Taking a step back

Okay, so I kinda jumped the gun on declaring intent to create a deep dynamic quest system. That's still my goal, but I need to start with smaller projects and work up to higher level stuff. From research and planning thus far, it's all about AI. In the case of a quest system, it would seem to be multiple layers of advanced AI.

The top level would be the planner. It would be responsible for saying "Okay, here's the basic quest, here are the actors involved, and here's what I need to do to make it happen." To be truly dynamic, it'd have to react to what a player does, and "re-think" the quest as it goes along.

The major subsection of that is the actors. They should be able to plan and act on their own according to their needs and goals. If the bad guy needs blood, he should find a farmer and kill them, or kidnap someone. If he's hungry, he might step over to the tavern (in the case of UO, you might find him at Buc's Den). What I call "pivotal" actors in my planning are the really believable ones, with dialog, goals, and they act as major plot devices.

A smaller still subset of Actors is the basic NPC. They tend shops, go eat when they're hungry, talk to you about recent events, send you on errands if they need supplies, close up shop when it's dark. I call these guys "drones."

So, my first project, based in a UO environment, will be getting believable drones working. An NPC might hop down to a tavern for lunch, after ensuring that his co-worker is still tending the shop. He might tell you about some strange adventurer that came in the other day. A bartender might complain about how much of a slob your friendly neighborhood blacksmith is.

I'll probably start a little bit smaller than that. Possibly just setting up a basic needs system for them and giving them a grid for pathfinding through the city to their destinations.

Still doing research, but that's about where I stand at the moment...

This whole thing is being targeted at UO (Ultima Online), just because it seems like it has a lot of resources open for AI computations, and it's what I'm used to working with in the form of a server emulator written in C#, and I feel OOP should lend itself to this rather well. Eventually it may be necessary to explore options for handing over the "thinking" part of this system to a secondary computer, but for the time being I'm not worrying about that.

So, yeah. First stop: "Drones."

Deep Dynamic Quests Update (henceforth DDQ)

Dissecting the "overall" RPG quest is proving pretty challenging. Coming up with ways to implement something with sufficient variety and interest while managing project bloat. The most complex thing so far is the NPC; I've differentiated them into "Supporting" and "Pivotal" groups, with your pivotal chars being the major interaction points, and supporting as say, the barkeep that didn't much like the dead guy you're investigating and doesn't care.

To keep my brain from exploding I'm employing FreeMind, a piece of free Java-based mind mapping software. I'm finding it very useful in visualizing an overall concept and expanding on ideas a bit at a time. It's a nice contrast to the usual practice of working on one thing, then another, and forgetting a huge amount of the first. You can do the whole mind mapping thing on paper, I'm just using the software because I have my laptop in front of me most of the time while at home (it wars constantly with interesting games/movies for my attention).

So, yeah, useful software, and the planning is under way.

Current line of thinking is to just mind map the thing until I can't expand on it anymore, then evaluate that and cut it down to something I could actually accomplish within the space of half a year or so.

Randomly Generating Soul

Thanks to a post by Raph, I'm pondering a new UO emulator project: Dynamic generation of deep & involved quests. None of that "Go fetch me an apple" or "Go stab 10 pigs" stuff, that's as easy as picking from a few random lists... I'm talking stuff you can really get into and feel like the hero or villain that you want your character to be. Creating quests with "soul" out of thin air. This might work, or it might fail miserably, but either way it'll be a learning experience and probably really fun.

I'll post more as I work on it.

You could do worse...

As I've mentioned before, a lot of my game design insight comes from my graphic design / marketing background. Marketing and games are ultimately about the same thing: Interpreting the needs of your target audience. It's all about people, and as my girlfriend would say, "people are squishy." What else is about people... business?

So, to that end, I'd like to point out a few things that I'm particularly fond of, not from a gaming standpoint, but from marketing, graphic/web design, and business

1. Monday Morning Memo - Interesting insight into business and humanity every Monday. Free.
2. The Wizard of Ads Trilogy - Pretty much the MMM, but 3 books full. At $27 for 3 books, I'm thinking I might start leaving these as a gift for graphic design consulting jobs. Read one a day and reflect on 'em, it's juice for the brain.
3. Call To Action - "Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results" sounds like the subject of a spam email, but it's really quite useful, reinforcing a similarity between web and games: there are people that have to use what you're designing. A good read, and particularly so  for those working on web-based games and projects.

