Umbrella Man
Anybody who doesn’t understand what that title has to do with what I’m about to blabber about wasn’t privy to the super-flammable Uru Live closure threads on the UbiSoft forums back in February of last year. Go here for an explanation.
Anyway, this does not, in fact, relate to Uru (at least not directly), but rather it’s another rambling musing post on my own game development, written when I should be asleep because the dipstick of an HR manager scheduled me to open tomorrow morning at 10AM (to those wondering why I’m complaining, I’m a night person almost by nature, and have worked about 6 opening shifts in the past year, but I’m digressing already).
I finally had a chance to sit down and chat with Pat - my manager who also doubles as a partner in insanity - about Phoenix (the partial title of my game, not the city in Arizona). For those who may have forgotten, Phoenix started life as a Homeworld mod idea, and ballooned from that into its own fully-fledged RTS game, and has since evolved into an MMO of epic proportions.
We talked about a lot of things tonight, and I got a number of good ideas just from taking to him. I always do, which is why I wanted to discuss things with him in the first place, plus he and I share similar opinions on the entertainment factor of the current offering of MMOs, so we share a similar wavelength when it comes to what we want to do.
The first thing we discussed was storytelling in a player-oriented world. I had, up until a couple of weeks ago, been willing to let players be characters from any currently-known race, but ran into problems when push came to shove and my story demanded events go one way, when player activity could very well drive them somewhere else. So, I briefly entertained the notion of simply restricting play to the human race, making all alien races NPC-only. Pat disagreed with that idea, and suggested a more fluid approach to storytelling be taken, wherein certain events should be written to occur in several different scenarios, so that while the events and circumstances leading up to a vital event may be different, odds are it will play out in a similar (though not identical) way to what had originally been designed. It requires a lot more work on the part of myself and whoever else ends up helping with the story development, because with this concept we’ll need a lot of consequence flowcharts to track the story’s evolution, and it requires me letting go of my incredibly vague story concept just a bit (which is fine, really…), but I think it will ultimately make for a game and a story that flow together better and take better advantage of player influence.
We also talked about city development and planning, and how to launch a game with a supposedly bustling capital city in place. Metropolises are hard to simulate in a computer because of the sheer volume of space they occupy, and modeling each room in every building is not on my to-do list. Ultimately, Pat confirmed that one of my earlier ideas was, with a little tweaking, a good one. Namely, let the city contain a number of skyscrapers and other rather large structures, but only allow general access to the lobbies of those buildings. Access to other areas would require an invitation or special clearance, thus saving me the headache of having to develop an entire city inside and out. Players could own storefronts near the spaceport, and warehouses above them would provide storage space for raw materials the shop may need, or finished items. Apartment complexes would offer general housing opportunities to players looking for a place to call home and stash their stuff, while more affluent players would eventually be able to afford whole houses or even mansions built in more “respectable” communities. The potential for player-owned property would even create the opportunity for unique player to player cooperation and communication. An example Pat used was one in which a restaurant owner in a certain neighborhood may offer discounts on meals to out-of-work members of the local community. Ultimately, I think I’ve decided to set the launch time period a little earlier than I originally planned to, enabling players to take greater part in the development of this new capital city and really make it their own (at least, to the extent that the game can feasibly allow). And for players who join later, there will always be more colonies to live in and help grow, if that’s the sort of player experience they’re interested in.
Interplanetary transportation also came up, as well as discussion of the design of the solar system itself. The design discussion lead to a rather interesting idea for a system that provides unique exploration and storytelling possibilities, and I really rather prefer it to the more boring 3-planet system I’d originally been developing. As for transportation, we decided on a number of things. First, Pat agreed with my notion of making the ship an inhabitable space, rather than just a shiny hollow shell you mysteriously inhabit. Again, more work for me because I have to design the exteriors *and* interiors, but hey, it’s fun. Besides, I want people to be able to really get attached to their ships and be able to tweak them to their own personal preferences, and it’s easier to do when you can stencil the dining room with a floral pattern ;). Anyway, NPC vs. PC transportation of other players came up, and we opted to allow both, especially for long-haul cross-system runs. We even decided to let players log out and still be able to continue their trip, unless of course you were the pilot, in which case, logging out could lead to you falling victim to a pirate attack while you were offline, with the potential for nasty consequences for your character, as well as anyone else you were carrying at the time. Cross-system travel won’t exactly be a quick trip, either… from one side to the other is about eight hours (planet-to-planet would, obviously, be a LOT shorter than that, depending on planetary positions at the time), so NPC transport is likely to have a bit of a stranglehold on the long-haul transport business. Capital city mass-transit also came up, and I opted to install a subway system, partly because I have a strange affinity for a well-designed subway system, and also because it allows for some CG trickery that above-ground systems wouldn’t be able to handle. Subway stops could be more easily added as the city expanded without having to worry about re-building railways, re-scripting entire bus routes or re-designing NPC taxi systems (PC-run taxis would be another interesting business possibility, coincidentally).
Finally, some random thoughts. PvP should be possible, though both parties would need to opt in before such activities would be permissible by the game (unless you specified during player creation that you were okay with unprovoked PvP against your character, such as a contract hit). By extension, Pat is of the opinion that players should be able to physically interact with each other (such as shoving and bumping), but I worry about the potential for severely decreased mobility in congested areas. Crafting should never be an option, but storefront owning, material sales, and possibly some industrial resourcing sorts of jobs should be allowed. The game should have a well-rounded, functioning economy, with failsafes in place to prevent recessions in the event that the game’s story drives the economy into the ground (how, I’m not sure, but I’ll go for it… nobody likes a recession). Players should be able to team up and form crews, who could go on jobs as a team and live in a ship together.
Ultimately, I was a bit pleasantly surprised that Pat was as enthused about the potential that MMOs provide for telling your own stories inside of a larger arc as I am, and we had a great time discussing ins and outs of design and gameplay, how the engine should accommodate certain scenarios, and what players could and should be able to do to help grow not just the story but the world itself.
More later. Right now, I’m off to bed. Have to be up entirely too soon.
November 26th, 2005 at 8:22 am
So? your point is?
In a forum just jam-packed with mean spirited people and quirky cutting edge technical work…what else could be expected. The spirit some of them showed was one of selfishness and pride. (”I gots mine screw the rest of youse!”)
Hell sir! with the kind of game it was, the kind it became, and the kinds of things folks were advocating as good game play in it, I suppose we are all lucky someone didn’t get killed over it.
I know that killin’ was discussed by some of the rats in the game. I read some of the threats/plans. In one of their “secret” forums, as a matter of fact.
I know for a FACT that issues relating directly to the political style manuevers used in that forum resulted in far reaching consequences. (Even as far as “Deviant Art”.) Tell me how that could be right,…can you?
I can name several people who had NOTHING to do with the damned thing who were negativly impacted by it. (f’in URU) I won’t bother though ’cause they are already on some kind of hit list, donchakno.
They are why I appeared, see?
November 26th, 2005 at 9:54 am
My point with even bringing up the Umbrella Man topic was to explain the title of the entry, which was an allusion to CyanBill’s metaphor for Cyan’s development of the game.
Beyond that, you haven’t made one lick of sense in your comment, but I won’t ask you to expound on your point because it’s already completely off the actual subject of my post in the first place.