get rid of cash like gambling.
Nickel and Dimes - By making boring processes of acquiring money have penalties to acquisition.
Supply Control - By slowly expanding the shop selection.

Conflicting Desires: Player Power vs. Fun and Challenge

2009-08-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

I believe that there is a design oversight that is very rarely addressed or remarked upon.

This is due to the fact that many problems look like they have only one facet to be modified and so they look like impossible balancing acts. Today, let's talk about the player.

There is a fundamental tension between these two statements:

Players want to feel powerful vs. Players want to have fun / Players want to be challenged

1. Players want to feel powerful...

Games are escapism. Players don't want to feel mundane. They want to feel like they've done things right. They want to feel like their character or avatar is great. They want to feel good about themselves, in that they've done well.

In an RPG, this would mean that players don't want to feel weak. They don't want to have to constantly juggle to do impressive feats.

In an FPS, this means that the player doesn't want to feel like he's holding a pea shooter. He needs to have some visible effect on the environment around him.

In short, in a game, the player needs to feel good and have a character that can affect the game environment very strongly. If the player spends 36 hours to whack one thing until it dies, the player instead feels weak, pathetic as if he's not doing something "right" or that he is missing the point.

...and yet.. when players are TOO powerful...

Players, however, get very bored when all they have to do is plow through the same things over and over again. The most engaging game is one where you are constantly challenged a half-step beyond your skill.

If every single enemy dies in easily in a single blow with no chance of success, that may be fun for a little while as the player would have an enormous impact on the world... but if that's the entirety of the game then the game isn't going to be very fun or challenging later.

If every single monster dies in a single bullet or the player is allowed to stock 9 billion health and be utterly immortal, then all that is left for the player's enjoyment is that he "feels" immortal but in reality, there is nothing pushing him to play better or get further "into" the game.

In short, if the player is super powered what gameplay turns into is a simple mindless button pressing exercise that doesn't need the player to actively engage in. A simple robot hitting 'A' for the next 12 hours would play just as well.

...but this seems impossible to get juuuust right...

You can tweak player power all along the spectrum but too little health and the player is frustrated because he dies at everything and too much health and the player feels immortal again.

Some sections might be harder than others.

Or how about, you can set the difficulty of the entire game so that the player has less health on harder difficulties and more health on easier ones...

...but that leaves the player with little choice over the matter since he knows nothing about your game and if he can't change the difficulty level in between sections of the games he is now "locked in" by his decision at the beginning of the game.

...so what's the answer?

The core oversight here in design is: They are too focused on the player and how much he effects the world and vice versa.

When you realize that the player is an active part of the entire game world then the solution becomes easier.

If the player has a large impact on the game (which he should), then the game world has to be interesting and varied enough to handle that impact.

For example, let us take a first person shooter.

If the player can kill every enemy with a single bullet that may still be interesting. Imagine the movie 'Aliens'. If the aliens are in open terrain, they are reasonably easy to deal with. They are soft, fragile creatures. However, the trick is the aliens are intelligent and swift little buggers. The player has a huge impact on the world, he can easily end the life of an alien with a swift burst of fire but the aliens themselves aren't stupid either. They'll hide in walls, leap in weird patterns or swarm in unconventional ways.

Once you realize that making enemy's more difficult can be done without decreasing the power of the player, then you can see the solution...

I'll give another example, this time in Crono Trigger. Crono Trigger was an excellent example of good game design in this regard. If there was an enemy that seemed to take a million years for you to defeat, it was a sure sign that you were missing something tactically. The acid slimes that were immune to physical and took 12 hits could be defeated by Crono's slash technique. Every creature had counterattacks that made you stop attacking at specific instances. You could avoid monsters if you were fast enough to move around them.

The players are enormously powerful in Crono Trigger but the game itself was not a boring grind because the encounters the player faced could be dealt and often had to be dealt with in a variety of changing ways; From proper target selection, to holding back on attacks, to attacking in a correct sequence, none of the encounters artificially increased the difficulty by making monsters simply have more defense or do more damage and thus take away from player power.

To rephrase a line from Dungeons and Dragons:

Powerful heroes need Interesting encounters.

Steal My Idea 1

2009-08-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Note: Going to try something out here where I do a bit of speculative game design called "Steal my Idea."

Steal my Idea

I intend for this to be a semi-regular addition to the blog where I outline a specific mechanic or game feature that could be implemented to serve a specific purpose.

Note that if you *actually* steal my idea, comment or shoot me an e-mail at kuoyen on gmail.com.

Pair Bonding / Team Training
An quest line to reward or facilitate player interactions with each other
Intended game: Casual MMOs that encourage player community.

Form: Daily Quest Chain
Original Inspiration: Ether Saga Online

Main Idea: The more quests the pair complete together, the greater the reward for each portion of the quest. Either player may decide to break their chain at any time by turning in their quest reward. In this case, both players are rewarded for how many pair quests they have completed and can restart again at Quest 1 after a day.

Quest Start: Give players tokens that they can get daily. The token given can be based on a variety of factors depending on the desired effect. Class can be an option or self-described gender or even random.

Restrictions: Some minimum level after tutorial levels.

Quest 1: Collect a token of a different type from someone. Give your token to that same person.

Restrictions: Similar level ranges are encouraged.
Alternative: Wildly differing level ranges can also be encouraged to promote old players helping new players.

After this quest, the two players are given a quest specific item that marks the two of them. Thereafter, the two, if partied, gain the option to participate in a number of bonus quests that require the two to interact

Possible Pair Quests: Parallel dungeons

A dungeon instance where the two players are isolated in two different paths. Each must manipulate switches and levers to get the other player across to the final area.

Pair Quest: Follow the leader.

A complex dungeon filled with paths and numerous doors and things to interact with. In alternating sections one player is designated as leader and is able to 'see' the correct path using a buff. The other player must follow the first player through the dungeon without being able to see which paths are safe or not. Things like ropes, platforms that you have to jump or ladders.

Pair Quest: Arena - Monster Mash

A simple kill quest where the amount of monsters are too much for one player to handle to encourage teamwork.

Pair Quest: Arena - Single Boss

Possibly at the end of the arena, where instead of dealing with a group of monsters; the player learns to face an individual threat in a pair. The boss selection should probably be based on the player's classes to strain their individual abilities.

Possible Rewards:

- An appropriate amount of in-game currency for that level.
- An appropriate amount of experience for that level.
- Pair Points that denote that you are an effective teammate!

Spinoff Idea: You can scale this up to a group of 4 or 5 but at that point groups are rather hard to form and quickly untenable for players to take full advantage of.

Math and Difficulty: Percentile and Fixed Scaling: Part 4

2009-08-26T15:38:00.000-07:00

Note: This is part 4 of a section on Math and Scaling of item modifiers.

Let me describe... possible solutions to the points I've talked about in this series and some discussion about the results.

0. The "Safe" law about percent modifiers, if I didn't stress it enough..

Reduction modifiers should stack multiplicatively.
Enhancement modifiers should stack additively.

The reasoning being is that this is the safest way to ensure that things don't have exponential growth.

0b. Consider taking only the highest bonus or prevent things from stacking.

If you are *super* paranoid about things scaling out of control, consider using only the highest reduction or enhancement of each category. Typically however, this will simply lead players to cherry pick a whole slew of other statistics and become well rounded.

This allows you to create a whole spectrum of gear without worrying about potentially dangerous interactions allowing for better ease and flexibility of reward.

For example, if they can only have one enhancement to critical strike then they will then choose to upgrade damage, accuracy, speed, etc. Since focusing on one statistic is useless they will choose to get bonuses in a variety of statistics.

(This may be a good thing.)

Note/Beware: Make sure players understand only the highest bonus applies.

Note/Beware: Lots of nominally unrelated things can actually be related! Damage %, Attack Speed %, Number of hits, Accuracy % all increase DPS! If you ensure that only the highest bonus takes effect, be sure that you have as many offensive modifiers as defensive modifiers.

Otherwise, if there are more offensive modifiers, players that like to play defense won't be able to "catch up" or vice versa, if there are more defensive modifiers, players might not be able to do any damage.

1. Cap reduction modifiers aggressively.

Capping reduction modifiers (damage reduction, slows target, etc.) aggressively (to 50% or less) hinders their exponential growth regardless of what kind of math model you use to accumulate reduction modifiers.

That is, if you cap all reduction modifiers to a maximum of below or equal 50% then you keep the marginal benefit of each additional percent of reduction roughly equal. This is due to the fact that in reductions each percentage has increasing returns that is grows roughly exponentially.

For example, let's consider a speed reduction spell. If this spell reduces their attack speed by 10% players will survive 11% longer since his damage output will drop to 90% of what it was, a relative difference of 11%.

1/0.9 -> 1.11
1/0.8 -> 1.25
1/0.7 -> 1.42
1/0.6 -> 1.66
1/0.5 -> 2

You can see the exponential creep start here where the last 10% is 3 times as effective as the first 10% but after the 0.5 mark, it starts to climb to ridiculous levels, such as 1% being 10 to 20 times more effective at the 0.66 mark than the first 1%.

1b. Consider compensating players for capped stats - Optional! Interesting!

If players are theoretically able to reach a percentage higher than your cap then compensate them in other ways in order. If players are not compensated for capped stats then you start to hit another odd phenomenon where players stack equipment to cap as many different statistics as possible.

For example, in WoW players reach a critical strike % cap at roughly 23% chance to critical. This causes players to go for hit % chance in order to increase their DPS, causing both statistics to be maxed by both players and making equipment diversity kind of useless. The problem is that players will want to optimize themselves and since the multiple capped statistics can are obtainable and maximizable then they will seek to maximize all of them and so everyone's bonus statistics looks the same.

If additional critical strike % had been converted to critical strike bonus damage %, this would be an interesting compensation that would allow players to have builds that are more critical focused with some loss in consistency by sacrifice hit rating.

Some Examples:

Hit % Chance -> Critical Strike %

If they are able to hit a target 100% of the time then it makes sense that they could perform more deadly critical blow.

Debuff Target % -> Increased Hit % for Debuff

For example, if their ice bolt slows for the maximum 50% slow then compensate them by making the 50% slow more reliable by reducing the enemy's chance to resist the spell.

Resist Effect % -> Flat % Reduction if they fail to resist.

For example, if a character has a 50% resist against stun effects, if they go over the cap perhaps consider compensating them by making the stun they *fail* to resist last shorter.

2. Have scaling flat bonus effects based on level.

This is *similar* to having percentile effects but still allows equipment to grow obsolete when the player reaches a new tier of equipment.

A weapon could have +1 / damage per level of the player. This can, in theory, scale with the player like % effects... However, you are guaranteed that this bonus scales linearly. If your health/defense factors scale exponentially then this equipment is guaranteed to be relevant for a while and still be outgrown and irrelevant after a number of levels without any other fact.

For example, let's say that at each level, our hero (and the monsters) gain 10% a level and our hero, receives, as a prize a sword that does 10 damage and +1 additional damage per level!

Level 1: 100 hp / 11 damage sword = 10 hits to die.
Level 2: 121 hp / 12 damage sword = 11 hits to die.
Level 3: 133 hp / 13 damage sword = 11 hits to die.
Level 4: 146 hp / 14 damage sword = 11 hits to die.
Level 5: 161 hp / 15 damage sword = 11 hits to die.
Level 6: 177 hp / 16 damage sword = 12 hits to die.
Level 7: 194 hp / 17 damage sword = 12 hits to die.
Level 8: 214 hp / 18 damage sword = 12 hits to die.
Level 9: 236 hp / 19 damage sword = 13 hits to die.

The sword is slowly becoming irrelevant. In a few more levels, the sword will have to be replaced because it kills monsters far too slowly. He will soon need to switch equipment thus allowing us to simultaneously give a useful bonus and a bonus that will eventually become irrelevant.

This is better than both flat bonus and % bonus to damage in terms of how it scales and how easy it is to gift. However, this works off the following assumptions:

1. Your bonus scales linearly. (In the above example, it was x * 1)
2. The thing it scales against rises exponentially (In the above example, it was a x^10% factor).

However, beware. If your bonus is too large then you run the risk of players not bothering to replace their weapons for a long time because they don't need to. It scales "well enough" for them to skip an upgrade or two. This is good in a sense, in that players will never hit an equipment dead-end. This is bad in a sense, in that it encourages players not to upgrade.

Math and Difficulty: Percentile and Fixed Scaling: Part 3

2009-08-24T21:04:00.001-07:00

Note: This is the third in a series about math and game balance, specifically regarding to item balance.

5. Percentile bonuses that can accrue are dangerous. Percentile bonuses out of 100 that can accrue are doubly dangerous.
+400% to a statistics at late game dwarfs everything else. A small insignificant +1 damage suddenly becomes worth 5 times the initial worth. A +1% critical bonus at the beginning of the game might be worthwhile until you realize that you can't give away more than 1% or 2% because by end game, players will reach 100%.

The crux of this is when you realize that some bonuses have a maximum relevant amount. For example, once you have reached +100% damage reduction, you can't give any more because it becomes meaningless. Some attributes simply should not be raised that high. So how do you pace yourself? Do you start off giving the player miniscule bonuses to damage reduction that accumulate? Do you arbitrarily cap players to a maximum amount of any one statistic and let overflow do nothing?

How would you then give them a "better" version of say "critical strike" gear without actually increasing the amount of critical strike they get? Or do you keep making gear with the same percentages? What if you miscalculate and accidentally give them 95% critical strike? What if you need to add new content but they've already reached absurd levels of bonuses?

World of Warcraft takes the approach of factors that scale down dependant on your level. At level 1, one critical factor might give you 1% critical strike but at level 50, one critical factor gives you 0.05% critical strike. This makes it easy to create new equipment that's better than the old (Here! This one has +86 critical factor while the other one only has 43!) but this introduces another problem. Leveling up decreases the power of your equipment. Leveling up in their system simply makes all your existing gear worse and it introduces some confusion in the inner workings of the game (Just how much critical factor do I need to reach that critical % cap?)

6. Not all percentiles are equal: Reduction and additions are and must work differently.
If I have 90% damage reduction and I get a mere 5% more reduction additively; I don't take 5% less damage. I take 50% less damage because now I'm at 95% reduction. Alternatively if I have 100% bonus to damage and I get 50% more bonus to damage additively, I don't do 50% more damage, I only do a mere 20% more damage because now I'm at 150% bonus damage.

This phenomenon often pops its nasty head up when designers either scale poorly or don't reliaze the exponential growth of penalties or the possible exponential growth of bonuses.

For example, let us take a item that reduces incoming damage by 50%. This is a very nice item as it effectively doubles our lifespan. However, what do you expect should happen when I equip another item that reduces incoming damage by 25%. This new item is clearly inferior to our old one.

Well, if the math works additively... 50% + 25% -> 75%. This means that our inferior item has raised our damage reduction to 75%! This means our lifespan is now four times our original by adding the inferior item.

What gives?

What if we then equipped another item that was a mere 15% damage reduction? This is even more inferior to our other item. However, if the math works additively.. 75% + 15% -> 90% and we now have ten times our original value.

Some poor designers then take this as a sign that this statistic is too powerful in large quantities and arbitrarily cap the statistic. Or else they give out the bonuses in small measure and irk out 5 and 10% damage reductions randomly.

However, what they fail to realize is this...

A reduction scales exponentially fast after 50%.

To double your lifespan with damage reduction, you need 50%
To triple your lifespan with damage reduction, you need 66%.
To quadruple your lifespawn with damage reduction, you need 75%.

The last few % are the ones that matter if you do additive reduction.

However, let's take positive multipliers. These are the inverse. Positive multipliers suffer the inverse problem.

Positive multipliers grow exponentially if they accumulate multiplicatively.

For example, if I have a sword that doubles my damage and a necklace that doubles my damage...

If the math works like this: 2 * 2 = 4!

Then I suddenly do four times the damage! If I get another item that doubles my damage..

2 * 2 * 2 = 8! I suddenly do eight times my damage!

This quickly leads to untenable growth when you realize just how many factors can accumulate multiplicatively...

Therefore, it is best that reductions and multipliers use different math: Reductions best accumulate multiplicatively while multipliers best accumulate additively to prevent dangerous exponential growth in effect.

Math and Difficulty: Percentile and Fixed Scaling: Part 2

2009-08-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

Note: This post is about simple math and how they contribute to poor end-game design and scaling.

I mainly talk about damage in this article because damage is one of the few factors that directly contribute to gameplay. A game's difficulty rises or falls based on how dangerous his opponents are and damage plays a large role in determining player and monster longevity.

1. Small percentile bonuses are insignificant early on and become oversignificant later on.

Small percentile bonuses are a trap. They *look* significant early on. However, their relative contribution to damage versus fixed stats are usually tremendously small when given out in small amounts.

For example, a sword that deals 100 damage would only gain 1 damage from a 1% bonus. One might ask if that reward is actually a bonus. Unless monsters had exactly 101 life or 202 life or something; the actual difference to the player is almost nothing.

Therein comes another design trap: Giving out large percentage bonuses so they both look and actually are relevant.

4. Percentiles are very hard to give to players in the correct porportions.

Large percentile bonuses are dangerous because they never become irrelevant. 1% may be insignificant by itself but it the player is allowed to accumulate percentile bonuses to the tens or hundreds; their contribution out-shadows anything the player could do for themselves. Lots of small %'s compound much better than lots of fixed additions.

It's important enough to reiterate: If large enough quantities, they're always relevant. They will always carry an impact. They will never be 'out-leveled' or expire. An item that adds 20% to your final damage is always relevant. The only way such items can become irrelevant is if there is an item that adds 21% damage to the game.

Percentile bonuses never become old or outgrown unless a better percentile bonus comes forth. Then comes the design intention of giving out small bonuses to better control their growth but then that comes with it the same problem of complete irrelevancy in low amounts.

As a side note, percentile bonuses come in many forms. What makes it worse is that they usually compound together multiplicatively instead of increasing additively.

Damage % bonuses, attack speed bonuses, reduction in enemy defense, number of shots fired, critical % rate, critical damage bonuses are all different sounding but in the end they are all % damage multipliers to the players combat effectiveness.

2. Small fixed bonuses are over-significant early on and become trivial later on.
+1 damage to 1 damage is insane.

This is the inverse of the problem above. Due to the fact that early on, numbers tend to be lower, and that most people do not think fractional damage constitutes an appropriate reward fixed bonuses tend to be oversignificant in their contribution to damage or statistics.

However, the problem with fixed numbers is the fact that they are almost impossible to balance correctly for late game damage. Most commonly, they are trivialized later, because character and monster HP tends to scale enormously and outrace any linear progression that fixed number bonuses give.

However, fixed bonuses have one more fatal flaw that becomes readily apparent when percentile bonuses also apply. They have the potential to compound with percentile bonuses to create tremendously unfair situations between attack types. +100 to damage might not be so bad to someone who attacks once a second. But when you factor that the character might have +100% to damage and shoots twice as fast with multiple bullets, that +100 to damage can become compounded exponentially.

An example would be in the first X-men legends game. Equipment in that game could add fixed damage. For any melee attacker, these were relatively powerful equipment that added tremendously to their attacks. However, any ranged attacker capable of firing multiple bullets saw their benefit differ by a factor of 10 as they would gain their bonus across each bullet. When the damage output between characters start differing by 900% or more, you begin to see how fixed damage is a relatively dangerous concept.

3. The order of operations matters.
+1 damage then +100% damage is 4. +100% damage then +1 damage is 3.

This is related to the problem above with the interactions between fixed and percentile damage, however this is more of a player understanding and basic math issue.

That is, when determining the relative power of statistics, one must factor in when they are applied. If a fixed bonus (+1 damage) is applied before the a percentile bonus, that fixed bonus begins to get the benefit of scaling with the percentile bonus making it much harder to manage and balance as well.

However, there are generally complex interactions that go on. Even if fixed damage is applied after percentile damage, you must consider whether the enemy might have a vulnerability that might multiply his damage or if the player has a speed increase.

Generally, there are two major crimes here. If the math is completely intuitive, generally balancing the game becomes very hard. That is, if the bonuses stack the way the player expects it to, game balance is quite difficult. However, any tradeoff you make in the manageability of bonuses you trade player understanding and usability.

Consider, for example, World of Warcraft, which has neatly bypassed all these issues by introducing the concept, Attack power. While this approach does solve each of the issues described by essentially hiding all the math from the player, that leaves a very difficult problem for the player: How exactly do I increase my damage? Do I raise a statistic that increases my attack power? Do I get a faster sword? What is going on if I choose to optimize for critical damage?

Whereas, in a game like Diablo 2, you pretty much always know what is going to happen when you get more damage buffs: Exponentially increasing damage. However, this led to exponentially increasing monster hp; which caused it to leave many players in the dust if they had not accrued the necessary bonuses to survive.