You could do worse than reading this stuff... even if it's not specifically for game design.

Break

Taking the night off from blogging, but I wanted to share this:

I suppose it's possible that I'm late to the party on this one, but this is really a great remix. There's even an mp3 link in the expanded "more info" bit. Making GLaDOS sing just... makes me... happy...

Excitement Over New Ideas

So, I wrote out a really basic story for a game last night, and it's been running amok in my skull ever since. There's a real kind of "woot!" excitement behind a new idea. My responsibility is now to not allow it to run away with me - I don't want to over complicate it to the point where I couldn't complete the project (mostly) solo. Still, I'm in that zone where ideas keep flying at me out of the blue as my brain digests the overall concept. I suppose the best thing to do is write them all down and sort 'em out later? Kind of like writing... pour everything out in the first round, and clip, snip, cut away at it until it's actually good.

Alright, off to work...

Why Write a Game Design Blog?

Ultimately I'm writing a design blog in order to grow as a designer. It's easy to spout theories and ideas when you're shouting at the darkness, but much more challenging and interesting when you receive criticism and input from your peers.

Also, I'm writing it because I think it'd be very difficult to break into the game industry without any formal training. I've been tinkering with a private UO server for about four years, trying out various ideas / social experiments, but that's about the extent of my resume.

There's certainly some bleedthrough between my current career as a graphic designer/web developer. Coding ability, graphics, and probably most importantly an insight into human behavior and interaction. I think a lot of the knowledge from marketing and web experience design can often be applied to game design. "Don't make me think," a common thought for web interface design, sort of lead to one my earlier posts, "Don't make me repeat myself."

Much of game design, I think, just comes from playing games and analyzing them: what worked, what didn't, and why. That's where a lot of my theory posts have/will come from. You play something, then think "That was fun, but why?" or "That sucked monkey balls, but why?" Analyze the good and bad parts of the game and why you reacted to it the way you did. The more complex the game, the more you can learn from it. 

Every now and then, my friends and I get into lengthy discussions about whatever game we're playing, or get into talking about what we consider to be really fun games. These tend to differ, but there are similarities. I have this annoying tendency to make assumptions about what people think, which usually leads to a quick boot to the virtual head.

Still, with just years of theory and discussion and gameplay under your belt, it's tough to compete against folks that have a degree in game design, or years of actual development experience, you know? So, among my solutions is to start this blog, and get to know the community that I'm so interested in. I'm currently following about 23 game design blogs via RSS, and I comment whenever I think I have something useful to contribute to the conversation, or a question to ask.

I'm hoping to get a few tiny game designs on paper soon, shooting for something I could develop in maybe half a year. I'll probably blog about that, too, and maybe eventually slap together a pretty eBook about it (which, i suppose, is where the graphic design degree finally pays off).

Short version: Lacking formal training & formal experience, I'm doing this the hard way.

I welcome anyone to critique anything I write. Please feel free to challenge my beliefs and ideas, it's the best way to learn. I promise not to take it personally if you tell me I'm full of shit.

Quick Note: What NOT to do

Just skimmed an interview with Flagship founder Bill Roper (via 1up.com) and one particular snippet jumped out at me:

"Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all..."

Overreaching is something I've often found myself guilty of in the past, and hopefully not in the future... may or may not write more on the interview tomorrow, it's pretty huge, and I'm tired.

Curves aren't just for difficulty

"Difficulty curve" or "learning curve" are fairly common terms, but you don't often hear of similar terms related to story and theme. This is something I learned from playing Silent Hill 4, and is loosely related to my Advancement/Involvement post:

If your game can't get by on advancement alone, it had better have damned good involvement. When it comes to the story aspect of involvement, accessibility - what you might think of as the "story curve" - is a major factor. Silent Hill 1 was incredibly deep and complex, but it started out very simple: Your character crashed a car and his daughter ran off, and he has to go find her. This kind of thing is something that almost anyone can related to and identify with, and it gets you involved in the story. Only after it's established something you can really relate to does it start to twist and warp the story, but it keeps that basic drive throughout the game.

