Home   |   About   |   Blogroll   |   MMOG Blogs

Metaplace Virtual Worlds and Remote Embedding

As posted on Raph’s blog today, Metaplace has officially released support for remote embedding of worlds. Embedding a Metaplace world on any web site (including a blog) is now nearly as simple as embedding a Youtube video. With some assistance from a beta tester’s WordPress plugin, I’ve festooned the “Pages” section of WorldIV with a few games and demos that I’ve tinkered fitfully with on Metaplace. Free registration is required to check out Metaplace worlds, but it can be done seamlessly while viewing the embed. Enjoy (Meep Defender is my favorite) — or even better, go explore Metaplace and find cooler worlds than these!

Some of Tacheverts Metaplace Worlds

Whither the One-Liner?

Lapsana apogonoides by junichiro aoyamaI often hear the question: What impact does Twitter “really” have? Well, I think that Twitter and its ilk have struck a painful blow at blogs. As South Park might say, “Those bastards! They killed one-liners!”

Even here at WorldIV, we used to often post entries which, if not precisely one-liners, had the souls of one-liners. Heck, we often felt that we needed to blather out at least a paragraph and draw some foolish conclusion just to justify a simple link.

What did producing a “meaty one-liner” look like?

The one-liner
Thanks to Troy Gilbert’s Twitter, here are some cool randomly-generated pictures of Space Invaders graphics. http://bit.ly/vi9Th and http://bit.ly/4Y0m6

Expansion phase 1 - keep it in the family
Via a recent Raph Koster blog entry, I saw a neat pixel art poster homage to classic videogaming.

Expansion phase 2 - an unsubstantiated (likely unsubstantiatable) generalization
I guess this conclusively proves that retro videogame pixel art is entering pop culture consciousness. Insert metaphorical comparison to paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans here.

So I guess…

It took a little bit of clever thinking to extend a one-liner to the point where it felt “worthy” of cluttering your RSS. Now I can blithely Tweet away, and always blame the 140-character limit. Twitter feels like it’s “pulled a Myspace.” It took something that formerly required a bit of art and craft, and reduced it to the point where everyone can do it easily — at the expense of the craft part.

And seriously? Check out those Space Invaders pictures: http://bit.ly/vi9Th and http://bit.ly/4Y0m6

Plants vs Zombies

I love Tower Defense. I play all sorts of variations. I even wrote a cheesy clone in Metaplace one weekend. I’m also a big fan of PopCap games like Bejeweled and Insaniquarium.

Given all this, I was thrilled to hear about Popcap’s newest game, Plants vs Zombies. A quick hop into Steam, and I was ready to thrash some zombies! My impressions after the cut…

Plants vs Zombies screenshot

Read More »

The Joy of Cheating

Supreme Master Scholar (well, almost)

I recently finished the Master Scholar Quest in LotRO for an alt. This was the last quest gating completion of Scholar crafting up until Supreme Master Scholar.

I had carefully wound my way from Esteldin across Nan Amlug towards the canyons of Angmar, stopping only at Aughaire to greet the Stable Master (easy return trips!). From there, I carefully picked a route between the mobs of Fasach-larran, ever careful to give the enemies of the free peoples a wide berth (and fleeing when necessary). My objective, a dwarven book, was at the Cairn of Honor, where even the weeds con’d purple to me. The top of the Cairn was busy with Angmarim. I had read the cheatstrategy site and knew the general location, but not the exact spot. Not knowing exactly where the book was, I couldn’t just dash and grab. Thankfully, a passing player drew aggro. I ran in, nabbed the objective, and jumped the first Warg back to Aughaire.

What does this have to do with cheating? I finished the Master quest at level 23, far earlier than level 40, the level expected by the LotRO’s designers.

For those that don’t play LotRO, let me explain. Read More »

Simply Challenging

UPC tattooWhen I was in Las Vegas last year, I got this tattoo. I also learned something important from my friendly tattoo artist. You see, a UPC code sure LOOKS simple — it’s all straight lines and circles! But it turns out that it’s REALLY difficult to execute. You see, your arm isn’t actually flat, so these symettrical, simple shapes can easily distort.

Making something simple means that the flaws are easy to spot. It can be harder than succeeding with something intricate.

As I posted previously, we learned this at Metaplace as we created a version of Rock-Paper-Scissors. The game mechanics were, as expected, blindingly simple — but getting the full feedback loop to feel right was a challenge!