Math and Difficulty: Percentile and Fixed Scaling: Part 1, Introduction

2009-07-27T00:57:00.001-07:00

Note: Duh. Incredibly intuitive article about math and games. Unless you like considering the implications of mechanics, I'd advise you to steer clear.

Itemization, the bonuses that players can achieve, matters in games with a heavy equipment/numerical component.They appeal Johnny's mechanical driver to tinker. A flashy item appeals to Timmy's desire to feel power. The fact that items can be compared numerically give Spikes a hard goal. Numbers matter in game balance.

However, numbers are not to be trifled with. A poor understanding of what makes an item effective or good can throw off the game's gameplay balance ridiculously to the point where the game becomes a complete cakewalk (Bad because players then become bored) or much too hard (Bad because players then must grind excessively which can get boring.)

In this series of posts, I'm going to talk about the following topics:

1. Small percentile bonuses are insignificant early on and become oversignificant later on.
1% of 1 damage is trivial and insignificant.

2. Small fixed bonuses are over-significant early on and become trivial later on.
+1 damage to 1 damage is insane.

3. The order of operations matters.
+1 damage then +100% damage is 4. +100% damage then +1 damage is 3.

4. Percentiles are very hard to give to players in the correct porportions.
+ 1% to damage? Is that a good reward? Does that even do anything? What's the players damage right now? It could give him 10 damage or it might give him 1000. How about reduction? -1% to damage taken? How much damage taken does he have?

5. Percentile bonuses that can accrue are dangerous. Percentile bonuses out of 100 that can accrue are doubly dangerous.
+400% to a statistics at late game dwarfs everything else. A small insignificant +1 damage suddenly becomes worth 5 times the initial worth. A +1% critical bonus at the beginning of the game might be worthwhile until you realize that you can't give away more than 1% or 2% because by end game, players will reach 100%.

6. Not all percentiles are equal: Reduction and additions are and must work differently.
If I have 90% damage reduction and I get a mere 5% more reduction additively; I don't take 5% less damage. I take 50% less damage because now I'm at 95% reduction. Alternatively if I have 100% bonus to damage and I get 50% more bonus to damage additively, I don't do 50% more damage, I only do a mere 20% more damage because now I'm at 150% bonus damage.

Designing Encounters, Part 5: Bosses

2009-06-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

The Death Star. The Huge Dragon. The Colossus of Sardus. Zeus Almighty. Darth Vader. Magus. Lavos. Sephiroth. The Lich King.

What exactly is a boss?

It's a grand encounter of epic scale. Unlike anything you've ever known. Instead of the player needing to adapt his style now he's playing on an entirely different turf.

Designing a boss is so freeform since all the rules can ultimately be thrown out the window. Have your boss be flying. Have your boss be an entire stage. Have him negate most of the player's abilities. It doesn't quite matter how you design it.

There are a few basic types of boss fights, but you should never adhere to them with a passion. Remember, you have the freedom to design boss fights to be epic. That should be your goal.

Common Boss Types

1. Trick Boss

This type of boss involves some kind of "trick" to defeating it. The boss that reveals his weakpoints every 6 seconds after an attack. The boss that you need to figure out how to properly advance.

Trick fights tend to be annoying if particularly obscure, especially if you *must* figure out the trick to defeat the boss.

2. Staged Boss

This type of boss consists of multiple boss fights linked together by stages. Perhaps you blow away the creature's exterior shell sending it into a berzerk fury.

Staged bosses become annoying if they are particularly long and are unforgiving because restarting the boss encounter essentially forces the player to lose a lot of progress.

3. Environmental Boss

This type of boss represents a threat in an environment difficult to navigate. The monster chasing you down an unfamiliar path, the mutated spider chasing you up a spiral of stairs. This fight is more about successful movement, rather than direct attacking.

4. Timed Encounter

This type of boss is simply undefeatable in the usual sense. The player must wait for the appropiate moment or survive and endure until a preset time limit in order to defeat the boss encounter.

General Guidelines to Bosses

Boss design is too freeform to pin it down to a science of abilities. You shouldn't restrict yourself by arbitrary rules. Here are some general guidelines for boss encounters that are less about the boss and more about how a player will interact with the encounter as a whole.

1) The easier it is to restart a boss encounter, the less forgiving your boss encounter can be.
2) The harder it is to restart a boss encoutner, the more likely your players will quit if they fail.

These two are taken hand to hand. A boss defeat isn't so annoying if you can instantly jump back to the beginning of the boss fight. A boss defeat is incredibly depressing once you've realized you been kicked back 4 levels and now have to redo entire swathes of the level.

3) Never lock out the player completely from experimenting - The Player's actions should still be meaningful.

If your boss can only be damaged by a single weak point that is covered most of the time and is invulnerable otherwise you are essentially negating all the players' skills that he has learned. The player should feel free to experiment and power on through times where the boss isn't attacking.

4) If a level doesn't need a boss fight or if you find yourself designing a boss "just because", don't force it.

Bosses are large, memorable and complex affairs and often expensive time-wise to implement. Games like Shadow of the Colossus have shown that they can carry entire games by themselves. Therefore, if you find yourself designing an unmemorable boss simply for the sake of having a boss consider scrapping that idea entirely. There are other ways to bring levels to a crescendo than designing a wild dumb brute.

5) Aspire to make a boss, his character and the fight iconic or particularly memorable.

Make the fight dramatic. Give the fight it's own theme song. These are memories that the player will carry on. Crono Trigger's boss fight with Magus is particularly memorable out of all the boss encoutners due to build up and suspense.

6) The complexity of the fight should match the time it takes to complete the fight.

If a fight is particularly simple, don't make it overlong. If a fight is particularly complex and challenging, don't make it a short instant kill. Pace the player according. As soon as the player has "figured out" what to do, the fight should end quickly for trick fights.

Designing Encounters, Part 4: Elites

2009-04-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

Let's review:

A mook is your standard generic foe who derives most of their strength from numbers and composition.
A boss is generally a single epic fight consisting of multi-part enemies that form a single encounter.

So what is an elite?

An elite encounter is somewhere between a mook and a boss. This makes them hard to balance and makes their role slightly unconventional.

From a designer's point of view, the idea of an Elite is to do three things:

1) Challenge a specific aspect of the player - "Enhanced" mookery.
2) Change up the player's gameplay
3) Show off.

but these things can be generally reduced to one axiom: Extend the player's boundaries

Wait.. what?

1. Challenge a specific aspect of the player - Stress the player in a specific way.

An enemy whose attacks are more difficult to dodge than others of his class. An enemy you need to change up your heal rotation. An enemy that recovers a little faster from your attack.

The goal behind this is simple: Give the player the opportunity to stretch his playing boundaries. If he has become complacent in his combo usage, give him an enemy in which he will need to fight a little harder to win.

It is okay if these Elites don't stand out very much. Their goal is to appear in earlier levels to expose the player to mechanics that the game hasn't forced him to learn quite yet. Jumping over enemy attacks. Using strong flinch moves.

These Elites are used to encourage the use of subtler abilities or not as pronounced abilities that your character has. Provide your players the window of opportunity to show off or "step" to the plate.

Example: Let's suppose our 'Elite' flinches less than other monsters. He's faster overall. If this monster flinches less, then the player will have to learn to speed up the timing on his hits if he's flinch dependent. Suppose our Elite doesn't flinch at all to regular attacks, but will flinch on powerful hits that the player hasn't needed to use thus far.

Our 'Elite' brandishes a wide club attack that players need to learn to jump over.

Or quite possibly, all of these things, together. Testing various aspects of the players own abilities, dodging, attacking with speed, force, etc. Providing him an incentive to learn these skills.

On the flip side: The Elite shouldn't be more dangerous than monsters of it's class. This type of elite wants the player to fight harder but it shouldn't be so dangerous as to make the player afraid to experiment. The goal of this type of Elite is to encourage the player to try new things with his own set of abilities, not punish the player for doing it wrong.

A common sign that your 'Elite' really isn't beneficial is when players start to repeatedly use one single safe move against them over and over and over again, taking them down slowly and safely. This is the exact opposite effect.

2. Change up the Player's gameplay

You could have the best normal gameplay experience in the world but it would still get stale after a while for players who aren't out to perfect a single style of play.

Elites can provide alternative experiences for players or demand a different style of play altogether. This is usually the type of enemy whose primary weakness revolves around a "trick" to defeating him, such as reflecting his own attacks back at him or separating the two attackers.

These types of Elites are easily destroyed when you are following the right "method", and thus have to ben planned heavily as opposed to Elites from #1. Monsters that can only be seriously damaged when they are attacked from behind, for example. These tend to be "staged" fights.

Examples:

An monster that is found around cliffsides who is knocked back when you hit it. The only way to end the threat is to knock it of a building.
Monsters that are strong next to each other but weak when far apart.
A monster only hurt by a specific type of move or by beneficial spells.
A monster that charges and is hurt mostly by environmental effects like knocking obstacles into him or luring him into headbutting himself into walls.

None of the player's abilities are tested here. What is being offered is an entirely new method of playing. Ideally, you do not want to make his weakness the only method of defeating him, but generally, you want the weakness to account for the majority of the player's effort.

Note: Being weak to a specific element does not constitute a gameplay change. This type of elite makes the player do different things, not equip different weapons or use a similar but entirely different type of skill.

3. Showing Off

You can't show off with regular monsters. They are too common. You also can't show off with bosses that much either because they are far too rare to show off specific things.

Therefore Elite encounters are great times to show off the graphical side or the engine side of your game. All the subtle awesome ways you have thought of to make monster's attack? That can be part of an elite encounter. A monster that breathes circling icicles that split and fill up the room with richochets? Badass. If that were a generic enemy encounter? Less so, because the entire screen would be full of them. If that were a boss? Cool, but then they'd never see it again.

Recap

'Elite' monsters are a step above mooks and a step below bosses. They are more common than bosses and show up in nomal levels with some frequency. Their primary goal is to broaden the player experience by:

1. Forcing the player to fight harder - Broadening the player's own use of his character.
2. Forcing the player to fight differently - Broadening the type of challenges the game can throw.
3. Showing off - Broadening the events that the player can experience.

Designing Encounters, Part 3: Individual Mook Role Design

2009-02-17T04:20:00.001-08:00

Let's review:

A mook is one of the faceless horde of monsters that serve to get cut down with relative ease by the player. Mooks derive most of their challenge and difficulty from the fact that they can come in a large swarm and the relative make up of the mook composition.

In this post, I'm going to talk mostly about the basic mook roles and basic comparisons between roles.

Know that the principle goal of any encounter is to challenge the player not to kill the player. It is incredibly tempting to destroy the player instantly with unfair tactics but monsters should be fun and challenging to kill, not painful and frustrating.

The Tank:

(Other names include: Brutes, Tanks, Meat Shields)

The tank is meant to absorb damage from the player. The tank is meant to deflect damage from the more fragile monsters to maximize damage/disruption from the other monsters.

Good abilities for Tanks to have:

Large Size - Hindering mobility equates to hinders the player's ability to target effectively. Alternatively an effective large "size" can be created from having many smaller enemies.
High Health - Greater lasting power enables them to do their job longer.
Moderate Mobility - Too fast and they'll be too effective at their job, completely limiting his options.
Moderate to Low Damage - Low DPS, as you want them to be circumvented, not feared.
Deflection - Being able to avoid certain missile types or stop missiles soaks damage for their allies.
Aura Damage - Encourages the player to avoid prolonged combat

Dangerous abilities for Tanks to have:

Damage Reflection - Tanks generally have high hp. Damage reflection punishes the player for doing what he is supposed to be doing, killing monsters. :/
High Damage - A Tank with high damage is being both offense and defense. Perhaps your monster is doing too much?

Other forms of Tanking: Reducing player speed at range, Increasing defense of allies, Healing on Death of Tank

The Healer:

(Other names include: Doctor, Priest, Cleric, Leader)

The healer's role is to actively reverse the damage the player is doing, whether it is by negating the damage, or negating the abilities, all the way to actively replacing the monsters the player has eliminating.

Good Abilities for Healers to have:

Healing - Directly negate the damage the player is doing to nearby monsters.
Summoning low damage monsters - Reversing the death of monsters by providing weak replacements. (Note: Summoning is a HEALER role.)
Resurrection - Reversing the death of monsters by providing exact replacements.
Reducing Player Damage - Fight the player by reducing the amount of damage he can deal
Increasing Monster Defense - See above.
Proportional Size to Effect - The size of the healer should be roughly equal to how bad it would be for the player to ignore him. Highly effective healers should be large.

Bad Abilities for Healers to have:

High Health - Healers with high health are both Tanks and Healers. The troublesome part of this is that they are both tanks and healers in the same unit and thus there is no strategic way one can split the two apart by eliminating the healer or the tank part.
Small Size - Smaller means harder to hit. You want players to target healers.
Large Groups - There is nothing more annoying than a group of healers. Because the threat of their damage mitigation surpassing the players damage output is quite likely.

Other forms of Healers: Summoners

Melee DPS:

(Other Names include: Scrappers, Rogues, THOSE GOD DAMNED BATS)

Melee DPS' main goal is to damage or kill the player outright. They are NOT supposed to hinder the player. Their objective is to damage and swarm, not to hinder the player's mobility, but to destroy the player. This is different from the Tank in that the Tank is designed to defend and absorb damage, while the Melee DPS only focuses on destroying the player.

Good Abilities for Melee DPS:

Damage - Obviously.
Fast Movement - Melee DPS needs to be dangerous. Fast movement allows them to actually reach the player. It also allows the player to separate them from the other monsters that make them *more* dangerous.
Burst Movement - Melee DPS that moves in bursts tend to be more easily controllable. It gives the player breathing room at times, and surprises them at other times. For example, monsters that charge at you every so often is exciting. Monsters continually charging at you is a little more boring.
Low Health - Melee DPS' tends to be a damage race. This is fine, because the only way of stopping Melee DPS generally is to separate them from their support and kill them. Low health makes this easier for the player.

Bad Abilities for Melee DPS:

High Health - Melee DPS with high health tends to be a nightmare because they pose such a dangerous threat that fighting becomes absurd.
Large Size - Larger sizes actually hinder Melee DPS' function, which is to surround the player with as many of them as possible and damage them. A large amount of smaller foes attacking the player is better than a few larger ones surrounding the player, damage wise.

You never want to get into a situation where the player is "safe" because he is only surrounded by a few large Melee DPS'ers.

Ranged DPS:

(Other Names include: Snipers, Assassins, Hunters, Archers, Artillery, Mages)

Ranged DPS' main goal is to restrict zones that the player can enter, or keep the player constantly moving. Their secondary goal is to damage the player.

Good Abilities for Ranged DPS:

Stationary Damage Effects - Poison clouds, jets of fires, traps are all effective ways to keep the player out of certain areas.
Moderate but Scaling damage - The goal of Ranged DPS is to prevent the player from being rooted to one spot and attacking. Thus, ensuring that large groups of Ranged DPS can effectively stack their attack on the same spot is important. (For example, a large group of artillery is ignorable if they fire at different positions. But the instant they focus fire on one spot, you better damn well move. It is not the fact that individually they do lots of damage, but that they can focus their damage after a while.)
Little or No Mobility - Generally, Ranged DPS shouldn't be lured away from positions. This generally leads to very odd things happening (For example, luring them behind a wall or something where they are completely ineffective.)
Easily Destroyed at Melee Range - They should be designed to crumble or be decimated the instant the player can *reach* them. Not being able to reach/affect the ranged DPS should be the primary difficulty of players.

Bad Abilities for Ranged DPS:

High Health - This disincentives blitzkrieg attacks by the player. The player should always feel compelled to rush in and destroy the Ranged DPS by going crazy on them before the other mooks catch up to him.
High Damage - Ranged DPS should be a threat, but more of a continual threat rather than a threat that destroys you instantly.

Other forms of Ranged DPS: Increasing damage of allies, summoning suicidal minions, continual life sapping mechanism.

Spice

Spice is used to liven up a generic mook encounter. However, Spice needs to be use infrequently, because otherwise the encounter might be hard to manage, design wise.

Here is where all your cool off-beat ideas come in about how to design an encounter. However, realize that each wild element also has to be understood by the player and you on how it affects the encounter. Thus, add Spice sparingly.

Examples of Spice:

Teleporting Melee DPS
Summoning by Splitting
Player Debuffing
Obstacle Summoning
Strength buffs on death
Player debuffs on death
Multi-form enemies

Designing Encounters, Part 2: Mook

2009-02-13T17:32:00.001-08:00

Let's review:

A mook is a simple type of enemy whose power comes from numbers. They are the faceless horde. They are the basic grunts in an army. The player is expected to effortlessly destroy a single mook. The heroes of the game masscre their way through tons and tons of mooks in the course of a game.

The single easiest pitfall when it comes to designing mooks is erring on the specialization vs. homogenization scale.

The second easiest pitfall is not considering mooks as a party.

Pitfall #1a - Having a million mooks with the same role (Homogenization)

I am being attacked by what appears to be a zombie, a giant bear and what appears to be a guy in leather armor with a dagger. I am being attacked by the same thing, three times over. If the entire game is like this, I will literally be repeating the same actions over and over again, on different colored/skinned mooks.

I offer, as a sacrifice to free thinking, how would you design an army?

Would it consist entirely of infantry? Of infantry, tanks and artillery? Of infantry, tanks, artillery and sappers? Would it be all spearman? Some spearman and some archers? Some spearman, some archers and a medic?

In any large ground force, there are roles to be played by the faceless mass. So for each individual monster, do not design them as different flavors of the same role. There is no need for 20 different types of tanks. There is no need for 200 types of infantry. Have a few unique types of each role in your design.

Pitfall #1b - Having a mook that does too much (Overspecialization)

This monster I'm facing shoots lightning, ice, fire, dances around on the walls, teleports, splits into mirror images of himself.... and there's 10 of them.

...and dies in a single hit? wait what?

...Well, whatever. Wait, now they're healing other people! Seriously? And charging at me? When could they stun attack or summon little beetles?

Oh, and he just happens to bounce all missile attacks back at me? What?

There is nothing wrong with having a character that is special or unique.

But it is absolutely criminal to give a standard guy 10 different abilities that get pulled out seemingly at random.

Why?

1) It violates expectation - Such a common monster with so many tricks?
2) Expected Value - Should a common monster have so many tricks? Should so much time be spent on designing a common monster?
3) Memory Issues - Can a player remember that a common monster has that many abilities?
4) Balance Issues - This monster interaction with other things seems difficult.
5) Rule of Cool and Poor Execution - The more complex something is, the harder it is to execute perfectly.

Pitfall #2a - Monster Role Homogenization

This is slightly different from pitfall #1a. That one talks about individual monster design. This one is about encounters as a group. You could have 10 monsters that do drastically different roles. But the makeup of the group of mooks that attacks you have drastically different effects.

This problem is the bane of monster encounters. Imagine for a second, you were fighting all monsters of the same type.

That is, what would happen if you fight 12 healers that constantly healed each other? You wouldn't be in much danger, but the fight would last forever.

Or what happens if you fight 12 high damaging enemies that charged at you? The game would turn into a damage race, where you must kill them first, or you die. Repeatedly.

What if you fight all guys who were big and massive that blocked your way? Repeatedly? It would just be a long tedious fight trying to clear a path for you to run through them.

Note, what this inevitably leads to? More damage. The solution to all problems is more damage. In fact, the only solution that works in all the above situations is more damage. So the game becomes an arms race. Can the game kill you before you kill them? You just have to take down X guys. There is no order that is important. Positioning is somewhat important, but either you die if you're in the wrong place (against the chargers) or it doesn't matter (against low damage healers.)

Instead, consider what mooks do in an army.

A large brute + a healer = A positioning fight where you must get around the brute in order to win. Damage racing is essentially inconsequential because you must kill the healer first.

Chargers + Brutes = A positioning fight where each individual brute restricts your mobility makes it very hard to get around the damaging chargers. The fight is won by either splitting off the group from one, or simply being fast enough.

Brutes + Ranged DPS = Similar to the fight above, only that the goal this time isn't to split them off, so much as neutralize the threat by slipping through the brutes to do damage to what is actually damaging you.

Pitfall #2b - Exponential Difficulty Growth Potential of Groups

I know I can kill archers individually. And I can kill those stupid brutes individually. But when you put them together, I can't seem to kill them fast enough before dying. :(

Toss in those annoying healing guys, and I quit.

The difficulty of any encounter is geometric with the amount of roles fulfilled. Balance accordingly.

If you have an encounter with 10 brutes, and you replace that with an encounter of 5 brutes and 5 healers, the encounter takes on a drastically different metric where the brutes are essentially nigh invincible until the healers are taken down.