SH4, on the other hand, kind of just dropped you in a room, and immediately has a complex and inaccessible plot. The game relies on a lot of "what was that all about?" plot devices, and doesn't really have an overall accessible storyline, apart from "I am really sick of this room and want to leave."

Stories should be accessible, in a situation the player can imagine themselves in as the protagonist. The more involved the player is in your story, the better. Don't just throw them into a situation and expect them to relate to it.

Characters need to be believable and flawed, too, but that's an entirely different post.

UO Story Arc, Act I

So, I tried to go to sleep a little bit early last night, and the promised UO story arc started to form in my head. Then it progressed to "OH GOD LET ME OUT NOW NOW NOW NOOOOOW." So, yeah, I guess I made my Friday deadline after all. I'll only post Act I.

This arc makes significant assumptions about the current UO storyline, mainly that the storyline is in some way loosely following the actual Ultima series story. It further assumes that the Shadowlords in the current UO storyline will also be defeated by the destruction of the shards of the gem of immortality that contained them.

Act I: Darkness Descends

With the shards containing the Shadowlords destroyed, peace appears to return to Britannia. A festival is held at the fairgrounds outside of Britain, but even as the people celebrate, the commander of the Royal Guard seems ill at ease.

In days that follow, the shrines of the eight virtues grow cold and dim, and the people of the land begin to act strangely, even violent. After a night of dealing with crime after crime, the current commander of the guard abandons his position.

Clainin the mage sets out to discover what ails the shrines, while a new commander assumes lead of the guard. This new commander leads raids upon the Juka, Meer, and Gargish peoples, each time personally silencing those that claim the attacks are unprovoked.

The new commander orders the virtues building in Britain blocked off and set ablaze, and powerful creatures embodying the eight anti-virtues appear around the dying virtue shrines throughout the land. The three chaos shrines become stained with blood.

When Clainin returns to report on his findings, he is appalled at the actions of the royal guard. He attempts to have the new commander imprisoned, to no avail. Ultimately he himself is arrested, and tried in a mockery of justice, sentenced to execution and returned to jail to await his fate.

Update 8/18:
Yes, I just discovered Clainin's prone body in New Haven, let's just assume he's back for this.

Random Thoughts: Ultima Online

On Interaction (or Pride)

Ultima Online is potentially the greatest MMO out there; the level of interaction possible in UO is above and beyond what I've seen in other mainstream massives.

In UO, the developers truly have the ability to make it an interactive world. The story can be directly influenced by player actions during quests, and there is the possibility of adding new structures, creatures, and so forth, without the need to commit art resources to world building. In fact, the whole idea behind UO would seem to indicate that this was the intention: Upon the shattering of the gem of immortality, each copy of the world contained in each shard was supposed to diverge on it's own path, kinda like the idea of parallel worlds. Each shard would have had it's own unique culture. To some degree this did actually work, there was for some time a volunteer program where the event/fiction folks, called Seers or Elders, were capable of propelling a shard's unique flavor. Lately, to my knowledge, there's now just the primary storyline, each shard getting a slightly flavored version of the same events.

Ultima Online's greatest strength, from a story standpoint, is it's ability to adapt and change according to what the players do. This really should be exploited as much as possible. In a world like UO, I think one of the greatest ways to retain subscribers (by way of increased player involvement) is to really let your players feel like they've helped shape the world.

On the world-shaping point, I've often felt that players should be able to make a more profound contribution to the UO world; an example of this might be a monthly writing contest for in-game books, where the top few entries might be added to the books that spawn in libraries across the world. You'd have to submit the forms via web, and check a box to allow your work to be published in game (with all legal mumbo jumbo involved), and the writer might even have a say in what shards his or her work can appear on.