Fortunately, there’s lots of prior art to learn from, if you’re looking to make a simple game feel fun. For instance, Fishing Girl takes an ubersimple mechanic — you need only your mouse button to play — and constructs an engaging gameplay experience out of it!

I’m considering making a run at the classic game Assassin. This starts me with two challenges: What are the key elements of Assassin that I wish to distill, and what are a couple of key challenges where unique approaches or changes might be required?

Key Elements

  • Assassin is a game of solo achievement. There are no formal teams or clan structures.
  • You receive a target mark. You must find and eliminate this person. Meanwhile, you are attempting to maintain a low profile to prevent other players from finding and eliminating you.
  • Self-defense: In high school, we maintained the rule that you could only target your assasination mark, UNLESS someone else drew on you. (We used water pistols.) Then, you were welcome to engage in a water fight.
  • Escape: If you hit your assassin before he/she hits you, he/she is “injured” and you gain a brief invulnerability window within which to escape.
  • When dead, you’re out. Your mark passes to the target who eliminated you. You can only be permanently eliminated by the person who has you as a mark.
  • You earn points for eliminting your mark. Rounds are timeboxed to prevent “eternal hiding” from ruining the game. Overall score is determined from a succession of rounds over a preset time interval.

Challenges

  • Collusion: To prevent “no-kill” collusion, failing an assignment should be penalized.
  • Watergunplay: A little bit of randomness should be introduced to simulate the real-life challenge of being stealthy and accurate enough to shoot an opponent with a water pistol!
  • Finding your opponent: If the gameplay area is large enough, some system might be necessary to help locate marks. Tuning (such as effect on scoring) TBD.
  • Feedback mechanisms: Assassin players should be able to find the round status, game status, etc information that is important to deciding how to play throughout a level.
  • Continuing Motivation: Long-term reward mechanisms (starting with high scores) are needed to keep players returning. In theory, the influx of new players should add gameplay variation, though this may need attenuation over time (perhaps low-level players are worth fewer points, to prevent colluding experienced players from rampaging unchecked).

Console Sandboxes

After signing up for Gamefly, I tried out a couple of games from my “older stuff” list. (Well, a coworker actually bought one game FOR me via Gamefly, at a FAR more attractive used price than GameStop was offering, but it’s all close enough.) I approached both games with some preconceptions, and both games proved me wrong!

Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed is billed as a stealth-action game with sandbox-y elements. I abandoned both! You see, you’re just so damned GOOD at fighting that unless you pick a fight in line-of-sight to a half-dozen archers, you can pretty much defeat any number of enemies. But I’m here today to talk about sandbox gameplay. The sandbox gameplay in Assassin’s Creed consists solely of deciding to (or not to) be a completionist. You see, you CAN locate 2-3 “investigations” in each level, rush through them, kill the bad guy, and move on. OR you can search for flags / people to kill / people to save / tell towers to jump off. And you can backtrack to replay old levels that you weren’t completionist about. That must be what they mean by sandbox.

That said, I finished the game. So I’m not saying it wasn’t fun. And the graphics are compelling, if you haven’t checked it out yet.

Sandbox score: low. Recommendation: At least rent this game.

Mercenaries 2

Don’t be fooled by the lower-than-it-deserves 72 Metacritic score, or by the heinous voice acting. (I haven’t heard voice acting this stilted since Resident Evil, where I’m still convinced that the voice acting was an intentional joke.)

Mercenaries 2 is the sandbox gameplay GTA IV only dreamed it could have.

There’s a plot, whenever you feel like doing it. There are scads of side missions you can do, or not. There’s a typical “explore and collect stuff” gameplay element, only the stuff you collect consists of munitions, fuel, airstrikes, cash — things you’ll directly use in your game, not “find 100 hidden tokens and get a prize.” You can steal cars, start fights, impersonate factions and make THEM start fights… Plus, you can join your friends’ games on the spot, giving you cooperative multiplayer without breaking out of single-player immersion — neat!

And you can blow up just about everything. What’s not to love?

Sandbox score: high. Recommendation: Buy it — it’s totally worth the used price!

Game Spending Habits

Dime StackHey man, there’s a recession on.

Things are OK out on my side of WorldIV-land. Emi’s employed, I’m employed, and neither of us thinks our jobs are evaporating tomorrow. Still, in a rough economy like this, it’s smart to trim some fat.