Always consider the geometric difficulty rise when having complex encounter groups. Additionally, consider the geometric difficult decay as monsters start dying. (The Domino effect, where if one group falls, the rest of monsters fall over.) You may wish to have monsters that grow stronger when they are not being pacified or healed, etc.

All this leads to more interesting tactics and gameplay in generic mook encounters.

Designing Encounters, Part 1: Introduction to enemy types

2009-02-13T16:36:00.000-08:00

Note: This is my personal stance on enemy encounters. I apologize if you disagree with them, but know that the 'rule of cool' is fun to watch but says very little on the actual content of fights.

In general, there are 3 types of enemies you encounter in a regular game:

1. Mooks - General run of the mill guys that serve as filler for you to grind your blades against and generally slap around with no difficulty, unless they make up a large horde.

The faceless zombies in any zombie movie make up 'the mooks.' Alone, they are not quite a threat. As an ever-present horde, however, zombies get their power. A few zombies are a pushover. A hundred zombies in unison is an encounter.

In space, these are fighters. Small tiny fleeting ships.

2. The Elite - These guys make up rarer encounters that serve as mid-points, checkpoints. They generally appear alone in the company of smaller guys. These fall under various names: mini-bosses... generals... 'Silvered Bordered Elites', etc. These guys pose a minor problem alone, but become major difficulties when found in combination.

This is generally the hardest class of enemy to design well, mostly because they must stand out, but they can't stand out too much. They also tend to fall into the syndrome where they become 'mook replacements' in that, in the beginning of the game, the guy in gold armor amongst a bunch of guys in leather armor is elite... but then at the end of the game, it's the guy in platinum armor amongst a bunch of guys in gold armor that is the elite. Generally, when this happens, it's a sign of bad design.

In any generic kung fu movie, there will be 'that one nameless guy who knows kung fu.' While Bruce Lee is taking care of an entire room full of mooks, there will be these guys. Still nameless, still generic, but they last long enough to pose a serious threat to the hero. When they come in pairs, the hero has a problem for a while. They don't go down with a single hit in the face. They distinguish themselves by getting back up and landing hits of their own.

Sometimes, the bosses' right hand man is one of these. Other times, they are a boss in their own right. Usually the bosses' personal body guards are a group of elites.

In space, these are powerful frigates, or capital ships that are surrounded by swarms of fighters.

3. Bosses - You know who they are. They are used to finish off a level or they serve as a crescendo for various points in the game. A boss should never be trivial.

The big one. That large red dragon at the end of the line. The Death Star. These are bosses.

Belief in the System, Part 4: Elemental Case Study

2009-01-27T00:46:00.000-08:00

So, in the last part, I discussed this problem:

Adding Elemental type resistance to various monsters brings about a host of design issues:

1. Elements can become too strong or too weak, depending on how monsters are designed.
2. Elements have the danger of being too 'alike.' Imagine having 8 different colored fireballs that do the same thing.
3. Elements might encourage laziness in design (Fire Beetle! Ice Beetle! Lightning Beetle!)
4. Tediousness inventory management on the part of the player, juggling around weapons with a ton of different elemental types just because he needs (or wants) to do more damage.
5. Critical difficulty jump if the player doesn't have the element he needs or if he is stuck with the 'incorrect' element. (Fire specialized mage encountering a fire elemental. Whoops.)

But what disturbs me most, personally, (and this is a personal view..) is that..
The common view to 'fix' these problems is to simply be a better designer.
Which I find it, while true, seems to be very very micro-intensive.

I touched upon this in the last post: You could solve each of these issues, simply by spending more time on each individual issue or being careful and methodical throughout design and sweating the small stuff.

But what are the chances you are a god-like designer and that you can solve each of the issues? What are the chances you have the time to spare on tweaking the small things? Not to mention that the smaller solutions mentioned (like carefully balancing monster elemental resistance values, etc.) add incredible complexity to adding new content.

But what can we do about it?

Make all design as global as possible. Global changes are changes in the inherent nature of the game. Global changes are changes to the very system you play it. Therefore, if you push your work to the GLOBAL system at large, your design cost is minimized.

Let's go with an easy example:

Let's say we have all the traditional elements in Dungeons and Dragons: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Holy, Darkness, Poison, Sonic, Slashing, Blunt, Piercing.

There is no way in hell I'm going to find a weapon of each type, let alone be bothered to sort through my inventory to search for each weapon type. There's also no way I'm going to even remember what monsters are weak to what, because that's not really a reasonable expectation for anyone to recall.

However, what if we had fewer element types? Physical, Energy, Fire, Ice, Poison?

Then, it'd be a lot easier to remember if monsters are weak to a certain element or another. A player could reasonably expect to cover at least some of the elemental types. In additional, certain problems later on become easier to manage. The problem of making 12 different elements seem different is a lot harder than the problem of making 5 different elements seem different.

This condensing of element space brings about a lot of benefits, while still keeping a lot of the core benefits intact.

1. It helps avoid making the elements appear to similar because there are fewer of them.

2. The condensing cuts down on inventory juggling because there are simply less elements to juggle around.

3. It cuts down on what the player has to remember so that the player will actually take notice to the system itself as a whole.

4. It cuts down the designer space and lets him focus on more important parts of design.

Let's go with a harder example:

Let's say you have a monster who you want to be weak to fire. Let's say I'm designing a monster and I could choose exactly how much more damage he takes from fire. Do I want him to take 80% more fire damage? 20% more fire damage? 45% more fire damage? Will it even matter in the end?

On the other hand, you could simply have a fast and hard global rule: All monsters weak to fire take 50% more fire damage. All monsters strong to fire take 50% less fire damage. Period. Thereafter, designers would only have to think about 'Do I want this monster to take more or less damage from fire? Yes? No?'

And additionally, you would skirt the issue of making the easy design mistake of having a monster be a complete cakewalk if you have a fire attack, and significantly harder if you don't because your weakness value doesn't go that high.

In this example, we have compacted the range of values that resistances can have. A monster's weakness or penalty/strength to damage could only fall under a few categories:

Immune to fire. (0%, optional)
Strong against fire. (50%)
Neutral against fire. (100%)
Weak against fire. (150%)
Really weak against fire. (200%, optional)

What are the implications of this change?

1. It forces the designer to think about their design on a slightly higher level.

The designer has to think harder about what weakness/resistances a monster should have. He can't take the easy way out and assign a small weakness vs. fire, because small weaknesses to fire don't exist.

There is a golden mean fallacy that states that the most tempting solution will be the median between two desires. In this case, the designer can't decide whether or not a monster should have 0% fire weakness or 50% fire weakness. The answer he'll most likely gravitate to is 25%, the mean between the two as some form of compromise. However, this is most likely the worst solution for this as the fire weakness does too little to differentiate it, nor does it reward the player very much for having the appropriate element. It just adds more tweaking that was unnecessary nor very helpful.

2. The impact of weaknesses and strengths can be well known.

Elements never lose their impact in the game. They always have an impact. The elements will never feel pointless because using the correct or incorrect element does a dramatic amount of difference. Additionally, the player knows the upper bound of how using the correct/incorrect element will do and that can influence his decisions.

In addition, you know exactly how easy or hard a given area is. Either the player will have the incorrect element and do half damage, or he will have the correct element and do double damage. Either way, the difficulty creep is known ahead of time and the area can be designed with that in mind.

3. Less time can be spent on 'tweaking' small things.

The designer doesn't have to tweak resistance values. They have to care about the actual area design. Less time thrashing on number fiddling means more *actual* design work is done.

Let's go with another example:

I have an ice bolt spell. I have a fire bolt spell. I have a lightning bolt spell. They all do the same thing. Deal damage based on element type. Boring.

Well, okay, I can tweak every fire spell to do a high amount of damage. And I can make all the lightning bolt spells do even higher potential damage, but a lower minimum damage. I can make all the ice spells do less damage but have a cold effect or a freeze effect of varying lengths.

Wait. Now I have to add another fire spell? Well.. I can make it do more damage.. or..

Contrast that with...

Let's think of a set of abilities all fire element things should do:

Damage over Time burn based on initial damage dealt (DoT)
Leave a lasting burn on nearby terrain, like a flaming wall effect, that burns based on the fire damage it would deal (Area Burn)
Explode in some way shape or form to affect more than one target (Explode)

Now every time I have to add a fire effect, I can assign it one of these properties. I could assign all three of them if I wished, but I will no longer have to tweak individual spell effects, instead, all I would have to do is mark an attack as: Fire, Area Burn, Explode.

By making sure that every fire ability has one or more abilities from that set of abilities and ensuring that every element which isn't fire doesn't have the same ability...

I admit, this example is pretty darned convoluted even for me. But my point is: Design a global set of attributes that can be selectively assigned to a skill, rather than tweak each individual skill.

Say we came up with a large series of effects, like so:

Fire: Damage over time, Area Burn, Explosion
Cold: Slow Effect (50%), Frozen (100%), Immobilized (0% Move), Pierce (Goes through targets)
Energy: Stun (Varying Length), Knockback, Arcs (Jumps from target to target)
Poison: Debuffs Attack/Defense, Damage over Time, Gaseous Area Effect..

And then when we designed individual skills, we ensured that all elemental spells of that element had one property of these effects. What does this achieve?

1. It separates interesting effects from the actual source/skill (Less tweaking!)

That is, a skill doesn't have to be designed with AreaAa Burn in mind. Area Burn is a template that can be applied to fire effects. This allows re-use of the fire effect and the player also realizes that fire effects often apply area burn.

2. Effects can be counted on to do the same thing

For example, you will never have one ice effect that slows for 30% and one ice effect that slows for 40% and one ice effect that slows for 5%. The player can count on ice slowing for a set amount of time, apart from the skill. The designer on the other hand knows exactly how powerful the cold is and can't commit the golden mean fallacy in design.

3. It really helps to different the elements, without micro-design tweaking and unifies the element in the mind of the player.

That is, you don't have to tweak every single skill or item to make them stand apart. Simply apply one of the global templates and then the elemental attack in question "feels" like it belongs to an element.

All poison does X. All fire will do something like Y.

The key here is that with a bit of global design, smaller micro design issues in individual skills, monsters, and items can be sidestepped or greatly simplified, allowing the designer to design a richer game without having to worry about specifics.

Belief in the System, Part 3: Bits and Pieces

2009-01-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

The examples that I've covered in parts 1 and 2 are simply expository, though they hint at a richer potential that could be found in the system.

For example, poker and hearts aren't strategically rich because of the deck of cards, there are certain properties that a deck of cards has that make it 'tick':

1) There are 4 suits.
2) There are 52 "unique" cards.
3) Of the 13 cards, 3 of them can be designated as "face" cards.
4) They are numbered in order.

Each of these properties adds something to all card games that use a standard deck of cards. Don't believe me?

Try playing Poker with a deck of 'Uno' cards. There are 4 suits. They are numbered 0 to 10. But uniqueness is violated, and there are a ton of 'special' cards that don't belong to a suit or have a specific number.

It's similar to the original game, but it's a little more chaotic and random than would be expected out of a popular game.

Working Example - Damage Types

Adding monsters with different resistances to different types of attacks adds greater design space: complexity in equipment/ability choice.

It tends to be an extremely common feature in games, mostly because it's very intuitive and close to reality.

But it *also* adds the design pitfalls that follow: the possibility that the player will have to carry around lots of different attacks and juggle his ability choice; increasing the amount of information the player needs to care about; opens up the possibility to be lazy with design (Monster Y is just like Monster X, except it's fire instead of ice.)

If the number of elements you consider grows to a staggering amount... (Fire, Ice, Lightning, Wood, Earth, Wind, Light, Dark, Tastes like Oranges...) then the net effect also decreases because each element simply feels the same.

Both the number of damage type you choose to consider and their net effect determines the extent of how your game suffers from either: Damage Types not mattering because you never have the right damage type on hand or tedious juggling from players because there are too many damage type items to switch between.

Then there's the need to constantly tweak monsters to both ensure that players who do and don't use the "correct" damage type make it through the game without making it too easy or too hard.

Adding resistances/bonuses to damage types opens up design space but make sure you consider common pitfalls of design when exploring said space. After all, if the feature doesn't add any well explored design space or simply adds problems, it would have been better if the game doesn't support it at all.

It's a good feature.. but what can we do to avoid design pitfalls?

We could design every monster and every skill very carefully so there's no overlap, therefore all elements are equally fair.

We could design every weapon that has a specific element to be unique and yet somehow expected results, so that the player never has to juggle elements just for the sake of doing damage.

We could plot each aspect of the game out very carefully to ensure that each battle is winnable.

We could script specific reactions from monsters to elements so that each of the individual elements actually have meaning.

We could tweak monster hp and resistances specifically for each area, knowing what elements are available so that no area is too easy or hard for the player.

We could promote very specific elements for very specific situations, for example, giving the player an 'anti-tree' weapon when entering a forest, with the knowledge that anti-tree will never appear again, because we don't want to keep making new 'anti-tree' weapons and abilities for tree monsters down the line.

We could simply design better, so that we never come across the lazy design problem with 'fire beetle' and 'ice beetle.'

...God. That sounds like a lot of specific work. And what if we get it wrong for some area?

The problem is, these solutions are all very specific solutions.
And they all make the assumption that you can design well in *each* case.

But what if you worked on a higher level?

Belief in the System, Part 2

2009-01-23T00:07:00.001-08:00

I'm assuming the first post didn't really make sense unless you have an intuitive understanding of what I'm talking about in the first place.

The system is the underlying engine that enables the game to be played.

Depending on how the engine is designed or what engine is used, very natural laws fall out, and these shape the entire game as a whole.

Example 2: Cards

Let's take a deck of standard playing cards. Take any game that uses a deck of cards.

What would be the common thread between them?

For any game, you know there is exactly 13 types of cards with 4 suits. Because each game uses the same deck, naturally, card counting possibilities become possible.

The strategy behind hearts or poker or bridge comes from guessing which cards are in the opponent's hands based on what cards you have.

Now think about it, whoever was creating Hearts, Poker or Bridge could have specified that they use a special deck of cards. But because they chose to use a standard deck of playing cards, it is a natural consequence that there is only one type of any card.

Those complex strategies of elimination are a natural fallout of the base system engine used.

Of course, how does this apply to game design in general? Core design principles at the base of the engine or system used have ridiculous effects on the game as a whole...

Example 3: 3D vs. 2D

This is the most obvious example of how the initial decision affects everything in the game.

A 3d game has multiple axis' of freedom and a richer environmental sense as well as improved realism... *but* it brings about the problems of camera control, complex math during collision detection as well as an increased expectation from the user for those things.

A 2d game on the other hand has fewer axis' of freedom along with a more restricted environment to explore in but it also has simpler controls, simpler collision detection and has no problems with shoddy cameras, since you control the view at any given time.

Some games can work extremely well in both 3D and 2D, consider how different the Mario franchises when they made the leap from 2D to 3D or fighting games in general with the Soulcalibur series.

However, some games suffer in a 3d sense. Tetris would be inconceivable in a 3d state, as would any other puzzle game; The decision to have a third degree of freedom adds so much positional complexity that they quickly become untenable.

Consider.. what is the correct base for the game design that you have? A game implemented on top of a system that fights with the design of the game itself can only bring pain. Adding a third dimension to Tetris would introduce problems of being able to view the entire space at once, as well as occluding certain areas of the playing field in such a way that it would almost completely undermine the open information that the player needs to make his decisions.

Belief in the System, Part 1

2009-01-21T14:51:00.001-08:00

I believe in the system.
Whatever system you have.
Because I believe that a powerful system can alleviate the pains of the designer.

Let me explain what I mean by system.

The system is the underlying hierarchy, the underlying design of the game. It is the core engine, the blind and sleeping god that drives every action.

The system is not hindered by content. The system is not bound by specially designed event encounters. The system is merely a set of rules that is to be followed.

But, as a Johnny, I believe that the system is the single most important reason why games are what they are.

You probably still don't understand what I mean, so it's time to delve into some specific examples.

Example 1: Controls

Have you ever played a platformer with unresponsive controls? That is, it takes 3 quarters of a second for your character to turn around, and your character jerks while moving and you can't seem to do with finesse what you want it to do?

Have you ever played the old school Mario games, where Mario responded instantaneously to everything you did. Mario followed his own rules of inertia, but he would *try* to do what you wanted him to do the instant he realized it.

The responsiveness is part of the system.

If the two simply existed in a void where the only thing you could do was move your character around a featureless terrain, Mario would still be more interesting and complex to move around, simply because you have greater control over him.

You could spend 10,000 hours designing the best levels ever for the game, the best visuals for the game, the best sound and musics ever heard.

But that one core aspect of responsiveness for the platformer, is what makes the game fun.

That is an aspect of the system.

And if the system fails in that regard, no matter how much time you spend on it, no amount of designed content will save you.

CCG #1- Flavor and Function pitfalls.

2008-08-20T23:07:00.001-07:00

Note: This post is about collectible card games.

Look! A blank card! It's up to you to fill in her abilities with something appropriate!

What would you fill the text box with? What would you pick up on? Okay. So I admit, you probably know nothing about the girl in the card box. Where could you even begin? Her name just sounds.. vaguely American and vaguely Japanese.

She's listed as a 'Major Character' so something grand, perhaps? She's also listed as a 'witch'.. which means.. err.. she should summon.. monkeys? It's rather hard to say given just the image and the name to come up with anything concrete.

Is she important? What does she do?

Let me provide some context:

Truly, a sign of greatness. Pause and bask at the greatness of 'Master Spark!' Clearly the card in question should damage other cards.

Great, so a mechanic like: Use this card. Hurt some other card would be quite fitting and it would be precisely in flavor.

This is a good demonstration of the first few pitfalls of designing from a strong context. Were we given no context and free range of what card could do, who knows what we would put on that box. The summon monkeys thing was promising.

Sadly, the context restricts us to fewer abilities to fit flavor. When you come up with a design for something, starting from a strong flavor base can give you ideas, but when your initial idea is 'Cool guy with a sword' there's only so many directions you can go.

Now, onto specifics:

There are a few issues with this combination of image/ability. Mainly because:

1. No context from the card itself. Unless you had the proper context, the picture and the ability doesn't quite synchronize. The happy smiley girl's sole purpose appears to be harming people. With what exactly? The broom?

Solution 1: Replace the image with something more fitting.

Looks painful, doesn't it?

Obviously, you can't just change the image on a whim. Mainly because you probably don't have the resources to requisition tons and tons of artwork for slight changes in abilities or ideas that you have. Which brings us to solution two...

Solution two: Provide context on the card itself.

Little story snippets, quotes and dialogue can help synchronize the disconnect between the ability and the card. It's a good deal cheaper than recommissioning art.

2. Doesn't push or pull the player in any direction. A card that simply deals direct damage is a very simple function. Depending on the game in question, it could be easily replaceable by some other card. It doesn't serve a unique purpose. Unless the card is very powerful or very undercosted, there is no incentive to use this card specifically.

People may criticize variants on the same idea for being 'boring' and 'unoriginal.' But the alternative is worse. You do not ever want to see a long slew of abilities that read: Deal 1 damage. Deal 2 damage. Deal 1-2 damage.

Instead, variants and restrictions allow different factors to push and pull them in directions.

3. It's boring. For a 'Major Character' having a boring ability is really bad. Tons of things simply 'hurt people.' You could easily imagine an archer having the ability to 'hurt someone.' A guy who throws darts could 'hurt someone.' While the flavor and function synchronize, the basic ability simply isn't attractive enough. This is a major flaw. While simple boring functional tools are good to have, it's criminal to put them on something that is considered 'Major.'

While this example is far from perfect, it makes an attempt at reconciling the basic issues of the initial simple design. It brings up the context level of the card to something understandable. It pushes the player to a certain direction (More.. whatever the numbers mean is a good thing.) And it's not quite as boring as the original ability.

Onto the next post, where I talk about where this version gets it all wrong...

A look at motivation - Mass Effect

2008-05-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

What do players want? What do players need?

Okay, it's a hugely broad question that is impossible to answer in general.

However, take a look at your favorite game and how they attempt to answer these questions.
For me, the most recent game I have had the opportunity to delve into is Mass Effect, so I'll pick on that game for today.

Let's take one of the main features in this game -- Depth.

Today, let me focus on: Depth in Exploration

Symptom One: Side-Quest on the Empty Shells on Empty Planets of Emptiness

The major premise of Mass Effect is the unrivaled exploration of an entire galaxy worth of planets. An entire galaxy worth of worlds, buildings, alien races combined with a epic sci-fi plot-line that has the galaxy hang in the balance.

That is all well and good. But does Mass Effect actually deliver?

Imagine traveling across the surface of the moon.

It is incredibly vast. Infinitely expansive. And if you look up at the earth, shining away at you, it will be incredibly beautiful.