On Accomplishments (be they good or evil)

I think a lot of work could be done to really allow people's characters to feel more heroic/evil (which is a whole other post entirely). You don't really feel like a hero when you escort some geezer to a fishing pier. I'm all for the little quests where you help out NPCs, but I think the really cool stuff lies where you can really get involved in a quest, trying to follow the path of a virtue - or antivirtue. Imagine your PVP players being Knights of the anti-principles: Valai, Knight of Hatred. Or, perhaps, deciples of the Shadowlords, who embody the anti-principles. Perhaps you would quest to gain the title "Child of Faulinei" or "Knight of Falsehood." Mind you, Knight of Cowardice doesn't really sound so hot, but hey, someone might dig that.

UO has great potential for players to play both evil and good roles, and the evil side would seem to be neglected - you don't see Lady Minax sending out a global message to all those with negative karma to meet her somewhere to plan a raid on the good guys. It's silly to assume that everyone wants to be a hero - being the bad guy is one of the things that make some games great (take Fallout for example, and selling your wife into slavery).

On Skill Gain (making 99999 plate arms = boring)

The skill gains in UO are, simply put, boring and repetitive. In absence of a leveling system (don't get me wrong, I prefer skill-based vs. level-based), it would appear that UO's skill gains are intentionally boring. Sure, you can craft items to order as a blacksmith, but no one wants your goods until you're maxed out (and sometimes not even then). There really needs to be some investigation into why it's necessary to force players to do this kind of repetitive chore - it's given rise to automation programs that are more interesting to code in and optimize than doing the actual skill gain itself.

On Items and Equipment (they're PANTS, why can't I wear them?)

As much as race-dependant stuff can be cool, it's generally not cool to players if you restrict what they can and can't use in an item-based game. There are robes and pants in Ultima Online, for example, that can only be used by elves. Why? What logical reason could there be for a simple tailored item like a robe to only be usable by an elf? Does the fabric hate humans? Things like this really only frustrate players. If there's a good reason for it, sure, but not just because you need something to differentiate the player races. Enchanted elven longbow? Sure. Elven pants? That's just stupid. Same goes for armor only wearable by females: Did it ever occur to you that some (really strange) males might WANT to wear that female plate? Not that I'm encouraging this, but there's no real reason not to allow it, unless you're afraid of lawsuits from parents of boys who suddenly start wearing bustiers.

Aaaanyway, I'm mulling a UO storyline around in my head, probably won't be done by tomorrow. Monday's my "deadline," so we'll see how that goes.

I have more thoughts on the state of UO and what could be done to improve it, but I think I've done enough damage for one post, so, until next time, stay away from the studded bustiers!

Yo ho ho

Obligatory pirate joke title aside, Cliff Harris has posted his findings and thoughts from a few days ago when he asked pirates why they do that thing they do. It's all very interesting and parallel to the kind of thing NIN's been pulling since their departure from "the man."

All in all it looks like people just don't like it when they are:

1. Charged too much. (overpricing)
2. Unable to get at things easily. (digital distribution)
3. Told what they can and can't do. (DRM)

You can even reduce digital distribution to a usability concern: Is the user experience of buying your games online optimized so that they feel confident about purchasing from you online? Marketing books like Call to Action (I own two copies of this) show that if there's either too much friction or insufficient forward momentum in the purchase process, people will often abandon it - in this case, possibly in favor of just sending an IM to their friend along the lines of "Hey, can you ZIP up that game and send it my way?"

I guess we're moving into a time when the user is king, and to say otherwise is to invite your own demise. I'll get into game packaging and episodic content in later posts...

Scaling Games

I was pondering tonight how one might create a scalable game, as to have it be fun and playable on anything from an HDTV (wide), to a CRT monitor (normal), to lower res and random aspect ratio devices like iPhones and other mobile devices.

1. Controls must be simple, limited to directional and maybe 1 or 2 function keys.
2. 3D would be good, sprite-based would be better purely for compatibility reasons, though this needs more research (not sure if 3d is even an option on mobile devices).
3. Real-time action is possible, while slower or turn-based would be preferable.

This being said, I had recently concepted a basic interface that would actually fit this model fairly well. Perhaps I'll make a weekend project out of implementing the interface in javascript.