Let’s face it. Video games are fat. So I’ve been trimming.

I’ve cancelled all of my paid MMO subscriptions. When I have the time, MMOs are the cheapest entertainment I can imagine — but lately, I just can’t seem to find the time. With summer arriving and the weather turning nice (well, this is San Diego, so “niceR”), the idea of grinding on orcs just isn’t holding me. It’s strange to be without an active MMO. And I’m trying out “freemium” games lately, because I WOULD be willing to micro-pay my way through an MMO…

I’ve been disappointed by a bunch of my $50-$60 console/PC game purchases over the last few years. That’s a LOT of money to sink on a game, and once I’m done with it, I rarely want to re-play it. That’s a major change in my habits, by the way — I ALWAYS used to play games a couple of times. So I’ve become that guy. I shop sales. I buy pre-owned. I watch Steam for its weekly sales. And I finally signed up for GameFly, which is kind of like the Netflix of video games. At $16/month, I figure so long as I swap out my games more than once every four months, I’m doing OK with them.

What changes, if any, has the recession brought to your game spending trends?

Relevancy of Game Blogs

Cuppy poses a question on her blog:

It seems like a decent amount of people who design games for a living want to blog and share that knowledge with others.

My question is: Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they even good designers?

This has stirred up several responding blog posts already, as well as some discussion in comments.

I can’t answer this question directly, for a couple of reasons. I wouldn’t call myself a professional game designer, though I think everyone in the development loop DOES wear the design hat at times. But even assuming that I’m qualified to call myself a “professional game designer / blogger,” I am of course deeply invested in both game work AND blogging. The question feels masturbatory to me. How could a direct response be anything but “Duhhhh… I rawk, and I know what I’m talking about, so game design blogs rule!” And yet, now that I’ve whored trackbacks at THREE blogs, I feel honor-bound to try to contribute some value to the discussion. Blast!

WONTFIX - WORKSFORME

Tuebit and I started this blog years before either of us worked in the game industry. And yet, even our armchair quarterbacking inarguably had SOME value. Maybe it’s because the blog was public discussion of our attempts to write games. (For those who didn’t follow those dark days, we sure learned a lot about game development. Mostly by failing repeatedly!)

Did our blog advance the sainted art of game design? Probably not. Did someone, somewhere share or see an idea or two that might have inspired something good? It’s possible, and maybe even likely. And did it benefit US — the blog authors? That would be an affirmative.

Yes. Sometimes.

Stuff like Shamus Young’s series on a procedurally generated cityscape is fascinating, and I learned things from it. It’s got tricks, tips, and it’s just plain interesting.

The design challenges and prototyping art from Lost Garden are awesome. OK, so I’ve never taken the design challenges further than paper, but I’ve sure put Planet Cute tiles to work for me before!

Everything I Know About Game Design I Learned From Stephen King

I cried when I read parts of The Dark Tower. This is despite the fact that what I read wasn’t really a surprise. I mean, Stephen King broke the fourth wall, wrote a note in the story text as the author and TOLD me a character was going to die, and yet it still kicked me in the nuts when it happened.

In essence, that’s what I feel is a great bit of game design. Meaningful moments of play, without resorting to tricks and surprises every time. The day I can TELL you that something amazing is going to happen — and yet, when it happens, you’re still amazed — then I’ll have a game design I like. But how do I get there (and even better, bring you with me)?

I can talk about fiero and atoms and graph theory and projection of force and feedback loops all I want. That’s awesome and empowering, and will help me talk within the community of “game designers who’ve done the academic legwork and can apply it to their work.” But Stephen King succeeded as a novelist because he was a great storyteller. He managed to tell stories — many that, from a perspective of scope, are quite comparable with “literature” — and succeeded by learning how to tell his stories to “us plain folks.”

In conclusion

I lied; I’m going to answer the questions directly.

Do they know what they’re talking about? Do even the great designers generate hits consistently? Game design is a creative art. Designers blogging about it know as much as composers who blog who know as much as writers who blog. So the answer is no… and yes.

Are they even good designers? I don’t even know if that matters. I learn as much from reading design ideas that get torn apart as from great ideas. And I learned even more from writing dozens of terrible ideas here. So the answer is… More importantly, are YOU learning design from them?

Duhhhh… I rawk, and I know what I’m talking about, so game design blogs rule!