The moon is also devoid of life, structures, buildings, people. Would visiting 45 moons give you a different experience than visiting one moon?

Have you visited forty-five unique scenarios? or the same scenario 45 times?

Symptom Two: Your reward is this gun! That you already have!

Is there an extrinsic reward for completing a scenario? Is the player rewarded for completing the quest? Is the player rewarded for his action?

...No.

The reward for exploring all of these desolate moons is cash. Of which you have millions.

The reward for exploring all of these desolate places is weapons. Which you already have, or can easily purchase with those millions. Or are simply worse than the ones you already have.

The reward for exploring all of these desolate places is simply the intrinsic experience of exploring. Of which there was none. Because you went to a desolate moon that had one important building which had nothing interesting inside.

Again, are there really distinct scenarios? Or the same one over and over?

Symptom Three: No sight of the end. Or even your surroundings.

If I generated randomly a million moons that were all the same, would you explore them all? How many of them would you explore knowing that no hand was involved in their making. Nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing discovered, nothing found, lost or gained.

What if there was the appearance of having and endless amount of moons. Would that make you more motivated or less motivated to pursue them?

Would you run a million miles with no end in sight?

Even the largest of impossible tasks can be broken down bit by bit, but only when you have vision of the entire process. When you collect 120 shines in Super Mario sunshine, you know how many you have collected. You know how many there is to go.

If you had been on shine 97 without knowing how many shines were truly left, how many would have the strength to continue to simply finish and explore it all?

To sum it all up: What does the player want?

Let's say I give you a quest. The quest is like any other quest. It may be set in a different plane. But you will do the exact same thing as you have for anything else.

Let me give you a reward for undertaking. The reward you get is like the reward from any other quest. It may look slightly different. But it is the same reward you could get from anywhere.

Let me promise you that you will encounter nothing new, nothing novel and that it will have no effect on the main storyline.

It will reveal nothing about the plot. It will not have an interesting question on life. It will not tie into other plot lines or affect the universe in any way, shape or form.

I will also generously give you one hundred credits for completing this quest. However, this doesn't matter as you have 1 million credits on hand.

Would you still take this quest? It adds to nothing. Builds up to nothing. Leads to nothing. Unlocks nothing. With no new experience.

Is there any additional motivation for undertaking this quest than any other? Can this thing even hold your attention so that you come back to it?

You may need to rethink why your player would want to undertake your quest.

Accessibility, Part 2: Setting up and delivering user expectations

2008-04-13T06:43:00.001-07:00

Reading back over my posts, I've realized I've completely glossed over a major reason games are played: Expectation.

To explain what I mean, let me put up a hypothetical situation;

If you encounter a boss randomly and it dies to one swing, you feel surprised, but not necessarily happy about it. If you had instead spent the last 20 hours upgrading your character and then it dies to one swing, would you feel happier?

My personal hypothesis is that the latter would be a more satisfying experience. Why? It conforms to what the player expects to happen.

What if instead, that boss randomly killed you in one blow? That would feel particularly bad. But if instead, the boss bellowed and screamed for a minute while "charging" power ridiculously and then killed you in a gigantic blow, how would that feel?

To look at the individual event that make up games is a bit shortsighted. One instead must walk the careful line with setting up player expectations without treating them like complete idiots.

Tradition

Tradition is, perhaps, the most powerful force you can use to set up player expectations. It also tends to be why people don't adopt other gaming systems easily.

For example, take this complaint about the MMO Dofus:

"For the entire time I played, no weapons or armor dropped from any monster. I wish this game wasn't so boring."

While the complaint is a valid one, I would wager that the real brunt of the complaint is simply because Dofus does not adhere to traditional expectations when it comes to items. Imagine if you were accustomed to weapons or armors dropping every once in a while from monsters, and suddenly encountering a game where all you obtained were randomly miscellaneous items, like in Dofus.

It is in fact, impossibly difficult to find items in Dofus. Combine this with random statistics and perfect items in Dofus are rare finds. However, the design of Dofus is that any item in the game, including the rarest items in the game, can be crafted from generic monster drops and rare monster drops. It is not a requirement to have any piece of gear drop. If you want that mushroom hat, all one must do is collect 30 mushrooms, guarenteed if you kill 30 mushrooms!

However, this is unlike normal games. And thus the complaint arises: 'I've spent hours killing mushrooms, and all I have is 100 mushrooms and no mushroom gear!'

Solution: Set up player expectations early. In Dofus, this would be greatly aided by having the player craft his first set of gear, or have some sort of generic craft system. If they had made their crafting system more obvious from the beginning, this sort of complaint would arise fairly rarely.

Understanding the System

The second major way to set up player expectation is hinged around making the player understand the underlying system. As explained before, the human brain is geared towards linear understanding. Exponentials and radical divergences from linear patterns are not easily understood.

For example, if I raise my attack power from 50 to 100, I should expect that my attack power doubles or increases by 100%. If instead, attack power was a logarithmic function, my attack power would only increase about log (2) or 40%. This violates player expectations. Imagine if the player had spent a great deal of time upgrading his gear and doubling his listed attack power, only to find out that the net return is only a fraction of what he gains.

This would be a major punch to the gut of any player attempting to understand the system.

If your system is complex in any way at all, you must set up a general explanation so the player will understand how the system works. The goal is to change player expectation to what your system will produce.

Therefore, in the above case, a simple tool-tip that explains how attack power works whenever the player has his cursor over attack power would go quite a bit towards weighing relative worth of equipment and abilities.

Visual Impact

Visual expectation are probably the most natural system that we can comprehend. In short, the more visually interesting an object is (size, flashiness, colors), the more impact it should have on the game. If you want a a major reason why adventure games are no longer seen in this world, it's because they violate this rule time and time again. The amount of time searching for the one item that will change the world which HAPPENS TO BE 3 PIXELS WIDE. Visual impact: Almost none. Game Impact: The entire missing piece to the puzzle.

Things that look small and unimportant should NOT have a major impact on the current situation. Conversely, things that look large and important should have a major impact on the current situation. Unless the player has been properly trained to look for small specific cues, you cannot expect that the player will understand that 'the tiny cute bunny' is actually a harbinger of death. Likewise, if the screen is filled with impressive nuclear explosions that do absolutely nothing, the effect is impossible to ignore and visually confusing.

You must always work to bring visual impact with actual impact, as this follows what players will expect. In the event that you wish to hide or brag things, you must first alter player expectations accordingly, perhaps by hinting of small things or setting up the scenario before hand.

Why bother?

Violating player expectation always carries some negative impact for the player. Either they will be frustrated at the experience, or they will not have the potential joy or the correct reaction. If the expectation is violated in a negative sense, then the player will feel frustrated. If the expectation is violated in a positive surprising sense, the player will be surprised but not necessarily as happy as he would be if it fulfilled his expectation.

Accessibility: Seeding a growing experience, Part 1

2008-03-01T02:11:00.000-08:00

Accessibility is some elusive trait that gets touted these days as one of the major goals of gaming. 'Games must be accessible enough to appeal to a large generation.' I believe that Accessibility, in and of itself, isn't necessarily the most important goal in game design. It depends upon your consumer base and the target you are trying to satisfy.

What I believe the term truly means in the context is used is, how do we design games that a casual audience can grow into?

The goal here is to mainly: Let the player feel free to play how he wants to play, guide the player gently down the avenues without restricting his freedom and rewarding the player's impulse to delve deeper into the game. In this manner, casual audiences can approach the game without needing to look at strategy guides or knowing the deep internals of the game, knowing that the game will attempt to conform itself around *his* needs, rather than demanding that the player conform itself to the game's needs.

1. Avoid dead ends in player progression (Real or Perceived)
(Let the player play however he wants to play!)

The major criminal in this case: Every RPG ever made that demands the player to choose what to level up. When players are first presented with a series of skills to choose from, there is always the moment of paralysis that grips them when they realize that their decision is final.

The exact instance you want to avoid is the player trying to rationalize his own 'mistake' with himself.

Damn. Why did I choose that skill? I've done this all wrong.

But there is another, more insidious version of the dead end trial: Where the incentive or necessity to follow a dead end outweighs the natural curiosity and desire for exploration. This makes itself evident in the form of rewards for repeating a certain action or playing in a certain style. Let's take the simplest example, the natural example where the usage of a skill improves it to its next level. It's a very natural system of game design, intuitively understood and mirrors reality well.

However, it's a dead-end path for players to choose. In real life, we can't switch our specialties in the middle of the road. We are trapped by the decisions of the past. We keep similar skill-sets and add to them as we develop. If the game forces the player to focus on a path, it will create the same similar trap for him where he is advancing down a path he doesn't wish to go down (a dead end, a worthless skill) and yet there is no recourse for him to go back (as advancing another skill would take forever at this stage, and be almost completely useless.)

Our player has now gone through half the game with a sword specialization such that our player is crazy good with a sword. However, now he is stuck on a dead end path. If he chooses not to use a sword and use an axe instead, the axe will be effectively useless (if he's so much better with a sword) or unfun (because he can do so much more with the sword) unless he uses the axe for a similar period of time with the sword.

This would be reasonable, except the player has now advanced to a stage where the game expects the player to have some crazy awesome skills with a weapon. Switching to another weapon just isn't feasible at this point and the player is trapped with his early choice, even though nowhere along the path has he ever said to himself 'I'm just going to use a sword.'

2. Guide players gently but let them be free to do their own thing.
(Do not restrict the player arbitrarily.)

The major criminal in this case is: Boss fights.

Who here has fought that one boss. You know which one I'm talking about. The 'I am invulnerable everywhere except this giant glowing spot on my torso.' Yes. That one. And he has the audacity to cover it up 95% of the battle. The message is, don't even bother hitting me unless you hit right there.

Run around, dodging his blows for minutes on end to hit him once on the glowing weak point and then repeat 20 times.

The obvious flaw here is that whatever tactic the player decides is the best way to engage the boss is suddenly null and void. If a player decides the boss is totally open after an attack and his instincts tell him to attack, he shouldn't be stopped simply because the boss is designed to be invulnerable.

Imagine the scenario here: Giant Robot dude swings at me mercilessly, and I go to hit him, only to find out that although Giant Robot dude has major holes in his defense, he's simply invulnerable to my attacks until he decides to do some completely arbitrary action that exposes his weak point.

The player has identified a game-play path he wants to explore. He should not be directly cut off for arbitrary reasons. In this case, simply making the boss take reduced but significant damage from player attacks would be terrific, as the player can identify openings in the boss to attack and he is also alerted to the weak point that he may strike of his own choosing.

3. Seed subtle interactions to encourage player exploration and experimentation without bludgeoning them over the head with it.
(Reward the player's sense of exploration.)

The thrill of discovering that something works is an incredibly rewarding one in game-play experience that opens up a great deal of depth into the game. As designers, one key tenet of design is to seed your game with intentional but hidden interactions, knowing that the player's independent discovery of these synergies will be greatly rewarding.

A lot of games will take the 'in your face approach' to let the player know of cool features in the game. In a recent example, in BioShock, the player is explicitly told through the radio that shooting a lightning bolt while enemies are standing in water is more effective.

Yet this didn't need to be explicitly told to the player. Seeing as how the entire city of Rapture is underwater, there is probably going to be a part early on in the game where the player accidentally shocks an enemy while he's standing in some form of water. There is no need to bludgeon players with the information. This is accessibility that caters several steps too far and allows no room for players to delve and explore the space for himself.

In another example in the same game, the player acquires a Pyrokinetic power and then is instantly instructed to burn an oil slick to destroy a group of enemies. He is explicitly told via a message from a person to burn an oil slick and watch the interactions between fire and flammable objects.

This goes a couple of steps too far in the information department. Players are simply not that stupid. If the interaction is not strictly necessary for advancing in the game, then they do not need to be bludgeoned over the head with information about interactions that they could have discovered on their own. (A much richer experience)

A much subtler method can be found in the platforming Metroid series, where, upon acquiring a new powerup, the player is immediately thrust into a series of situations where he must use the powerup. After Samus acquires super-missiles, she is instantly locked into a room with a large green door that is seemingly invulnerable to all her other weapons. In this manner, the player makes the association on his own, without having his/her intelligence insulted.

It goes to show in the excellent design of this game, that the room immediately after the green door room, is filled with all sorts of nasty armored monsters the player has encountered before, but become very easy once they have been swatted away with a burst of super missiles, thus letting the player draw his own conclusions about how best to use the missiles.

From CCG to RPG: Brainstorming... Part 1!

2008-01-31T05:43:00.000-08:00

Note: This is a random and convoluted article that requires both an understanding of collectible card games, specifically Magic: The Gathering and conventional online RPG's.

One of my most major desires is to experienced a skill system in an RPG that is complex and customizable to me. I am a Johnny/Spike, which means I like to win (Spike) and I like to find interactions and explore dynamics so that I can express my creativity through the system (Johny.)

One thing I've noticed is that Collectible Card Games speak to the imagination of us all. If only there was a way to take gaming card concepts and have a RPG skill system that would capture it...
...so you know what, I'm going to try. I'll take each mechanic I can think of and turn it into a skill that you might find in an online massive multiplayer RPG.

1. CCG - Kindle: "Deal 2 + X damage to target creature or player, where X is the amount of cards named Kindle in the graveyard."

What is a graveyard in an MMORPG? A Graveyard in the CCG represents a list of spells cast and a list of spells that have no effect anymore. Therefore, the easiest way to think about it is that the graveyard is a way of keeping track of spell history. Therefore...

RPG - Kindle: Deals 2 flame damage to a target. You gain 1 bonus damage to every Kindle spell cast until you exit combat. This bonus stacks up to X times.

Fairly straightfoward, I think. Each time you cast Kindle, your Kindle spells are more awesome until you finally kill the thing you were trying to kill. It doesn't capture the interaction of when other players cast Kindle, thus boosting your own Kindle. We could do this by changing the spell slightly.

RPG - Kindle 2: Deals 2 damage to a target. Then, each creature or player within 30 meters is afflicted with 'Scorched' status which increases damage they receive from Kindle by 1. This effect lasts until end of combat.

This isn't quite as elegant as the previous incarnation, but it does capture more of the original interaction.

2. CCG Discard Spell - Target Opponent discards two cards (at random)

What is a card in the MMORPG sense? It is something like a skill or ability. Therefore, the most elegant way I can turn this is...

RPG Discard Spell - The next two skills that the target attempts to start using become disabled for 30 seconds. (Or, two random skills from the target become disabled for 30 seconds.)

While at first glance, this seems a little weird, I think it captures the feeling of discard pretty well. There's some timing interactions to this that could be bad, but on the whole, it captures the feeling of discard in a way that I need for the next interaction..

3. CCG Madness - When this card is discarded, you may play it for madness cost instead.

See where I was going?

RPG Madness - If this skill is disabled, you may still use this skill except that its cost is now its Madness cost instead. You may only use this ability once for each the time the skill is disabled.

Given better templating, I'm sure it would sound nice and even.

4. Flashback - You may play this card from your graveyard for its Flashback cost. If you do, remove it from the game.

Nice. What's worse than having a spell in the graveyard? It not being in the game at all. What's a game in RPG terms? One combat. What does it mean for something to not be in the game? Not being relevant to combat ever, any longer.

RPG Flashback - You may play this skill while it is temporarily disabled or cooling down for its Flashback cost. If you do so, the skill becomes permanently disabled until end of combat.

The Setup: RPG-style.

2008-01-29T00:46:00.001-08:00

This article is a spiritual successor to this one.

I talked about the setup in the previous article, which is when a little bit of work allows you to create some very cool interactions in the future without any previous work. Let's start by drawing obvious crossovers from the CCG world into our RPG world.

Just for reference, the card was a card named 'Arcane Blast.'

Arcane Blast deals 1 arcane damage to each opposing ally or player. Draw a card for each damage dealt this way.

1. Keying off Keywords: "Deal ARCANE damage..."

From the card, we can see that we are able to reference the type of damage on the card. This is easily translated in RPG terms and has been done so for many years. The idea of damage 'types'.

For example, instead of having a skill do damage, have it do fire damage. Then we can create things like: Resistance to fire damage or Weakness to fire damage.

So a monster could take more damage from fire or less damage from fire. This is a fairly obvious change.

The second thing that we noticed, was that now we could boost the damage of the skill without mentioning the skill directly. Then, we can create things like: Bonus to all fire damage dealt, or Double all fire damage.

So our fire mage could learn some passive that could increase his damage dealt, or multiply it by a factor of two or something.

Thirdly, we realized we can create things that can trigger off the type of damage. Then, we can create effects like: Chance to set target on fire or Dispelled when hit by fire.

So our fire mage could learn a skill that could set his target on fire if he hits him with fire damage, sort of a burning effect added onto all his fire skills. Or suppose that our fire mage has encountered an evil tree monster, protected by thick layers of bark. Then we could make the protective layers of wood burn away when hit by fire damage, making the tree much weaker.

Each of these interactions would force the player to reconsider what fire damage actually means, whether or not fire damage is an appropriate response to what he is doing, and what other skills/effects can interact with his given mode of damage.

2. Area of Effect: Multiple Targets, "Deal Damage to EACH ally / player..."

In the Card World, we can let a card affect multiple targets. In the RPG world, this becomes the notion of 'Area of Effect.' We can increase the complexity of interaction by specifying what kind of Area of Effect interaction the spell can have.

For example, the most generic effect is Spherical. The damage is spread out among a sphere, like an explosion. This is the most commonly seen area of effect spell and increases complexity by encouraging the player to bunch together groups of monsters. Our fire mage would like to see tight packs of monsters.

An interesting twist on the Spherical Area of Effect is the Point-Blank Spherical Area of Effect. This is the type of Area of Effect spell that is High Risk / High Reward, as it rewards the fire mage for being at the center of all the monsters.

However, the RPG world has a great deal more targeting shapes than the real world. Consider the wide multitude of area of effects:

Piercing (A straight line, like a bullet that goes through people)
Conical (A cone extending outwards from the caster, like a cone of flame)
Chaining (Bouncing from monster to monster, like electricity or chain lightning)
Spherical (Extending radially outward from the initial point, like a fireball)
Spiraling (Imagine a Spiral slowly spinning outwards)
Wave (Everything in front of me, like a tidal wave)
Random X (Randomly hitting X targets. Imagine a chaotic lightning storm)

These interactions force the player to think about what time he attempts the spell, as well as what position him and the monsters are at. They reward the player for being in the right place at the right time, or maneuvering the situation to be just right.

3. Triggered Effect: "Draw a card for each damage dealt."

This type of effect generally doesn't translate well into the RPG world's flavor. The notion of a 'card' does not have an clear analogy in most RPG worlds.

What is important however, is that the spell or ability itself is attempting to reward the player for maximizing a specific behavior, in this case: Damage. Translated as literally as possible, this would be a spell that reads something like follows:

Fiery Explosion
Costs 20 Mana to Use:
'Deals 1 damage to all enemies in a 30 foot radius. You gain 2 mana for every damage you deal.

This spell would be somewhat interesting in a game. It would be a spell that is only usable when there are large hordes of monsters. It scales extremely well to handling a large amount of monsters, as it costs the fire mage essentially nothing to cast. However, if there were very few monsters, the spells effects would be drastically reduced.

However, imagine the damage boosting interactions that was previously mentioned. This spell would also be extremely cheap to use if our fire mage could somehow double his damage. It would also be extremely cheap to use if our fire mage hits something that is weak to fire. If our opponent was somehow able to magically shield himself, preventing the damage, then our fire mage would be unable to regain mana.

Additionally, if our fire mage was careless and missed the spell, it would cost him a lot more mana than if he had only hit a few targets.

All these interactions come from rewarding the player additionally for something he wants to do anyway. The fire mage obviously wants to deal damage. Then, if we add an additional trigger based on what the fire mage already wants to do, it adds a layer of interactivity as the player seeks to maximize the benefit of that trigger.

4. Risk / Reward and Target Limitations: "Deal damage to each opposing allies and player."

Recall that the card restricted you to damaging opposing characters. In most RPG's generally you do not want the player to have the ability to damage allies. Normally, that would be that. If we let players hurt players who are supposed to be their friends, no end of trouble could happen.

However, if you think about it, dealing damage to your own creatures in a card game essentially means hurting yourself, not other friendly people. Thus, the analogy we draw from this is the self-harming spell.

For example, we could have our fire mage cast a Fiery Explosion so deadly, that it also incinerates him as well as the entire room of monsters. This then poses a question to the fire mage: Can he survive his own spell? Will it be effective enough to ensure his survival? Is there something he can do to mitigate or nullify the damage to himself, making the spell one-sided?

Additionally, by letting spells be able to target the caster itself, brings up more interesting interactions. For example, the fire mage might think twice about doubling his fire damage through some ability because this would mean that his Fiery Explosion would ALSO deal double the damage to him!