Unrelated, I'm thinking of writing up an Ultima Online story arc as an exercise. Possibly by Friday?

Advancement and Involvement

This post is based on conversations over the last two days related (mostly) to this subject matter. What emerged from this is the basic idea that playability = advancement + involvement. Let's first define our terms:

Advancement: The rate at which the resources controlled by the player change in some way in a (usually) positive manner. "Positive" is of course relative to the player's goals: if your goal is to lose everything, then losing can be considered positive.

Involvement: How much you relate to the overall narrative experience of the game, and want to see it progress. I can't really say that this is entirely story-based, either. One might reduce it to "the next big carrot on a stick."

Playability: A moment-to-moment evaluation of advancement and involvement, which represents how much the player is actually interested in the game. Basically, the idea is that if this theoretical value dips too low for too long, the player becomes more and more likely to just stop playing the game altogether.

Another way of putting it: Advancement = pushing forward. Involvement = pulling forward. Playability is the sum of these, or overall forward motion. Advancement offers small and frequent rewards, while involvement offers the big payoffs.

The most applicable examples mentioned in conversation with Jason were Diablo 2 (PC), and Ninja Gaiden 2 (360). I'll toss the recently reviewed Braid (XBLA) in there as well.

Diablo 2

• Advancement: Constantly given new items, new skills, new levels, and new environments. Grade: Excellent.
• Involvement: The story is fairly interesting, with promises of showdowns with the big baddies. For those interested, the Diablo lore is actually quite deep. Grade: Good.

The overall feel of D2 for me is that the first play through is awesome, while subsequent plays are still great due to replayability and advancement. There's a million possible items for your character, and tons of possible skills and stats to tweak as you level.

Ninja Gaiden 2

• Advancement: New weapons / skills become increasingly rare as game progresses, character really doesn't advance too much. Not a lot in the way of rewards, apart from the feeling of success in any given victory. Grade: Average.
  
• Involvement: Where NG1 had at least a passable story, NG2 had an old rehashed "Bad people released fiends, fiends destroying stuff, go kill fiends" story. Boring and really didn't offer any desire to advance to the next chapter: You already know the next chapter is "go kill the next fiend." Grade: Poor.

I really wanted to love this game. It has awesome action gameplay and style galore, but style alone cannot save a fundamentally flawed game. Infrequent rewards and a bland storyline had me putting this one back in the stack halfway through.

Braid

• Advancement: Constantly challenged with new puzzles, each puzzle revealing a new piece to an image, and each world introducing a new gameplay style. Grade: Excellent.
• Involvement: The story in Braid is a fascinating narrative, and you can always see your goals - the attic "world," and the worlds that you have not yet unlocked. There's a lot of "wow, I wonder what they'll cook up next," which just increases the forward pull. Grade: Excellent.

I've pretty much reviewed this one already.

Conclusion(?)

During the conversation, there was a point where Jason asked me what I thought of "sandbox" games like SimCity or Spore. At the time, I said something to the effect of "They're like crayons. Crayons are just FUN." After a bit more thought, I think that these kind of games actually just rely almostly purely on Advancement - tiny rewards very frequently. You feel accomplished creating things, then bringing those things to life. Even simple puzzle games, Tetris for example, are subject to mostly advancement: rewarded by points and levels, you play for the fun of it. These games don't have to rely on Involvement quite so much because their Advancement is being constantly bumped up by the gameplay itself.

Involvement, on the other hand, seems like you might think of it as the lower-boundary of your gameplay experience. If you're really involved, you can survive an advancement lull in order to see what happens next in the game. If that involvement isn't there, a lull in advancement can absolutely kill a game.

Future posts will reference this one in regards to replayability (more Diablo/StarCraft) and story accessibility (yay, I get to write about Silent Hill.)

Braid is Awesome

Was turned onto Braid on XBLA this morning via a post by Xemu. This is the first time I've seen time travel as an effective game mechanic (unless you count Chrono Trigger, I guess?). I snagged it this morning and it made me late for work. When I got home, I played it non-stop until beating it. It is that much fun, and totally engrossing.