These ask the player if he would like to trade security for a powerful effect. How close to destruction do you wish to walk? Can you handle a momentary set-back in exchange for a great effect?

5. Putting it all together.

So compare....

Magic Bolt
Cost 20 mana to use
"Deals 1 damage to targeted monster."

...Boring.

Fiery Explosion
Costs 20 mana to use:
"Deals 1 fire damage to the caster and monsters within a 30 foot radius. Gain 2 mana for each damage dealt this way."

This is a spell that can be boosted or reduced by abilities that care about fire damage. But he needs to be careful because it also hurts him. However, if it hurts him more, the spell will cost less, as he will have dealt damage to himself and gained mana back. Addi tonally, the spells gets maximum benefit when the caster is surrounded by enemies because of the type of area of effect it is. This entails more risk as to get maximum benefit, he puts himself in a dangerous location. However, he is rewarded with an essentially free spell, if he puts himself through all the trouble.

Phew. All those things to think about with a single spell made from a single card! Imagine what you could do with all the other examples out there in the world. All those interactions are because the spell thought a little in advance and set up interesting interactions down the line.

Adding Complexity: The Setup

2008-01-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

There is a formula for writing in which authors pen in character or plot events that they themselves don't know how to end. They leave loose threads dangling in the hopes that it will be useful there. How many ominous shadows have you counted in your favorite TV-shows, only to have them be explained away simply or never mentioned again? How many dangling plot threads seem to be hanging off, never explained? Now how many of those ominous shadows or mysterious threads came back to grand effect, making the entire affair seem like a brilliantly orchestrated concerto?

This is a simple technique in which I will call 'the setup.' It is a method of opening up the complexity with a tiny bit of extra work at the outset.

Take this card from the World of Warcraft trading card game:

Arcane Blast deals one arcane damage to each opposing ally and player. Draw a card for each damage dealt this way.

The first part of this ability is a generic ability that anyone could think of. Hit someone for one point of damage. Then, you draw a card to replace the card you just used. However, compare that ability to this one:

Lunge deals one damage to an ally or player. Draw a card.

In a vacuum, Arcane Blast and Fire Bolt do the exact same thing. They both do a single point of damage to the opposing player and allow the user to draw a card. However, games are not played in a vacuum.

There are four key differences between the two cards. One is obvious, the other three, far less so.

1) Mutiplicative Effects: Area of Effect

The first obvious difference is that Arcane Blast deals one point of damage to every opposing ally. This makes the spell an Area of Effect spell. However, note that you draw a card for each point of damage you do, thus, not only is it better to hit multiple enemies with the Arcane Blast, it lets you draw a card for each damage dealt, significantly increasing the reward if there is more than one target to hit.

This kind of setup asks the question: Should I wait or should I apply the effect now? Maybe there will be greater payoff later.

2) Additional Clauses: Negation or Boosting

Consider if your opponent has the following effect:

Negation: Prevent all damage that would be dealt from the next source that would deal damage.

Now playing Arcane Blast becomes a little more tricky. In order for you to draw a card with Arcane Blast, you must *deal* damage first. The little "setup" clause enabled a deeper interaction with other effects in the game. Will you play some other card first to absorb the negation? Will you simply wait the shield out before blasting him with Arcane Magics?

Even better, if my opponent attempts to cast Arcane Blast against me, in the hopes of drawing a card, if I can somehow prevent that damage with a shield, I will prevent that player from drawing a card. Arcane Blast as a card also creates more interesting choices for your opponent as well as the player playing Arcane Blast.

This kind of setup asks the question: Is there some sort of interaction can happen *at the moment* to boost or negate my move?

3) Keyworded Damage Types: Arcane

Alternatively, consider if your opponent has the following effect:

Weak to Arcane: Takes double damage from Arcane Sources.

Because the damage type was keyworded, it was able to be referenced by other sources. This is a fairly intuitive concept that is very easy to miss. The ability to reference damage types allows for crazy interactions later on down the line. For example, one could now create this card:

Reckless Arcane: Whenever you deal damage with an arcane source, double that damage and you lose 3 life.

Note that casting Arcane Blast with this card active will most likely kill you. But then, you'd also double the amount of cards you draw and the amount of damage you deal. Trade-offs and choices...

This kind of setup asks the question: What kind of scenario will I be in? What kind of planning and synergy can I add to boost my effects.

In all fairness, this kind of effect could be done with Lunge, it's not hard to imagine a card like:

Weakness to Damage: This card takes twice as much damage from all sources.

But on the other hand, this kind of card is generic and all too often involves too many uncontrolled interactions. Additionally, it also feels kind of bland and overdone on the complexity side. It is also harder to justify from the perspective of flavor as, what exactly is a weakness to damage? If he was weak to damage, wouldn't he just have lower health? Weakness to Arcane fits better and 'feels' more right.

4) Targeting Restrictions: Limiting or Expanding Choices

Arcane Blast is actually *less* interactive in one regard, than Lunge. It has the choice of limiting your targets to Opposing ones. Arcane Blast doesn't actually let you kill off friendly allies.

Although, most of the time this is very desirable, it is interesting to note that by making the card more user-friendly, we have also limited the interactivity of it somewhat. A quick example should illustrate the point well enough:

Let's say I have just cast Arcane Blast upon my opponent's character while he has a character with one hit point. If the opponent has lunge, he has the option of destroying his *own* character with lunge before my Arcane Blast hits him, by responding to my Arcane Blast with his Lunge. He can do that because Lunge allows you to hit anyone, not just opposing allies. Since his character dies before I did damage to it with Arcane Blast, I don't draw a card for damaging him.

A simple setup can inspire a lot more interactions and complexity. Later on, I'll discuss my own musings for transporting this mechanic into other game types and take it out of the context of card games.

Exponential Math and Games.

2008-01-17T01:33:00.000-08:00

Note: This post is a spiritual follow-up to an earlier post, which can be found here.

Exponentials are hard to understand.

Most of us understand instinctively how big 100 is compared to 10. If I gave you 10 dollars a week for a year, you'd have a fairly decent grasp of how much money you'd have at the end of the time period. 10 x 52 = 520.

What if I gave you a choice? I could give you 10 dollars a week for a year or instead, I would start by giving you a dollar each week, and I would give you a 10% raise every week for a year, how would you respond? On the one hand, 520 dollars is relatively easy to understand. But starting with one dollar and going 10% bigger every week.. that seems rather small compared to 520 dollars, no? I mean, how big could that dollar get?

Fast forward to 51 weeks from now, and realize that you would get 142 dollars on the 52nd week. In total you'd rake up about... 2000 dollars for the last 4 months alone. Raise your hands if you guessed anywhere near that range.

Some of us have some grasp that exponentials tend to grow out of hand really fast, but the human mind tends to be really bad at grasping exactly how much those exponentials will be. We tend to dramatically overshoot or undershoot our guesses. Part of it is due to the complex and compound math involved but there's some evidence to suggest that it is hard-wired into our systems. Human beings tend to live for the immediate moment and look towards the future in a linear fashion.

So, what does this have to do with games? It has to do with the difficulties in grasping what is truly effective at first glance. It has to do with balance and the interplays between choices in games.

Qualitative Example: Contra

If you have ever played a little gem called Contra, perhaps you've noticed a slight discrepancy in the weapon power-up selection. It has to do with a weapon dearly beloved and known as 'Spread' or 'Shotgun.'

For those of you unfamiliar with the Contra series, imagine you have a tiny little pistol that can shoot one bullet a second.

One bullet a second seems reasonable.

Now, we could improve your gun in several ways. We could make the pistol fire more powerful shots, like say, a flaming shot. Or we could make your pistol fire faster and fire many bullets at a time.

One powerful fireball a second seems reasonable.
Several bullets a second also seems reasonable.

In practice, the machine gun is somewhat more effective than the fireball weapon simply because increasing the Rate of Fire on a gun is far more effective as the shots can hit multiple targets and sometimes a fireball is simply overkill on a small enemy (like a chicken.) The discrepancy isn't very high, however, as the fireball's sheer stopping power and 'fire and forget' mentality makes up for the versatility and ease of use of the machine-gun.

Now, let us examine the 'Spread' or 'Shot' gun. This is meant to be a slightly rarer power-up than the machine gun or fireball power ups. So, maybe we can make it a little more powerful. But not too much.

The 'Spread' gives you the ability to shoot out three balls every half a second. These balls are pitched at an angle to give it a wide arc of attack. The Spread gun can't really attack a single enemy since the balls spread out in an arc, and so it is less powerful than a machine-gun at long range and somewhat more powerful than the flame-thrower at close range. These balls are slightly bigger and stronger than the machine gun shots, but nowhere near as powerful as the flame shot.

This seems like a reasonable power up, in comparison with the machine gun and the flame shot weapon, no? It fires slightly more shots, slightly faster, for slightly more damage and is slightly safer. This seems on far with the ridiculous firing rate of the machine gun or the superb damage of the flame thrower.

However, in practice, any Contra player would tell you that the 'Spread' gun is the weapon of the game. This is in part due to the fact that although the 'Spread' guns *damage* is about equivalent to the flame thrower or the machine gun (In reality, the spread gun is slightly less damaging than either of the two) ; the fact that the spread guns *arc* gives the player far more survivability. It also shoots faster than the flame shot with about the same power as the flame-shot up close if all 3 shots connect.

What gives? Each individual ball of the 'Spread' is far weaker than a single fire shot. The 'Spread' gun fires slower than the machine gun which literally is an unending hailstorm of bullets. The 'Spread' guns marginally safer attack angle doesn't seem to make it *so* much more powerful than the other two. What gives?

It is again, the power of exponential math.

The Spread Gun is faster than your regular gun.
The Spread Gun has slightly more powerful bullets.
The Spread Gun shoots more bullets at once.
The Spread Gun lets the player survive longer by not having to be in the direct path of fire.

The combination of all four gives the final weapon a dramatically increased value in relation to everything else. Imagine each bonus as a numerical value.

The machine gun would increase your rate of fire 5 to 7 times. This would mean that roughly speaking, it is 5 to 7 times better than your old gun.

The flame shot increases your damage 6 or 7 times over. This would mean that roughly speaking, it is 6 or 7 times better than your old gun.

Let us perform a very very rough analysis of the spread gun's benefits, however.

The Spread gun only doubles your rate of fire. (2x) However, it lets you shoot 3 balls at a time (3x, Running Total: 2x * 3x = 6x). It can't hit a single target with all three balls which costs it some points. Usually, you'll only be able to land 2 out of 3 balls on a target. However, the third ball might actually hit something else as a nice bonus. (2/3 x, Running Total: 2x * 3x * 2/3x = 4x) However, these pellets are also stronger than your regular gun's pellets, they are about twice as strong (2x, Running Total: 2x * 3x * 2/3x *2x = 8x). And the 'Spread' gun lets you survive a lot longer against bosses by not putting you in the direct line of fire, maybe even twice as long. (2x? , Running Total: 2x, * 3x, * 2/3x * 2x * 2x? = 16x?)

And so we have a gun that, roughly speaking, is about a hojillion times better than your pellet gun and 3 to 4 times better than the machine gun. The cumulative effect of small incremental bonuses (slightly faster speed, slightly more damaging shots, slightly more shots) gives the final effect a huge boost in the end.

Linear vs. Exponential: MMORPG's

What is more effective in an online MMORPG to be the best player? Raising your attack speed? Raising your chance to hit? Raising your chance to dodge attacks? Raising your chance to block? Raising your raw damage potential? Raising your chance to critically hit?

Let's say I could choose to choose to improve 3 attributes by 100% -or- two attributes by 150% -or- one attribute by 300%.

So I could double 3 things, or 2.5 x two things, or quadruple one thing.

On the surface, this seems fairly intuitive and straightforward.

However, in practice, this is what happens.

If someone swings twice as fast, and hits twice as often and hits twice as hard, he will be doing eight times the damage. He will not be doing (100% + 100% + 100% + 100% = 400%) damage, he will instead be doing 800% damage.

If instead he simply chose to quadruple his damage, he would only be doing 4 times as much damage.

What if we could distribute things farther? What if we could improve 6 attributes by 50%.

So I could swing 1.5 times as fast, hit 1.5 times as often, hit 1.5 times harder, hit 1.5 times critically, dodge 1.5 times as much, take 1.5 as many hits. I would be twelve times as effective as someone else on average.

This is the insane power of exponentials, something that's not quite easily grasped. The difference between offering the player a choice of doing a few more points of damage, and attacking slightly faster, realize the difference between a small linear boost and an exponential percent based boost. If balance is your goal, then you need to carefully consider how different exponential gains will produce dramatic increases in power that need to be accounted for.

So the next time someone offers you to double your damage or double your speed, instead ask for 50% more damage and 50% more speed. This will give you a net increase of 25% over merely doubling one or the other.

Grinding: The Grindinging, Part 2: The Action Audience

2007-11-18T02:27:00.000-08:00

Notes: Ahead are hypothetical untested claims about improving MMORPG's for an action audience. You may also need to understand how the "series of tubes" works (the internet).

1. WASD Movement.

For a audience who likes action games, there is nothing more mind-numbingly boring then moving with clicking the mouse. We're used to moving with a button, not telling our character where to go.

That's the realm of those guys who like those weird CRPG's.

If it's such a good idea, why don't more people do it?

Client-Server synchronization is slightly harder for WASD movement to keep track of. Essentially, to have smooth WASD movement, the server has to assume certain things about the position of the player. The players position is less of an exact point, and more of a diffused cloud.

You see, we are so used to being able to move swiftly as human beings, that the slightest non-responsiveness feels clunky. WASD must be a client-side thing, with the server attempting to synchronize as much as possible.

2. Left click to swing your weapon / fire your gun.

None of this auto-attack stuff. If I swing and it hits something on my screen, I want that to be counted as an attempt to attack something. Every click of a button should correspond to an action that my character attempts to perform.

The problem with auto-attack and the like, is the abstraction. It removes me from the game. I realize that MMORPG's are supposed to be slower paced and more thought oriented, but there's no reason to have the pace be several thousand times slower than normal.

Emergent Gameplay: As soon as I have to aim at my opponent in order to target him, player opponents have to attempt to dodge my targets in order to avoid taking damage.

3. Mouse-Aim to target opponents (None of this Tab-Selection / Auto-targetting)

Let player aim matter. If I am casting a fireball, I want to cast it at what I am actually looking at. This brings an element of skill into the game, where aiming and dodging matters. When two players circle each other in battle, movement matters.

This also brings about emergent game-play. If the monsters were flying, or could move and skitter very fast, then the monsters would effectively dodge my shots if I targeted the wrong spot. This also leads to very natural obstructions and positioning requirements on the player. To target correctly, the player must avoid natural obstacles and the obstruction of other monsters with ranged attacks.

4. Some form of Defensive Maneuver or Active Dodging. (We'll accept that we can't dodge every hit, but at least make our dodging attempts *do* something)

A 'block' button would be nice that gives us some sort of defensive move. Most action games have a defensive reaction concept that gives you time to do something once you see that something bad will about happen. I admit it's unreasonable to expect that we can dodge every attack in an MMORPG battle sense, but at least let my dodge attempts have an effect of the gameplay.

A simple bonus to avoiding ranged attacks while moving would be good. A larger bonus to avoiding attacks while 'dashing' would be great. A block button that reduces damage taken by some percent while blocking would be terrific.

5. AI that does something other than hit us repeatedly or use generic damage skill #37. Or perhaps having fewer mobs and have them be more challenging.

For example, AI that dodges intelligently might be nice. Or perhaps AI that refuse to be herded into tight little packs to be AoE'ed. I admit, this is quite a strain on the server and could be quite computationally expensive to execute and synchronize.

On the other hand, a monster that keeps you on your toes by intelligently dodging (that has an effect) and forcing you to pay attention to your fight rather than your skill rotation might also be a welcome change of pace.

7. Knockback / Altering the Position of enemies.

This is born out of the desire to be able to use our surroundings to our advantage. Knocking the enemy into deadly areas or out of the way of our friends is the kind of positional advantage that makes each potential fight different and engaging.

8. Being able to take cover to avoid enemy fire, Crouching.

This is a natural follow up to #3. If we have to aim at opponents to target them, they should also be unable to hit us when we take cover behind natural obstacles. The most natural form of defensive cover is the crouch.

9. Greater rewards for harder difficulties.

A game is most fun when the enemy you face is roughly as challenging or a little more challenging than enemies you can barely kill. That said, each player has a different skill level in this case. By having greater rewards for harder difficulties, you give an incentive for players to improve their skills and reward players who have great skills in your game, allowing them to skip boring content in favor of ones that are more challenging to them.

Grinding: the.. Grindinging.

2007-11-17T03:14:00.000-08:00

Or hereby known as 'the black fathomless time sink into which all MMORPG's must dwell in.'

It occurs to me that I should probably start by explaining what the Grind is: MMORPG's are essentially large time-sinks with rewards separated out by individual requirements, such as experience costs, number of monsters defeated, or number of menial tasks performed.

For each arbitrary goal, the player is rewarded with some increased ability or the ability to perform some new action in the game, ensuring the player spends a pre-set amount of time in the game world exploring some aspect of it to ensure he takes the time to appreciate that portion of the world or does not prematurely exhaust his interest in the game.

However, one can imagine that for a game, the amount of content is necessarily limited. Therefore, the only way to stretch gaming hours is to enforce restrictions on pacing to such a degree that advancement takes an exponential increase in magnitude or risk the danger of the player burning through the game too fast. (And thus, not remaining committed to the game.)

The grind can be many things, but generally equates to the repetition of a certain amount of actions for a long duration of time for the sole purpose of advancement.

The fundamental problem with grinding is...

It isn't fun. It's work. No one ever wants to grind. They want the results from grinding. Much in the same way that a lot of people don't want to work, but getting paid possibly overrides their desire to not work.

I've heard of a lot of solutions to grinding, make it less extreme, have 'bonus xp' days, make it quest/story oriented... etc.

Example One: Fix the 'Grind' by reducing the amount of experience needed to level.

Okay, here's the problem. The amount of experience you need to advance in most games follows an exponential curve. That is, the amount of time invested will always grow way beyond control in relatively few levels.

For example:

Let's say that each level, you need to slay a mere 10% more monsters than you did at the previous level to level.

So at level 1, if you need to slay 10 monsters, at level 2, you need to slay 11.

At level 20, you need to slay 67 monsters.
At level 40, you need to slay 452 monsters.
At level 60, you will now need to slay 3,400 monsters.

To go from level 60 to 61, requires three hundred and forty times the investment as to go from level 1 to 2.

Anything involving exponential growth balloons quite rapidly, no matter how gently the growth starts at first, the compound effects soon make the requirements enormous.

But, surely that's expected! The more you progress, the more time you need to invest. You can't expect to go from master to grandmaster in the same time you go from novice to apprentice! That would remove all the thrill of accomplishment from the game.

Ah, yes. Of course. It's somehow 'justified' that such enormous time investments be part of the game. Even if that were the case, you have to consider the actual return on time spent. Let's say I paid you a thousand dollars every time you leveled. This will represent the 'thrill of accomplishment.'

So going from level 1 to 2, you made 100 dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 20 to 21, you made roughly 15 dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 40 to 41, you made roughly 2 and a half dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 60 to 61, you made roughly 33 cents per monster you slew.

The rewards don't match the time invested.

Ah! But that's unfair! The rush of going from level 60 to 61 is far greater than going from level 1 to 2.

That is absolutely accurate.

Now ask yourself this, does it feel exponentially greater to go from level 60 to 61, than level 1 to 2?

Would you feel three hundred times more satisfied going from level 60 to 61 than level 1 to 2?

No, chances are, most people feel about the same level of happiness or even less. Going from level 1 to 2 in a new game is a novel experience. Going from level 60 to 61, we'll have the 'been there, done that' scenario where we've seen it all and all we want is some new skill, piece of equipment or a minor increase on the numbers we see on screen.

Example Two: Supplementing the Grind with alternative forms of experience.

This is an idea that most often takes the form of Quests.

Unfortunately, the most tried and true forms of quests are (Now, we can all say it together..)
Kill X monsters... Which.. is exactly the same as above.

And then comes the second one... which is...
Deliver package X to guy Y... Which involves lots of tedious travel.

The main problem with these kinds of Quests, is that it's overdone, and essentially replaces the main grinding of the game with an entirely new beast: The Quest Grind, where all grinding is forsaken to do even more mind numbingly boring quests. Kill 30 rabid squirrel badger weasel... orcs.

And hot on the heels of these quests are: Repeatable Quest Grinding!

Which makes sure players always have a quest to do by simply giving them the same quest to do over and over again... but make sure they have to do it more and more...

...which just makes it grinding again... doesn't it?