Part of the fun lays in that it offers so many variations on the time manipulation theme; you can reverse and fast-foward time, sometimes you control time by which way you walk, you can use your shadow from a previous time rewind to do things for you, and you can make a kind of time-slowing bubble. It's just a blast, and it's challenging, but not frustrating. Well, OK, 6-5 frustrated me just a bit (ok, a lot...).

The story is kind of thought provoking, with a wicked ending. Art's awesome as well. Normally I wouldn't do a game review — that's not what this blog is about — but I felt this game stood out because of the unique time manipulation stuff and off-beat story, so there you go. 5/5, 100%, etc. Well worth the 1200 points (or $15).

Oh, and oddly enough in relation to my last post, there are Mario references galore in this game.

How to Break a Player...

I was going to write about episodic content today, but instead I'm going to take it easy and mention something I kind of stumbled upon on YouTube this morning: Asshole Mario. aka Kaizo (hack) Mario World.

Click to search YouTube for the clips I'm talking about...

Seriously, folks, this is the most sadistic level design I've ever seen. I've got to give mad props to the player working through these, I would have broken down before finishing the first stage. You would find me gibbering in a dark corner somewhere, and occasionally you would faintly recognize a word or two, like "fekkin' plants," or humming the death melody while drawing simplistic Mario scenes on the walls in my own blood.

It just goes to show how important difficulty levels are, so a player can tune the game to their preferences. A game like "Asshole Mario" wouldn't sell very well, but it would be awesome to have it as an option, for those times when you feel like you can take on the world.

Bonus link: Mario: Game Over

Stuff to Write About

Things I need to write about in this blog, and their inspirations:

• Atmosphere and psychological trickery (Silent Hill)
  
• Variable playstyles (Ninja Gaiden as a pacifist, Fallout)
• Great storywriting (Dreamfall, Silent Hill, old adventure games)
• Player roles / Good vs. Evil (Ultima Online PVP & RP)
• Color and Character (World of Warcraft, Diablo 3)
• Risk vs. Reward (Ultima Online, etc)
• Episodic Content (Doom, Quake, Half-Life)
• Similarities to Marketing (none)
• User Interface: Web vs. Games (Ultima Online, World of Warcraft)

And, of course, any projects / experiments / etc that happen to come up.

Don't Make Me Repeat Myself

Yesterday I wrote praises of City of Heroes, with a little side note that City of Villains (when I last played it, at least) did not mirror those expectations. In the process of trying out the different character options, I completed the same introductory quests over and over. And over. And over and over. This is among the greater sins an MMO can commit, in my opinion.

Don't make me repeat myself! Quests are only interesting the first couple times. After that they become a chore. Shortly after becoming a chore, they become torture. Variety in content is absolutely necessary. In World of Warcraft, you at least get a different starting zone for each race, maybe a couple class-specific quests. When I played City of Villains, I quickly became tired of the same few quests with every new baddie I started. Ultimately, it led to a closed account.

Folks, please don't bore your players with repetitive tasks. It's really not that hard to put together a decent dynamic content generator. One that my friend Jason is fond of is one implemented in Anarchy Online: as he describes it (I haven't played AO), a machine allows players to pick and choose randomly generated quests, showing the rewards and requirements. Of course, it's much more difficult to automatically generate really immersive or involved quests, but I would imagine it's possible. In the absence of such a system, I'd settle for the AO model.

On the subject of repetition, I'll get into Ultima Online's skill system sometime.

On Instancing

I had a rather fascinating discussion today regarding the use of "instancing" in massively multiplayer games. For those not aware of the concept, it's essentially an area that a player or group of players experience as if they are the only ones in the game. It's employed by World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and to a lesser extent (to my knowledge), Ultima Online. For more info, see Instance Dungeon on wikipedia.

This conversation was with an old friend from Ultima Online, who is a vehement role-player and kind of a purist as far as the game itself is concerned. I managed to make her quite irate with my thoughts on instancing, in fact.

My thoughts on instancing pretty much could be summed up by saying "it has it's place, but is really being misused in some cases." More specifically, I'd say that instancing should really only be employed to solve the problem of gameplay overlap: If you're about to kill Final Boss A on a long, involved, immersive quest, and when you get to him you have to wait in line to start the final event, the experience is quite obviously going to be ruined. It's a solution to situations where the gameplay would be hopelessly ruined by overlap.

The problem, I said, was that it was being used more often than not to tune the content to the situation, rather than as a solution to an overlap. Look at World of Warcraft's dungeons and you'll see static content designed to be played by a very specific Tank-Healer-3DPS model. It's all or nothing, and it leads to forced grouping.

A game that DID get this right was City of Heroes: the instances - basically employed by a large percentage of quests - auto tuned to the players, rather than the other way around. You could solo them, or fight through them with your friends, and both were equally fun. Among my friends, it's commonly been said that the only thing COH got wrong was the lack of loot. If it had a robust loot system (note to self: more on loot systems in a later post), I think it would be a shining example of a near-perfect MMO (City of Villains is another subject entirely).

I feel like this should be repeated: Instances are for overlapping content, not tuning content to a maximum party amount. The instance should tune itself to the players, not the other way around. There is nothing wrong with single player instances, but be sure to balance it out with "outdoor" content. People still want to feel like they're adventuring, rather than passing by a bunch of boring content on the way to the instanced stuff.

At this point my friend told me to shut up before she punched something. I still think there's something to be said for using instancing in a way that facilitates gameplay, rather than as an excuse to force specific parameters.

On a related note, I spent a bit of time in Ultima Online today observing (I play a thief, all I can really do nowadays in UO is observe) a spawn based in the game's ongoing fiction. The event spawn, Melissa the Servant of Nosfentor (iirc) would spawn, get instantly mobbed by about 15 players and their enormous dragon pets, die with an RP event, and repeat the process every few minutes. You can't really take a big evil badass seriously when they're going through the same "I own you all!" speech every few minutes before getting unceremoniously smacked down. Now, if there were a lengthy and accessible quest line ending in an encounter with this character in a closed and instanced environment (in fact, the room she was in was PERFECT for instancing), it would have been considerably more enjoyable for those involved. In the current situation, it's basically just farming the mob for stuff to sell, with no care at all for the lore behind the situation.

First Post!

I thought it best to create a new blog centered on game design, rather than flooding up my writing blog with that kind of thing - while game writing IS writing, game design encompasses far more than just the writing of fiction. I wrote one post in my writing journal before creating this blog, and so I've replicated it here in this "FIRST POST!!!!11!."

Writing for games, I find, is quite a bit more complex than traditional writing. When I write for fun, it's usually a very loose experience; There's a lot of just writing down whatever the characters in my head are doing, thinking, etc. It's a much more fluid process.

When I'm writing for games, UO events in particular, there's a lot more consideration to how players would react to any given situation. It also has to be easily chopped into a combination of short story bursts (events) and ongoing background stuff (quests). Most, if not all, stories should have some sort of tie to the main theme or overall lore of the game. While you can always write a quick little quests where it's just kinda-sorta interesting, it's always a lot more fascinating and "epic" feeling when it feels like it's really a part of something larger. I try to tie the UO stories I write into the lore: virtues and anti-virtues, what may or may not have happened since the shattering of the gem of immortality (it's interesting to think of the entire Ultima storyline as "stuff that might or might not have happened in this timeline/shard").

Basically you have to think a lot more about how to work the players into the story, and it's that immersion which can make or break a plot. In the case of an MMO, it's more difficult to tie players directly into a story, as you can't be certain that they will be at the next event. Mid-event quests would seem to be the right answer to this - things that players can perform that are directly related to the ongoing fiction, and that directly affect the outcome of the story.

It's this interactivity that adds another factor to the game writing for a persistent world; You can only loosely define the story as it develops, if you're to give players the freedom to REALLY affect the outcome.

Of course, you can always just make everything static and predefined, but it takes away from the interactivity and therefore the overall immersion, and the players feel more like observers / pawns than heroes whose actions will determine the fate of the world.

I may write more on this in the future, possibly in a more professional format...