How could you ever argue that quests are bad? Would you really prefer pure grinding?

Nay! You misunderstand my point, fair citizen.

It is simply that most Quests are a different form of grinding. It does nothing to solve the main problem of the grind, it simply presents it in an alternative light. Instead of slaying 3400 monsters to get to your next level, you simply have to slay 30 of them, 10 times over.

It has some benefits: You achieve a mini-rush of satisfaction from completing the quests.

It has some costs: The amount of work required to implement quests could be quite costly to the game.

Cutting the grind up into little mini boxes and wrapping them in bow ties, doesn't actually change the grind in some dramatic way.

That and the effort of implementing a sustainable quest grind is literally massive. Think of how many quests you would have to implement to ensure that the player never runs out of quests to do and hits your behemoth grind... masked by the pretty quests that have kept him on his merry way.

So then what do you propose, if you think these are such 'bad' ideas?

I never said they were bad. They just don't change the innate nature of the problem.

Grinding isn't fun. There is too much time involvement for too little reward.

Then the obvious solution? Make the grind fun. Or at the very least, make the grind interesting.

Okay. Then how?

It really depends on who your target audience is... (to be continued..)

N-Modal Gameplay

2007-11-14T03:14:00.000-08:00

Note: RPG talk up ahead.

Scenario One: Single Mode

Let's say that you have a spell called 'Heal.'
Once, every 30 seconds, you can heal someone.

You fight a monster, what do you do?

Obviously: You hit him, and once, every 30 seconds, you heal yourself.

Scenario Two: Single Bi-Modal Spell.

Now take the same spell, but give it the option to harm *or* heal. So now we have a spell called 'Harm or Heal.'
Once, every 30 seconds, you can heal someone, or harm someone, but not both.

Now you fight a monster, what do you do?
Do you heal yourself? Or do you harm him and hope he dies before he kills you?

Obviously: You harm him until you're almost dead and you heal yourself.

Scenario Three: Single Bi-Modal Spell + Single Mode Spell.

Now let us add a new spell to your list of spells. Let's call this one 'Ice.'
You can, once every 10 seconds, slow the movement of someone for 10 seconds and do a little damage.

Now you fight a monster, what do you do?

You could:

Slow down the monster's movement continually, and harm him with your spells, while staying out of the monster's attack range.

-Or-

If we're about to die, we can slow down the monster's movement continually, and heal yourself with your spell before going back to hit the monster some more.

Scenario Four: Two Bi-modal spells.

Now let's add something new to our 'Ice' spell. Let's say that instead of slowing the monster down, it can be used to block the next hit the monster does to us, giving us an 'Ice shield', or it can be used to attack the monster

Now we could:

Stay in combat with the monster forever, using our ice shield to negate damage and our heal spell to heal damage.
Stay in combat with the monster, using our ice shield to damage the monster and our harm skill to damage the monster.
Slow the monster down and use our harm skill to damage the monster, like before.
Slow the monster down and heal ourselves if we are about to die.

Scenario Five: 4 Individual Spells

However, if we had these 4 individual spells: Harm, Heal, Shield, Slow...
we would have a very different game plan.

It is true that we could do all of the options above, but the *optimal* solution would be:

Shield ourselves, and harm/slow the monster we're fighting. If we get low on health, Shield, Slow, run away and Heal.

There are no decisions to be made when we have all 4 spells. We don't have trade-offs. There are no difficult decisions to make. There will be no difference between individual play-styles. There will only be optimal players and non-optimal players.

The result -- Restrictions breed awesomeness.

The restriction of only being able to use one of two modes for your spells every once in a while gives you the freedom to choose a style of combat you like. If you had all the spells available to you, you do have the choice of choosing a style of combat you like, except that choice would be either optimal or obviously suboptimal.

If the optimal solution isn't clear, or is balanced between the modes, then players have the ability to express themselves and it creates depth in skill usage. Knowing what skills to use when and knowing how it will constrain you later adds skill into the game.

One of the most important things in gaming life...

2007-11-09T03:07:00.001-08:00

...is death.

No, I'm serious.

Death is the ultimate consequence. The 'Game Over.' The point at which you understand that you have fundamentally failed in what you have set out to accomplish.

It can also be hilarious...
...or bitter...
...possibly frustrating...
...or infuriating...
...or nothing at all.

If Death in the game itself has no meaning, then defeat has no meaning and subsequently, the game loses meaning. Imagine space invaders without the penalty of death. There is no reward for doing well. No penalty for doing poorly. No incentive to improve. Pac-man without ghosts or infinite lives becomes a chore in dot-eating and maze following.

Death gives us those 'I can't believe I just did that' moments.
Death gives us the 'I can't believe they made a boss that ridiculous' moments.
Death gives us the momentary break away from monotony where we step back and evaluate our performance.

The design of death in games then.. should be taken seriously. Let's look at one extreme.

Nothing happened. It was all a dream. Continue play as normal.

Most recent offender: Bioshock

Bioshock is a descendant of System Shock, a game in which you wake up alone, in a hellish nightmare scenario, where roughly 17,000 things are trying to bash your brains in while apologizing for doing so. You might imagine that this makes playing System Shock, in the dark, at night, alone, with full environmental audio, the easiest way to be found dead the following morning from terror-induced panic attacks.

Bioshock is roughly fifteen thousand times less scary than that. Pretend that you were alone. In an abandoned city. Filled with ghoulish minions of what used to be human beings. Dark. Terrifying. The only other human contact is through remote radio. And everywhere you can observe what used to be scraps of humanity and the decay of it all.

With only your wits and your guns to survive.

Terrifying, no? Except for the tiny fact that you're immortal.

IMMORTAL.

Every time you die, you pop-out of the neat little 'Ressurect-o-matic' locating conveniently every 15 feet. Free of charge. Slightly dis-oriented perhaps, but all in all, well jolly good and well rested.

...and not that scary at all. When death becomes a minor inconvenience, things fail to be scary. Things fail to be relevant.

You're Dead. Game Over. Restart?

Biggest Offender: Almost every game on the NES? Raiden / Ikaruga / Tohou 'Perfect Shooter' games.
To a lesser extent: 'Punish me' games, a la, Ninja Gaiden. Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, MMORPG's that penalize your exp when you die.

Then there's the flip side of the equation. If Death means you essentially restart from ground zero, or the first level, or perhaps at the beginning of the level you were on several hours ago because you kept dying to that ONE boss.

Death, in the first case, cost you nothing, and was essentially made gameplay irrelevant because there was no penalty or incentive for how well you did.

Death, in this case, costs you everything, and thus makes every single move relevant. Almost frustratingly relevant. We play games to have fun. While some of us do enjoy the Zen like qualities of playing the perfect game of space invaders, I would wager that most Timmy players out there are not out play the perfect game, or have every move carefully scrutinized for errors.
The removal of all progress, forcing the player to restart entirely from scratch, also doesn't work because the time commitment required for playing the game is magnified to an enormous amount. No one but Spikes have the time involved to actually restart the game over from that far back. What's the point?

Making death cost you progress is essentially demanding that the player perform to a certain level. Games simply don't have the right to do that unless the player himself requests it. Some hardcore gamers do desire to be challenged into performing at high levels. However, Timmy players just want to play and Johnny players just want to experiment. There's no need to force them to perform 'perfect games.'

But what other kinds of death could there possibly be?

Better known as the 'sliding scale.' It would appear that most games nowadays go from 'Death is a minor inconvenience' to 'Death sets you back for a few hours' to 'Death drives you completely insane and makes you snap your controller in rage.'

How exactly does one make death relevant but not set you back for a few hours or penalize you for game-play time? It seems to be impossible, when you first look at it. It's a sliding scale, no? How could you not penalize the player at all and still have death be relevant?

One only has to look at team based FPS games to realize that this is simply untrue.

When Death does not equal Defeat

Suppose you are in a game where death has no penalty. You come back to life somewhere else. You lose nothing. You didn't get shunted an hour away from where you were. You can get back to where you died in seconds.

What did you lose? Seconds of time. A minor inconvenience.

And ridiculously important when those seconds are precious. In a team-based multi-player game, where the coordinated actions of a team are magnified by the efforts of individual players, not having a key player in place might cost the players the entire match. And having a player who constantly takes stupid risks and gets himself killed 90% of the time is simply not an effective teammate.

And it might even cost your team the win. The key in this case, is that your individual death does not affect you directly, but it does affect your chance of success. Your individual death might not cost you anything at all or it might cost you the entire game.

Death is still a set-back and a penalty in this case. However, it is almost entirely virtual. If your team was doing well, your death might cost you nothing. If your team was doing poorly, your death still costs you nothing.

But what if... what if your team needed you at that crucial moment? Or what if your teams were evenly matched?

Death, in this case, doesn't really feel horrible and yet still has tremendous importance on the game.

Death in the online world...

In the world of massively multi-player online role playing games, the only 'fair' negative impetus that one can deliver players is death. If they mess up, death. If they are in an improper area, death. If they do something incredibly stupid, death. (Or to a lesser degree, damage, which is essentially, the threat of death.)

If you don't want the players to do something, the kindest (and possibly only) way to do it is to kill them, or threaten to kill them by harming them a lot. (One can do other things, such as taking away experience or items and such but in an online rpg, this essentially means setting them back potentially hundreds of hours of progress... and possibly sending the player into abject depression or keyboard-snapping frustration.)

However, in these games, death is a negative impetus strictly because it costs you time (either travel time), experience (which is time spent playing the game), or penalizes you with some sort of penalty that says you can't play the game for a while. These penalties are designed to make deaths relevant. Death is always a bad thing.

How could we possibly make almost certain death something that the player would want to do?

Without it being horribly abused...

The Graphics, Part 3: No Free Lunch.

2007-10-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

How many things must go into a game for it to be a fun, enjoyable game?

I would like you to imagine a delicious golden flaky pie. Do you like apple pie? Okay, a slice of it is apple pie. Do you prefer peach pie? Okay, a slice of it is made of delicious peaches.

Do you want more apple pie? Okay, but that means the peach part slice has to be smaller. If you want more peach, then you have to make the apple part smaller. If you want some blueberry filling in there, then you gotta take some slices away from the peach and the apple. Want more crust on the outside? Then you have to have less filling.

You can't make the pie bigger.

For any game that's produced these days, they do have set budget. A time constraint. A fundamental limitations to how many resources they have. This is the size of their pie. They can't make their pie bigger. If you want prettier graphics, they need more artists. If you want shinier visual effects, they need more graphic programmers.

Bioshock had 2 or 3 dedicated programmers working on water effects, which kind of makes sense, seeing as how the entirety of the game took place under water.

So we have these pretty graphics. The high-flung visuals. The dramatic displays of absolutely stunning photo-realistic effects. And it's awesome to look at and feel.

But at what cost?

The more graphically stunning a game has to be, the less time there is to go into game-play. Or balance. Or design. Story. Direction. You can't reasonably expect to get a perfect game if you insist on having the pie consist of 95% graphics and 5% everything else. What could the game have been if you had 10% less graphics and 10% more focused on game-play, balance, bug testing, engine.

What is the cost of your graphics?

I've heard tales of graphical demands, inflated to such a scale, that if one were request say.. a model for a jeep in the game, that after all the artwork, texturing, rendering and animation, the Jeep would cost somewhere around 500,000 to a million dollars to be developed.

Hundreds of thousands in budget for a Jeep model. ONE JEEP.

And here's what happens:

I want to have player drive-able vehicles. Oh, but the artwork will take an enormous amount of time to perfect? And the animations will set us behind schedule and over budget? Oh well. Scratch that idea.

And the game now goes vehicle-less. Players can't drive vehicles. Oh well.

And that amazing, pre-rendered cut-scene? Well, that took so much money to produce, that we can't hire that many level designers.

And the game now goes down a few levels in scale. Instead of 18 levels, we can cut it down to 12.

Was that shiny lightning effect worth it? Will you even notice it six hours into the game?

What is the benefit of your graphics?

Can you be awed by the same laser gun the 60th time you fire it? Can you be awe'ed at the mean looking giant, when it's the 10,000th one you've slain?

Or would you rather be impressed by a stunningly designed level? A clever convoluted boss battle? A nice, balanced, game? How about monster A.I. that offers you a real challenge?

Was the subtle lightning arcs off the side of your gun worth the loss of a level? Maybe a boss fight? Is it worth it to give up some game-play balance? Or how about having your cinematic epic storyline being cut off?

But that's unfair! Why can't I have my gorgeous screenshots AND a great game?

Because the pie is always the same size. They don't have infinite budgets. They don't have infinite time. If you keep your expectations for gaming graphics to such ridiculous levels that they push all other content, you can feel free to do so. But at the same time, I believe you fundamentally lose the right to whine if the difficulty curve is a bit off, or the monster A.I. is a bit... shall we say... retarded.

They simply don't have the time to do all that in a finite amount of time.

But those huge companies have all the money in the world to throw at us. Look at how much they're charging! SIXTY DOLLARS A GAME! Surely I could have my awesome graphics and great AI and balance and...

Even if they had infinite sums of money, they have a finite amount of time. A year and half to develop the game when 90% of the time was spent on making it look pretty will still be a horrible game. Even if you had a quadrillion dollars to spend on a game, if you try to iron out all the game-play issues in the span of a month, that's still not enough time to iterate the gameplay to perfection.

The best case scenario? Delays.
The worst case scenario? A bad game.

That is BS. Those programmers are smart guys. And they could always hire more of them...

Even if they had infinite programmers, the system that you're playing on doesn't have infinite processing power. If you're going to make your XBox blow chunks trying to create photorealistic water, you lose the right to bitch that your controls are irresponsive, or that your camera isn't intelligent enough, or that your A.I. comrades in arms can't seem to hit a brick wall with a nuclear bomb.

It all takes processing power. And if 99% of the processing power is devoted to giving you a fully cinematic view, your AI will frankly suck as the best it can do is "Walk, Walk, Shoot!" It can't think that hard, otherwise your XBox will skip a frame, and you'll lose out on that AMAZING lighting effect that you've seen for the 37th time straight.

At the end of the day, why do we play games?

We play games because they are fun. We play games because they are challenging and engage us. We play game because they have masterfully told stories. And yes, we do play games because they are beautiful pieces of art that are dazzling to the eyes.

But everything has it's cost. For every model, beautiful light effect, dazzling texture or beautiful cinematic, just ask yourself...

If they didn't have to spend so much of their money and time on this artwork... what else could they have done? Would I have been able to play more levels? Have bigger, better boss fights? Could they have spent more time on balance? Could they have shipped the game without delaying it for months? Sound? Music?

Just ask yourself...

What could the game have been?

The Graphics, Part 2: The Purpose

2007-09-27T18:53:00.000-07:00

Now, before I start a horrible rant about how I feel graphics are overrated nowadays, there are very very good reasons for having a game with good graphics.

#1: Timmy wants to roll in Style. Timmy wants to feel awesome.

Timmy doesn't play the game because he's killing a bunch of abstract shapes. Timmy plays the game because he wants to be a ninja. You can't properly evoke the feeling of being an awesome ninja without looking like an awesome ninja with all the cool ninja duds. This doesn't mean you go and look up in the history books how ninjas historically looked. This doesn't mean authentic grass hats and patchwork peasant clothing. You want to evoke style, not historical accuracy. This also means that you don't go for photo-realism exactly.

Timmy doesn't want historical realism. Timmy wants to have the ninja experience he's picturing in his mind. Timmy wants to play what he feels is the ninja. It might be a cliche ninja. It might be a realistic ninja. The only qualification in the art is that it must be an awesome ninja. Totally unrealistic black armor, with sword bigger than he is? Who cares?

Awesomeness, the feeling, needs awesome art.

We play games to experience the feeling of being larger than life. Even the Nitty-Gritty war games portray a war, far more intense than the war, with bullets whizzing by and explosions that leave no mark. None of the boredom, none of watching horizons for hours. You can't do this without that feeling of awe that art can do. I mean, which one of us can ride a classic muscle car, or race a Formula One Racer?

None of us. And do we want them to look photo-realistic? Not neccessarily. We want them to look good. We want to feel good about racing these beauties. No faded paint and semi-reflective surfaces here.

#2: Spike needs to understand what is going on.

Art is an incredible communication device. For example, I could have you memorize a list of cards in a some trading card game, let's say.. Magic: The Gathering. For example:

Player A has 6 forests in play, 5 of them which are tapped.

He also has 3 creatures in play, a Shinen's Roar, a Humble Budoka, and a Wispy Moonrider.

His opponent has 5 untapped mountains in play, with 3 plains and a Kami of Fiery Roar, a Kami of life's Web, 2 Kabuto Moths, and a Red Devil.

And by the time you've finished reading this and trying to figure out who is winning... a minute or two would have passed.

...Or quite possibly, you could've looked at the picture and immediately understood the game state from the simple picture before you've even finished reading the first sentence.

Lots of cards on our side, a few cards on their side. A bunch of his cards are sideways, which means he can't use them. ALL of our cards are ready to smash face. All this in a glance. This is the amazing power of effectively formatted art. Colors, frames, icons and graphics all convey more information in a second, in a glance, than we could ever tell from reading lines and lines of text.

This is heavily important for Spikes. Spikes need to understand the game state very quickly. They need to figure out the game state as fast as possible to come up with their next move. No one wants to lose a game because some bit of information was unclear. Art and Graphics are a tremendous vehicle of information for Spikes.

Take it from a different angle...

Think of it this way, this time from a Massive Multi-player Online game perspective. I am level one. I see a huge brutish ogre that has a massive red aura. I probably won't attack him. If I see a bunny on the ground, I would probably think that's weaker than I am. The graphics convey the threat that a monster poses.

If the bunny somehow happens to be the vorpal bunny from Monty Python, and the huge brutish orc is actually some kind of hemophiliac coward, then even the best graphics won't save you from a Spike's wrath.

Graphics determine player expectations and a lot of that is because people treat artwork as a source of information. Notice how I made the bunny much smaller than the Ogre? Even that little resizing gives you the information that the bunny is a smaller, weaker threat compared to the two muscled brutes. If instead, you were treated to lovely O's for Ogres and b's for Bunnies in some sort of text-action game (I'm looking at you Rogue, Nethack.) You would not nearly get the depth of information that artwork would get you.

#3: Graphics allow people to express themselves.

Look at the advent of digital avatars. How many times have you found a ridiculous good hat in a game, put it on, and then promptly burned it because it was ridiculous looking? No? Oh well.

In this age where people are increasingly represented by avatars, having those avatars be customizable allows people to communicate who they are or what they think is cool. Look at Halo 3 customization which customizes individual armor pieces and compare that to what Massively Multiplayer Online games have already been doing with thousands of armor pieces in different colors, shapes and sizes.

Self-expression in games is as important as self-expression in the real world. Graphics help people achieve that goal. People can put more personal investment in a game if their virtual avatar resembles the ideal person that the character is envisioning in their mind.

I, personally, am a fan of any kind of sunglasses in a game. Although... I will occasionally wear a silly hat if the need fits.

The Graphics, Part 1: The History.

2007-09-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about art in games.

No, not like, whether games are art. But rather, the graphics of games.

Let's talk about.. whether graphics are good for games.

Hold on, put down the pitchfork. I'm not saying I want the old text adventure days back.

But with the rising costs of today's development, a major blockbuster game takes something like tens of millions of dollars to produce, must sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and a couple of years to produce. With the longer and longer development times, innovation is squelched for favor of stagnant copies...

I mean, it's a little hard to believe all this is worth it for the photo-realistic virtual tennis game I'm seeing. I had about a million times more fun playing Mario Tennis (with loveable, cartoony graphics) or Wii Sports (with.. shall we say.. rudimentary graphics) then I had playing 'Pro Super Awesome Tennis Supreme Champion with realistic commentary, skin tones, and character models.'

There's a cost to the demands of graphics. Let's see how this whole silly affair started...

Back in the day, you had your little raster graphic consoles. We're talking scanlines here. Your Atari-era days. And the era were programmers tried to out-do each other with fancier and fancier techniques for graphics. Back then, when you wanted to draw a line on the screen, it had to be all the same color and you had to plot out the entire horizontal axis. You couldn't draw a line and then go back and 'draw something before it.'

And there wasn't a frame buffer either. *shudder*

But then, programmers started to learn the tricks of the system. Changing color memory on the fly so they had characters with more than one color. More and more complex shapes and designs, as well as speed improvements and controls...

This was the golden-era of arcade gaming, so to speak. The lone developer who made the graphics, code, design and put it all together in a neat package to sell to the world. The first wave of graphic improvement, where programmers struggled to out-do each other in graphics pushing whatever hardware they were on to the fullest. However, this brand of playful competition was quickly squelched when new management came around and realized that this was a new possibility! A new market! A entirely new frontier...

...where you could pass off a tiny pixel as Spiderman and dupe people into buying a few hundred copies.

When you only had to sell a few hundred copies to break even.

Note, I said 'dupe.' Take a look at the ancient games of the 80's. They were all produced by a company. No individual programmer names made it on there. It was in fact, forbidden to put your name anywhere in the game. Initially, the programmers had free reign over what they produced, but as times changed (and profit margins grew...) so did policies. And thus it became that, it was company mandated policy to churn out... well... crap.

People were indeed duped back then to pay for the crummiest of games. When you pay 10 dollars for a Spiderman game, take it home to play, and realize that you're looking at a red dot swinging on some white dots across a square block of dots... You do indeed, feel quite silly at having bought it.

Especially if it played like a cross between washing the dishes.. and say.. slamming yourself in the head with a brick.

Imagine the crisis of faith the consumer population feels when exposed to this. Suddenly, it wasn't enough that you produced a new fancy video game. You had to ensure that it was actually worth buying. And what could the consumer possibly have to gauge the quality of the game from the box?

Screenshots, of course.

(Actually, one of the alternative solutions game companies tried to use was a ridiculous amount of hype. There was an Atari game called.. 'ET' based on.. guess what? ET. Awesome movie, terrible terrible terrible game. This game marked the end of the initial golden age of games, where people finally realized that the game companies at the time were out to simply dupe people into buying crap. The programmers rebelled of course, but the company had its say.

...and people joke about millions of unsold ET game cartridges ending up in a landfill...

...Snopes confirms it too.)

So the graphic console wars started. Because each game could only run on a very specific console, if you could convince the majority of the public to purchase your console, you would have your market audience for life playing your games. And thus games starting becoming graphical promotions for the consoles themselves. How would I know the Z9000 console would be better than the Atari 2600? How would I know the NES would be better than the Atari 7600? In a world where games were new, often disappointing affairs, people turned to graphics to help guide them. Screenshots of the newest technology. Look at all the pretty colors the Atari 2600 can do! Look at those beautiful lush greens and the man with the hat (Pitfall.)

This trend continued to the present day, where the major consoles are still fighting the graphics war. Each generation of consoles fighting for supremacy of.. who can pull off more sprites, the biggest explosions, the most realistic 3d graphics...

And where screenshots once ruled the day before, we turn to in-game videos or demos to see our beautiful games in action. The first thing we judge a game on is by graphics. Perhaps the only way we can judge a game without actually having played it. It's in our gut to judge a game by it's beautiful beautiful cover.

Where will it all lead to...

MMO Diversity, Part 5: Modern Models

2007-09-23T02:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This article is primarily about massively multiplayer online rpg's but can be extended to talking about any rpg with a skill/numbers base.

So, I've spoken a bit about some problems that MMO's have, primarily with how their skill tree is developed. I would like to take a walk through some modern MMO's and analyze how they (attempt to) sidestep these issues.

Recap:

The diversity problem in western MMO's is since the classes are role-based how does one customize one's character because all the roles have the same skills (or need to perform the same functions.)

The diversity problem in eastern MMO's is since there's too much customization of character, and too much focused on the choices you make, you have limited skill sets, you become a narrow focused character, and the classes become somewhat hybridized and hard to tell apart.

City of Heroes, NC Soft

Straight from the outset, you are forced to choose your role: Tanker (Melee Defense), Scrapper (Melee DPS), Blaster (Ranged DPS), Support (Heal / Support), Control (Crowd Control).

But then, how does City of Heroes address the customization problem?

1. Appearance is everything: By giving characters full control over how they appear (and thus doing away with all those silly equipment pieces.) they make a very visual impact on players. Players can choose to be anything from super sailor princess to titanic mecha overlord. Everyone thusly can choose to be somewhat unique, as they definitely stand out from the other 9 players wearing full plate mail.

2. Skill SETS: City of Heroes allows you to choose primary and secondary powers, but the crux of the matter is you are only allowed to choose skill SETS, not individual skills. In these skill sets, you can put the utilitarian skills as a bundle with the awesome skill that the player wishes to acquire. In this way, you do manage to give the player the utility spell he needs to fulfill his role and give him the freedom to choose how he wants to play.

3. Utility Sets: If you could only choose 2 very large power sets, then the game would still be hard to balance. City of Heroes addresses this by giving additional Utility Sets to the player, designed to handle problems such as transportation, gathering, evasion, or anything else lacking to the class. Since these are, again sets, they can be bundled with niche skills. In any event, the player does not have to give anything up to acquire these utility skills.

Silk Road Online, Joymax

Silk Road Online is, without a doubt, the single most grindingly boring game on the face of the earth. To give you an idea of what a Silk Road Quest is like, imagine you have to kill literally 5000 chaos demon flowers to get 5% of a level. Then repeat 50 times over.

That's not to say it doesn't have some good ideas. It has a very very good skill system that encourage skill experimentation and innovation.

1. Exponential Skill Improvement Costs: To get a skill from level 1 to level 10, it requires something to the degree of 100 times the skill points it takes to get a skill from level 0 to level 1. In this manner, one *can* get useful utility spells at low levels because the relative value of the utility spell / skill point ratio is far far greater. Imagine that you had a choice between improving weapon damage by 5% or getting a 3% speed increase in stealth, like in Ragnarok Online. Now imagine if that choice, was, instead, a choice between improving weapon damage by 5% or getting a 3% increase in stealth, speed, attack speed, stealing ability, with the ability to cure poison and cast a weak magic defense buff.

2. Limited Infinite Skill Selection: Silk Road characters can choose from every skill in the game potentially. Potentially. Realistically, it's fairly improbable. What they have done is made it so that one must level up a generic passive ability to unlock later and later skills in the trees. One *must* level up these generic passives in order to improve their skills in the tree. Thus, to have skills whose power nears one level, one must focus on one or two trees.

However, you cannot level a skill tree greater than your current level, so there is no incentive to put all your points into a single tree in the hopes of achieving a higher power level. And given that the trees (Weapon based or Magic based) are very synergetic, the optimal choice is to choose two trees.

What this means is that to realistically gain powerful skills, one must divert the majority of their points to two or more trees. Out of the possibility to choose between infinite skill trees, the optimal choice in their system is to choose two or more trees to focus on. Coupled with their exponential skill point improvement costs, this means it is very easy to tell what few trees characters have chosen to become.

3. Micro-gains in skill improvement unlinked to level gain: During the gaining of one level, a character in silk road will gain many hundreds of skill points. In this manner, they encourage experimentation as the character can simply gain a couple of extra skill points in this level to try out skills. It does not in any way shape or form hamper his advancement of his current level to try out new skills. He does not give up anything by trying out a skill besides a little bit of time. He does not lose anything "in the long run" and mistakes feel very cheap. Because, hey, even if that skill was horrible, I only spent 3 skill points on it, and I could get that back in like, a minute.

World of Warcraft, Blizzard

I don't really think I need to go much further than to say World of Warcraft is currently one of the best models of the western mmorpg. It has clearly defined role-based class systems with a heavy influence from dungeons and dragons and MUDs alike. It solves diversity in an interesting way, directly related to their talent tree.

Let me say this: the talent tree is the most obvious/simplest way to combine the western and eastern systems of skill thought.

First off: Every character in WoW gets their class based skills. All of them. They don't get to skip any. Then every character in WoW gets hit by a fully loaded skill tree that modifies their skills. All of them. And they have to spend points in this tree to unlock bonuses in skills.

Imagine an Eastern MMO where you started off with nine points in every skill and the last bit of adjustments you were to make were to add the last polishing skill points to those you wanted to be just a bit better (or get a few more points in those passive skills.) Wow does have one very good system in place though to increase this diversity even more.

1. "Gold Medal Skills" - These are special (powerful) customized skills designed for players who play a very specific way. How does Blizzard know that these players are playing this way? Because they have placed points in those skill trees in a following manner and thus earn the privilege of being able to use that skill.

It's the best case scenario. Some players have skills that other players don't, but they are the ones who can best use these niche skills in the first place or have the best rationale to have this skill.

It is fairly balanced because there is a significant cost to getting them. It also helps distinguish people from each other as even two of the same class has wildly different 'special' abilities. It's kind of like two people playing street fighter that have their own signature moves. Very 'Ken' and 'Ryu' like, in a way. They're both shotoken characters, but they're tweaked just enough so that they're diverse.. but they can still handle the majority of the same situations decently.

That's my brief discussion on MMO Diversity. Granted it was mainly about skill trees, but since MMO's are so reliant on the skills players have to use, talking about the core skill setup defines 50 to 60% of the core gameplay of any MMO. Thus, by carefully planning the skill setup, one can promote or squelch playing diversity.

Why I play for High Score? The game outside the game.

2007-09-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

A lot of games will, as a seeming after-thought, give you a score based on how you performed.

I guess it's supposed to give you some indication of your performance and how well you've performed. But a lot of these scores are meaningless to the average player. High scores, in a void, mean nothing. A lot of online mini-games will give you scores for your performance, but are those scores meaningful?

It's true that scores don't *need* to be meaningful, simply a measure of the player's arbitrary ability to play. But at the same time, a well designed score system can be very good for the game's meta-game. The meta-game is literally "the game outside the game." The game of competition to see, not who can beat the game, but who can score the highest. Getting to level 25 in Pac-Man is playing the game. Getting to level 25 in Pac-man collecting every single piece of fruit so that one can put your initials on the high scores list is playing the meta-game.

The meta-game can inspire people to do better, think harder, and come up with new and interesting strategies to play the game. The perfect example of this is Tower Defense, where simply beating the game might not be enough for players. One must beat it with the highest score or the best possible strategy. The meta-game thus extends the life-time of the game, by encouraging people to improve their game.

What properties do score tables need to have to ensure this?

1) Scores must be public.

There are far fewer rewards in having a score that no one ever sees. A little private assurance. However, scores are just numbers, and a number without context is essentially meaningless. Having a public high scores table also means there's the possibility that you could be a high-rank in those high score tables. That people will know about your accomplishments.

The desire to beat other people and the desire to achieve a rank on that high score table are very Spike goals. Without this kind of motivation, Spikes have little to gain from a simply score.

2) Scores must be a fairly accurate representation of performance.

This is fairly simple. If I kill 3 guys, and he kills 3 guys, we should have roughly the same score. If I kill 3 guys and he kills 3 guys and we have a wild score discrepency, the score becomes meaningless as it becomes less understandable to the general player.

A high score automatically implies certain things: A mastery of the game, or a long time to achieve the feat, or simply an efficient performance.

If high scores fluctuate wildly, then it becomes meaningless. If I said Player A had 5000 kills, and Player B had 4339 kills, that is a fairly good score representation. If I said Player A had 129387129387123 million points while Player B had 334934 points for the same amount of kills, you would have no idea what those points meant.

This also implies that there shouldn't be a point-farm where the only measure of success if to see how long a player can abuse a specific pattern to acquire a large amount of points with minimal effort to himself. (Like, hanging back and just shooting upward at the spawning enemies... forever.)

3) A high score must be achievable.

There is no point in keeping the top 10 scores of all time, as it only makes players feel that they can never reach that point. Why post the 45 millions and the 67 trillions when most players reach the thousands at most? We can't all play perfect games of Pac-man every single time.

The newest trend that seems to be working quite well, is to post the daily or weekly high scores. This way, you are ensured of competing with people of relevance. (Oh my god, I'm 15th out of all the people playing, right now?)

4) Scoring should not be based on some exponential system, scoring systems should strive to be linear.

If you make it to level 10, you should not get some exponentially bigger score than someone who made it to level 1. The key to this is again, understandability. If the first place has 100 times the score of the other top 10, that's bizarre. If he really 100 times better at the game? Human beings are terrible at understanding what an exponential increase really means. Thus, if at all possible, try to keep scores linear. If he gets to level 10, he should have roughly ten times the score of someone who got to only level 1, not hundreds. That way, you can easily tell from the score what kind of progress that person has made through the game.

Good: Wow! That guy has 10,000 points where I only have 5,000. He must have gone like, twice as far as I have.

Bad: That guy has... 100 times the score I do.... I have no idea what that means.

5) If a public high score isn't achievable, then smaller goals (or ranks) might be sufficient.

There is nothing better than being complimented by the game for doing well. By giving players ranks (like, silver star, gold star, A++.) You provide an additional incentive to do well. I mean, sure some people can be top 100, but if I can get a gold medal on this game, it's good enough for me. This sets the 'good enough' point, where the player might not be the best, but he's hit a goal that he can accomplish with a little effort.

(For example: If you survive 15 seconds longer, you qualify for a gold medal rank!)
(Especially, if said gold medal rank unlocks something)

MMO Diversity, Part 4: Focused Skill Sets

2007-09-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

Note: This post is mainly about massively multiplayer online rpgs but is applicable to any role playing game with a skill based system.

Recap: Skill Sets

Western MMO's: Traditionally, Western MMO's have fixed skill sets, where there is little or no variation among character classes as to what skill a class has. If a level 15 rogue has a 'pick lock' skill, then rest assured, some other level 15 rogue you encounter will be almost certain to have the same skill. This assures that classes have the skills to do what the designers intended, however, it means a relative lack of diversity in the character classes.

Eastern MMO's: Traditionally, Eastern MMO's have skill trees. One acquires skills by purchasing them with a skill point acquired by leveling. One can also empower their skills by investing more than a single point in them. In this manner, players can choose what skills they wish to acquire, and generally acquired much more diverse skill selections. However, the problem with this is that with a harsh system of 'no take-backs' and the quick obsoleting of skills that aren't being empowered are generally weaker or even useless. This leads to Focused Skill Sets with a Fear of Experimentation.

Thus, the main problem is how to create an environment where players can have diverse skills without leading to Focused Skill Sets and a Fear of Experimentation. This is a much harder problem than it seems.

Problem 1: There is hidden tension between an Experimental Community and a Diverse Community.

The problem is essentially: If a player can experiment all he wants, then how does he ever stick to a skill set? If all Thieves could magically become Healers without risk, how does one stop the entire community from jumping, en-masse, to the newest and currently best known build?

Real Life Example: Consider a collectible card game. One is free to experiment with his deck build as often as he wants. However, when you get up to a tournament level, the most predominant decks are those that are considered 'the best' in field. The freedom to choose whatever deck they would like often leads to the best players choosing the best decks. It is not unheard to see 50% of a high-level tournament make-up to consist of the same exact deck with minor variants.

Possible Solutions: Some scaled cost to re-experiment, limited experimental phases, a 'one-level' test phase for new skills, quick character re-advancement (The idea that once you've hit level 100 on a character, leveling another character to 100 should take much much less time.), merit-based advancement, Balance in power of the top-tier experimental builds, lots and lots of additional skills added over time (thus changing what is the 'best' build at any given time).

Problem 2: Making lots of skills does not neccessarily make a more diverse environment.

If Warrior One has 'Heavy Strike' and Warrior Two has 'Impact Strike'... how are they any different? We've given them different skills, but since they both need the same types of skills, they end up playing the same. The biggest offender of this is Trickster Online, where each of the 4 character classes essentially start with the same skill. 'Hit things for damage based on your primary statistic.' The game does get better later on, but because each character needed to play similarly early on, there is almost no difference in the skill selection they get early on.

When you have 4 different names for 'Hit something slightly harder' or 'Heal Damage', there's a problem. You might have name diversity, but you've just made the same damn thing.

Just look at all the games where mages will get 'ice bolt', followed by 'slightly stronger bolt.' Truly sigh-worthy. An entire class whose 20 out of 25 skills basically boil down to 'Hit enemy at distance for damage.'

Possible Solutions: Different resource bases for different skills. Basic Skills with alternate effects or additional effects. Diversification of roles. Later skills that have added synergy with basic role skills. The idea of gaining skill sets instead of individual skills. Skills that become more complex as they are improved, rather than simply more powerful (For example, adding a knockback component to a heavy blow skill, or adding a bleed component.) Skill cooldowns such that single overpowered skill is unable to be used repeatedly.

MMO Diversity, Part 3: Hybridization...

2007-09-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

Note: This article is mainly about Massively Multiplayer Online RPG's but can be stretched to incorporate any skill-tree based game.

Recap:

Western MMO's suffer from a lack of choices. You can't decide on what skills you want to be better than others. You can't really decide how your class will evolve. A warrior is a warrior is a warrior.

Eastern MMO's suffer from too many potential possibilities. Too many classes waters down the pool of classes. With so many possibilites, one is unsure whether his class can fulfill a specific role, or what his class is even meant to be doing in the first place.

How Modern MMO's can address these current problems...
...with examples of some that already have.

Hybridization: Giving each character class a clear goal and keeping in mind that no matter what the player does, there are clear roles he can fulfill is the main fix to the problem of too much Hybridization:

1) Have a clear set of roles that each character class can play and how effective he is at those. Have less roles that a character can fulfill but make him more effective in those roles.

2) If one character class can fulfill multiple roles then we make sure that he can fulfill those multiple roles without interfering with himself. Address potential problems with those multiple roles and how one can alleviate it.

3) If the character is too much of a hybrid, make his customization choices something that would naturally make sense as a combined whole.

Bad Example:

Assassin, Ragnarok Online

Roles: Primary Damage Dealer, Secondary Physical Defense Character, Secondary "Money" Character, Secondary Stealth Character, Poisons Enemies.

Do these roles interfere with each other?

Somewhat. His main powerful ability (Sonic Blow) requires a lot of magical energy to accomplish. However, it cannot be used in stealth. If he, instead, wishes to steal items from a monster, that takes up the energy he could have used to sonic blow to kill the monster. If the Assassin stealths, then he no longer fulfills his potential to be the party member who can dodge 95% of enemy attacks. Additionally, many of his powerful damage abilities cannot be used in stealth mode...

Except for the fact that many of his damage abilities can only be used in stealth mode. His only Area of Effect attack can only be used in stealth, and takes up a lot of magical energy, so he can't both handle Area of Effects and play defense (Which would be an ideal role, a defensive character who could also damage everyone that's attacking him.) The Assassin can play many roles, however, they are at cross-purposes with each other.

Do the roles make sense when taken together?

Partly. If you choose to whittle away the Assassin's, steal, stealth, envenom, area of effect abilities, then what is left with is a very strong defensive character that deals a high amount of damage. However, add any of the Assassin's other skills to the mix and you water that down to something that never utilizes the Assassin's full abilities and somewhat unclear about what the assassin's true role is.

Which is a shame, because if those abilities were not at cross-purposes with each other, they would make rather good combinations. Stealth and Massive Damage would lead to a very powerful 'Alpha Strike', except for the fact that the Assassin cannot attack in stealth except with a weak area of effect.

He cannot use his area of effect while he is playing the role of defense, because he needs to be stealthed to use his area of effect skill. This would make a great deal of sense if possible as a warrior who could keep the focus of multiple enemies at once.

He cannot both stealth and steal from monsters, which would create a very interesting money character that focuses on bypassing monsters entirely. Poisoning a monster is much less effective than simply doing his most powerful attack move. Furthermore, the Assassin's most powerful Poison Bomb skill is on a timer and has the condition that the enemy not be killed while the poison is in effective to deal the most damage... which totally defeats the purpose of the Assassin being a damage dealer. (In order to poison most effectively, the assassin must not attack the thing he poisoned.)

Good Examples:

Paladin, World of Warcraft
Clear Roles: Defensive Warrior, Secondary Healer, Tertiary Party Enhancer

Do the two roles interfere with each other?
If he is healing, is that hindered by the fact that he is a defensive warrior? Possibly, if his healing is interrupted because he is in the front line getting hit by stuff. Therefore, we give the paladin the option to have faster heal times, ignore spell casting interruption.

If he is playing defense, does that hinder his healing ability? Possibly, if his defense abilities take up all the magical energy he needs to heal other people. Therefore, we can make his defensive abilities relatively light on magical energy or give him the ability to recover magical energy while he is being hurt or doing damage (As a defensive warrior.)

When his abilities are put together, do they make sense as a combined whole?

A defensive warrior and a backup healer. Clearly the Paladin's role is to make it hard for his party to die. He both absorbs damage from rampaging monsters and heals the party in case some of that damage passes by. Additionally, he might have some powerful resurrection abilities or group buffs that make it even harder for the group to perish.

Pure Wizard, Dungeons and Dragons Online
Clear Roles: Massive Area of Effect Damage Dealer, Powerful Crowd Control, Secondary Group Enhancer, Places Enemies under Negative Enchantments.

Do the roles interfere with each other?

Yes, the roles do interfere with each other. Using magical energy on both Crowd Control and Area of Effect Damage Dealing are redundant tasks. If on the other hand, he is around to provide useful enchantments for the party his role as Damage Dealer and Crowd Control will be hampered by the need to constantly maintain and use up his magical energies on keeping the group buffed.

We can address this issue by giving the wizard only a few spell slots to choose from. His highest level spells will be limited in number to one or two that he can swap out at specifically designated rest points. This way, the wizards most powerful spell will only be from one or two of these categories and the player's focus will be on only one of these roles and not all three of them at once.

We can also prevent the wizard character from fulfilling all of these roles by giving him a very limited energy point to work from, thus ensuring that he will be called to fulfill only a few roles at a time before he is exhausted. To balance this, we can make him very powerful while his magical energies are well supplied.

Do the roles make sense when taken together as a whole?

Yes. These roles, when combined together, make the wizard a universal problem solver or a "panic button". No matter what the situation at hand, whether it be overwhelmed by enemies, having to have a powerful enchantment or simply destroying something very quickly, the wizard can be called to get rid of a problem. Balanced with a low energy pool, the well prepared wizard becomes a valuable role as he can be called on to unleash his full power at those critical moments.

MMO Diversity, Part 2: The Choices You Make...

2007-09-13T22:23:00.000-07:00

Note: This article is mainly about Massively Multi-player Online Games, with a slight bleed into skill-based RPG's.

A quick recap of terms I've discussed and that I will continue to use:

Western MMO:
An MMO where characters choose clearly defined roles at the outset, characterized by little or no character branching and definite skill sets rather than point based skill tree systems.

Examples: Everquest, Dungeons and Dragons Online.

Eastern MMO:
An MMO where characters start off with initially unclear roles, and determine them by strict character branching with further branch-offs from point-based skill tree systems.

Examples: Ragnarok Online, Trickster Online, Maple Story

In the Western MMO, it's very hard to talk about my character. After all, what makes me different from anyone else? There's very few classes, and in those classes are very similar skills. How do I express myself if all I can say is 'I'm a level 30 warrior.' 'Oh.' Where is the choice or the diversity there? How am I any different from the faceless masses?

Considering the problems of Western MMO's, the Eastern MMO System seems like a comparative upgrade to the old Western MMO system. Why would one want static roles and a complete lack of choice in skill sets? Why shouldn't I have the freedom to decide whether my character has heal or not? Why shouldn't I look forward to when my Thief becomes an Assassin?

Problem 1: Hybridization

Throughout time immemorial, there have been 4 main party roles:
Thief (Single Target DPS).
Cleric (Heal Bi.. err. Healer.).
Mage (Crowd Control).
Warrior (Tank.)

When you have 32 classes divided up into these 4 roles, and possible combinations of those roles.. you have no idea what those classes end up as. Please, tell me, at first glance, what you think the difference between a Crusader and a Knight is? Crusader, Knight, Swordsman, Assassin, Rogue, Battle Smith, Monk? What do you think their roles are? Tanks? Damage/Tanks? Damage/Tank/Cleric? What makes these characters special besides the unique way they take/deal damage? How do you compare the relative benefits between a Crusader and a Knight? An Assassin and a Monk? When the classes come too close to one another, the difference between the two might be in Name (And looks) only.

Still, with a little effort, you could do it... I mean, what do I care if my Assassin and my Monk do similar things. Isn't it awesome that I have an Assassin? And a Kung-Fu Monk? Or better yet.. ASSASSIN MONK?

Problem 2: Focused Skill Sets

If you have one point in a skill, common knowledge says that it should be worse than a skill in which you have 9 points in.

Fair enough, that makes total sense. A skill in which you've invested in should be better than a skill in which you haven't. And it also makes total sense you should be able to 'pass up' bad abilities to further your good abilities. Who hasn't groaned when their thief in some game got the skill 'kick a little bit of sand in someone's eye' and wish that they could just possibly gouge that eye out?

However, this leads to dangerous scenarios where core abilities and utility spells are ignored in favor of the best abilities. It'd be slightly odd if the following scenario happened...

'Okay, Thief, sneak around that corner and kill the guard.'
'I err.. don't have points in sneak.'
'Okay, then steal the key off him.'
'I err.. don't have points in steal... but I can err.. stab him twice, really quickly.'
'...'

This frankly, wreaks havoc on the whole class-role system. You can't count on a person in that role to have to skill you need in a party system. Imagine a Healer who couldn't heal effectively, because he spent all his points on his 'holy attack' skill.

Furthermore, this problem kills game-play diversity. In our focus to make our good spells ... well... really good, we kill off any opportunity for our other spells. Any player who has spent the last 10 levels saving skill points to dump it all into 'Double Attack' of any type will know the feeling. Days and weeks are used leveling the same three skills over and over to their maximum power. Other skills are discarded into the dust. It is *so* important that we level our main skills that we do not deign even to "waste" a point in other spells.

Our game-play will be reduced to three-skills. And the system encourages it, otherwise, we're just being silly and weak, wanting 'too much.'

Problem 3: Fear of Experimentation + 'Cookie Cutter' builds.

The major problem with the skill point based system is that usually, each and every decision made with our skill points is final. We can't try out a skill before we sink a point into it. It's FINAL. Nothing is worse than the excitement of putting a skill point into our recently acquired skill of fiery explosion mark 3 and learning that.. well.. it sucks.

Which leads to a major fear of experimentation. Who has the time to level another character up to 60? 100? 200? How will I reconcile my desire to have a good play experience as well as the desire to have a character that remains useful? I limit myself. I limit my skills. I do research online to find the 'best' skills.

Which leads to the plethora of 'Cookie Cutter' builds. The established common builds that are supposedly better than any other build (Whether or not that's true or not, is up to the player.) Millions of people requesting help on how to build their characters. Millions of skills lying unused in the mud.

Problem 4: Obsoleting Skills feels like a punch to the gut

So, I have my shiny level 10 double attack skill. It rocks. Wait.. what's that? What do you mean in 10 levels, I get a triple attack skill? What? That totally sucks. I just got a new skill. I should be HAPPY. Instead, I feel like the game creators have just pulled a fast one on me and are now pointing and laughing.

Some skills are better than others. This is true.

Having skills that are simply better than others and obsoleting old skills that people have spent dozens of points on, while ignoring other ones, is like someone slapped you across the face.

Now, you could make level 10 double attack a pre-requisite for this awesome triple attack skill.. but then that pretty much means you've set the course for the player for the previous 10 levels. 'Hey! You better get level 10 double attack, or else.. You're going to suck!'

Compare this to the Western MMO, where if you get a triple attack skill, all players will scream 'Awesome', replace their double attack skill with the triple attack, and walk off feeling like they've been rewarded for invested their time into this so far.

Proble...

Well, actually, I've said enough about the skill tree system. The fact is, the sheer amount of customization you give to the players might be a terrible idea if the system also punishes them for customizing their characters in the wrong way. That, combined with the fact that more and more character classes generally leads to more confusing and less diverse gameplay tends to be more of a net negative in the end.

Join me for the next part, when we look at Modern MMOs and how they've addressed the issue of customization and avoiding these problems.

MMO Diversity, Part 1: The East and the West

2007-09-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Note: This article is mostly about Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMO's)

There have been a glut of MMO's from the East (Korea, China, etc.) and the West (US, Europe). Both have somewhat different roots and they lead to very different game-play models. This is my theory on the history of the evolution of these various styles of MMO's. Under no circumstance should you take any of this as well-researched facts. That said...

How did western MMO's evolve? The earliest model would probably be the Pen and Paper games popularized in the west. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons being the most ubiquitous example. In these games, the classes were not so different from one another. Take one mage and compare him to another mage and the only difference would probably be the equipment and the player playing the mage. Both of them could learn everything the other mage could and more. Every warrior was at least proficient in their weapon of choice.

The next stage in this evolution was the gradual adaption of the pen and paper model onto an online model: The MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon. Modern muds have a terrific variety of game-play and settings but the very first few muds have, for the most part, a firm grounding in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules. If you were a level 25 warrior, you were going to have kick. No question about it. There wasn't a choice. When you leveled up, you got a skill. Barring very rare exceptions such as weapon choice, all level 50 warriors had the same skill set.

One of the first incarnations of what could be called a Massive Multiplayer Online Game was Everquest. In this, all classes followed the same general model. You hit level X, you get skill Y. All Bards that were level 30 had Spirit of the Wolf. All Monks that were level 30 had meditate and kick. They all had the same meditate and kick skill. You weren't going to suddenly find a level 30 Monk who somehow didn't have meditate, but had some god-like triple kick skill.

From Everquest onwards, companies have tried to emulate the massive success that Everquest has had. Most of these typically have the same class-based play as before. Warrior, Thief, Cleric, Mage. From this model, the western MMO's were born. You picked your class, and you stuck with it, and you flamed on the message boards when your class was depowered by those evil Game Masters.

Western MMO's are very role-based. At the outset, you choose a role. A warrior, a mage, a priest, a thief, etc. This stems from its Dungeons and Dragon roots where players would choose what type of role to fulfill in a party. These games give you tools (in the form of skills) to help you fulfill that role. Thus, it is vitally important that each role or class have the same set of tools to work from or they might be woefully under-equipped to handle it.

From my experience, Western MMO's typically ask you this question:
'How do I use the skills that I have effectively?'

What about the history of Eastern MMO's?

To tell the truth, there isn't much of one. Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds was one of the first MMO's out of Korea and it followed a straight-forward path akin to the Western Muds. It, however, introduced the idea of character-branching, that one base character could become aligned and subtly different. (Lineage is one of the direct descendants of Nexus, branching off from one of the Nexus sub-servers several years after it was released.)

To tell you the truth, there was a precedent for character-branching before. It was a Japanese game of all things that brought this to us. The game? Final Fantasy 5 J. (FF5J was never released for the U.S. Market.) You can see the class-change system in Final Fantasy XI has had its roots in one of the earliest incarnation of the game.

And then shortly thereafter, Korea spawned one of the most pervasive and well known game of the Eastern MMO's: Ragnarok Online. RO marks, what I believe to be, one of the earliest examples of the Eastern MMO marked by one thing: Skill-tree based character development as well as character class changes. While the game was officially released in 2002, the earliest alpha/beta of the games were many years before that date.

Shortly thereafter, the Eastern MMO market quickly branched off into derivative works such as Maple Story, Silk Road and other "free-to-play" MMO's which made money by selling in game upgrades. Individually these MMO's have small quiet markets but when taken together as a whole these small free MMOs have user bases that can compare with the large stable western MMO populations.

As a general rule, these games are all about defining your character through the choices you make while leveling. You choose what skills to get. You choose what skills to upgrade. You gain levels and sometimes you even choose what character class you will become. Not only that, sometimes you even choose what the next advancement of that character class you will become. It gives the player an amazing freedom of choice. The decision to make their character how they want it. The ability to branch out into multiple paths.

From my experience, Eastern MMO's typically ask you this question:
"How do I build my character up so that he has the best skill-set for me?"

...In the next part, we'll see how this affects the actual game-play of these various MMO's...

The Conflict of Timmy and Spike: The "Cheap" and the "Scrub"

2007-09-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

Note: This article refers mainly to 2 player fighting games (Ex: Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, etc.)

Cheap: A move or tactic that is felt to be unfair. Someone who is abusing the system to earn wins.
Example: Throwing 20 times in a row is too damn cheap.

Scrub: A (possibly) derogatory term for a novice player mainly used by highly competitive players. Mostly used for players who refuse to adapt to powerful tactics.
Example: Look at that Scrub complaining that I just threw him 20 times in a row.

There is quite possibly an eternal conflict between which group of players is justified. Are Spike's just really cheap? Or are those whiners just Scrubs who refuse to adapt?

The Casual Viewpoint: A group of friends are sitting around playing one of the many fighting games of the ages: Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, Marvel vs. Capcom. Much blood has been split. Much accusations of cheapness have been declared. Every player has their own signature tactic that, when used, elicits many groans from everyone else. Everything from the classic 'Fireball Spammer!' to 'Corner Turtle!'... from 'Button Masher' to 'You keep doing that same damn move over and over again.'

Timmy's Complaint: Spamming fireballs all day or hiding in a corner all day is not fun. You might win, but all you're doing is really just annoying people to death with your cheap tactics that are simply designed to win without any sort of excitement. Jump. Fireball. Block. Fireball. Etc. What we're doing is trying to have fun. We get that winning is fun but not if winning turns out to be looking at the same predictable pattern over and over again.

Spike's Response: I am spamming the same move over and over again. If it is so impossible to counter this one move, wouldn't I be foolish for not using it? Furthermore, what would be the limit to using this move if it is so impossible to counter? Even a single use of this move could be called 'cheap.' You know exactly what I am going to do, can't you just play around it? Is there no desire for self-improvement here? It can't be possible that I've found *the* impossible to defeat strategy while we're just spamming random moves here.

The Hardcore Viewpoint: A group of players are around their local arcade stand playing competitively. A newcomer comes to the playing field and plays around. After he is trounced by the elite players, he sighs to himself and complains about how they kept abusing the most well known absurd combos. And then comes the inevitable. He'll leave, and the elites will shake their head and decry him as a "Scrub."

Spike's Complaint: Complaining about tactics that win you the game are a moot point. If what you really want to do is *win*, then you will learn to adapt to increasingly new tactics. If you're getting bombed by planes, you can't complain that planes are "cheap" and that they are fighting "unfairly." If you want to win, you learn and adapt, not redesign the game so that is "fair" for you. Complaining about cheapness is really a sign of not wanting to improve your own playing skill and instead wanting to play a game which requires a lesser skill component to win.

Timmy's Response: If your only motivation to play is to win, then you prevent yourself from truly having fun with the game. In any fighting game, there are top-tier, middle-tier and bottom-tier characters. If your only desire is to win in high-level competitive play, that limits your play experience to simply top-tier characters. What an incredibly boring way to play, limiting yourself to 2 or 3 characters. Furthermore, our objective is not to win. It is simply to have a good time among friends or have a good time at the arcade. Your goal of "self-improvement" is ruining our play experience.

Loss of Diversity: Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has a character roster of some 50 plus characters. If the players involved aren't very skilled, they will choose a team that consists of 3 members out of these 50 plus characters. However, the actual 'playable' character roster that tournament players choose from consists only of a mere 12 to 16 characters. Of those playable characters, not all the 'special moves' of those characters can be used, as some just are straight out terrible. (Example: Strider Hiryu has some 15 special moves. Of these, only 4 are ever used and that's stretching it.) The pure Spike mindset seriously limits the gaming experience.

If you'd like to take this to the extremely, look at Guilty Gear. 15 out of the top 16 tournament players all used the same character: Sol Badguy. The 16th player played a different character, Baiken, and predictably died very very early on.

Both sides have extremely valid points. One group is trying to have fun with the game experience. The other group is all about self-improvement. It would be hard to find a group of friends playing a fighting game who didn't want to get better and the fighting game *and* have fun.

Here's the thing though, for both groups: Decrying someone as cheap or decrying someone as a scrub doesn't actually help either of you achieve your goal.

Timmy: Suppose that one predictable move is too 'cheap' for you to handle. If your only way to beat this move is the other person not doing it, perhaps a fair degree of practice is in order? Going deeper into and getting better at the game can be more rewarding. If I had to pick between a Street Fighter with 'cheap' fireballs and a Street Fighter with no fireballs.. or a Street Fighter with 'cheap' throws versus a Street Fighter in which you couldn't throw... I'd rather have the fireballs and the throwing. It's more diverse. It's more gameplay. And once you learn how to handle it well, it's more fun.

Besides, nothing's better than showing that Spike just how vulnerable he really is. :D

Spike: If your ultimate goal is to find the dominant tactic of play, consider two things:

1. Playing to win all the time will quickly drive off all the casual players. If all you play with is with casual gamers then you will quickly leave yourself with no avenue of improvement.

2. Playing to win all the time will ensure that you *not* find the dominant tactic of play. It might ensure that you perfect your *current* dominant tactic, but that does not ensure that your tactic is the best.

Street Fighter example: Suppose you've learned to play Ryu *really* *really* well. All the casual players call your fireball / dragon punch traps cheap and you win the majority of the time. Newsflash: Ryu might not be the best character. Unless you vary your gameplay experience and try supposedly bad moves, you might never make the discovery that some other character might be the best character for you. The best character for you might be a really really weak character at first glance but if you keep doing your old fireball / dragon punch traps, then you'll never find out.

So relax. Go deeper into the game and learn to adapt. Or stop using that dominant tactic for a while. Who knows what you'll discover?

Basic Math and Games

2007-09-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

Note: This article is mostly about action-rpg that have game mechanics rooted in heavy numbers.

Well, I believe it's time to take a little tangent here to talk about a thing that has plagued me for years: Mathematics.

It comes from the fact that I love action games with rpg elements or rpg games with heavy action elements and such. (Examples: Castlevania: SoTN, Secret of Mana, Diablo.. Etc.) They are typically rich games with a good mix of customization from the RPG side and fast-paced gaming from the action side.

...And then math rears it's ugly head. Suppose that you have a game where Damage is Calculated by (Attack - Defense) = Damage. Simple. Perfect. Understandable. Of course, simple is better, right?

Slime hits you for 3 damage!
You hit Slime for 7 damage!
Slime hits you for 3 damage!
You hit Slime for 7 damage!
You have defeated Slime!

What's wrong with this picture? For starters, it's utterly boring. You know exactly what will happen next time you face the dreaded slime. You'll take 6 damage. If you don't have 6 hp, well, then you'll die.

What happens if you get +3 defense? Well, then.. even if you face a million slimes, you won't have to fear a thing as they all bounce uselessly off your armor. What if you had 3 less defense? Then you'd take twice as much damage from all slimes. In this 6 point margin, you can go from 'Slime is a terrifying force' to 'Slimes are trivial.'

In 6 points. That's a thin margin.

Now, think about what happens to the next mob? Say, the Blue Slime. If he hits for 3 more attack than a Green slime and you take 0 damage from Green Slimes, then the Blue Slime will be as hard as a Green Slime before. The monster isn't getting harder. It's running hard to stay in place. However, if you didn't have you armor... then the Blue Slime would be more than 50% harder than the Green Slime. Such a jump in difficulty would be hard for most slow paced rpg's to stomach.

The problem with using straight attack - defense = damage formulas is the thin margin of balance you have.

For example:

If my attack is less than the monster's defense, I essentially do nothing to the monster and it is impossible.

Alternatively, if my defense is less than the monster's attack, the monster is challenging for a while, until he decimates me by having just a few extra points of attack. (The difference between doing 5 and say.. doing 9.)

If my defense is greater than the monster's attack, then the monster is essentially irrelevant. It does nothing to me.

And the difference between impossible and ridiculously easy is only a few points. A few pieces of equipment for defense. A level or 2. Fall a little behind, everything is impossible and you're forced to stay behind to catch up. Fall a little ahead, everything is ridiculously easy.

This problem becomes compounded if you want to have a character that does repeated small strikes. Suppose we have a 'Thief' type character who hits twice.

Thief hits for 0 damage. (Attack less than their defense.)
Thief hits for 2 damage. (Attack one more than their defense.)
Thief hits for 4 damage. (Attack two more than their defense.)

This character will do very little or start doing twice as much as his compatriots. How are you going to balance this when it all comes down to a razor thin margin of points? If you give a character 50 attack but 2 attacks and a character with 100 attack, these characters are essentially ALWAYS unbalanced no matter what the defense of the monster is. The thief character will always be affected twice by the monster's defense and the 100 attack character will always out-damage the thief. But it seems balanced, at first glance, and that is the difficulty.

Typically, games that use this formula follow a distinct pattern: "This game is too hard." "Wait, now it's too easy." "Wait, now it's too hard again, did I miss something?" "Wait, got that piece of armor. This game is too easy." "Aagh. Can't afford that next armor. This game is too hard."

What was missing? "This game is just right." or.. "Hm. Well, I don't need that armor, I could just play a little better."

But you might say.. "Well, I can perfectly pace my game such that it curves out perfectly. At level 1, they'll fight green slimes and at level 2, they'll fight blue slimes with such and such bonuses and they'll have such and such equipment..."

Which is all fine and good, until you realize that you are not flawless, that players will either miss the equipment/skill/level or player's will innovate and achieve far greater equipment/skill/level and make all your careful balancing irrelevant. Putting the entire difficulty of the game on a razor thin edge by using simple math? A game that's too hard is no fun. A game that's too easy is no fun.

In a large complex game featuring complex interplay between monsters and players... Having the entire difficulty of monsters come down to whether or not people have the stats to EXACTLY put them on this razor thin edge of 'just right' is insane. If the players have control over their stats (Attack/Defense) then it's essentially hopeless. There is no margin of error if you use this kind of simple math.

And if you screw up.. well..

Slime attacks you! It does 0 damage!
Slime attacks you! It does 0 damage!
Slime attacks you! It does 0 damage!
You attack Slime! You do 7 damage!

*Yawn*

Big Slime attacks you! It does 13 damage!
You die...

*Sigh*