Entries Tagged 'Production' ↓

Following up from part 1, here are lessons 6 through 8. I didn’t quite make it to 10, but at the end, you’ll see what I want to do about that.

Lesson #6: Remember everything else!

…working at an MMORPG is not only programming. You also have to do some advertising, public relations, dealing with the players, read/moderator the forums and the game, and many other things you don’t even think of before you actually have a working game full of players.

This is particularly nerve-wracking to me, because I’m going to need extra help once we launch. So I’ll be calling on responsible, reliable, and enthusiastic community members to help me with as much as they want.

Lesson #7: Do backups!

The good news was that he replaced that machine with a better one (Dual P3, 1.1GHZ). The bad news was that we had no backups whatsoever. So all the player files, the guild files, and pretty much all the dynamic data, plus the logs and ban list was gone.

And not just the game…

One nice July day, while I was at work, a script kiddie used an exploit to gain moderator access, and deleted most of our forums.

I’ve learned this one from running and building websites. Still, you can never assume anything about your hosting with regard to backups. You should do manual backups, too!

Lesson #8: When change comes, so will complaints

…usually whenever we change how something works, there are at least a few players complaining, threatening to leave the game, etc. In fact, whenever we are making something that was previously simple more complex, a lot of players take it almost as a personal insult.

I was thinking that the chance is pretty reasonable, and was hoping the players will enjoy this change, as it was designed to add some spice into a boring activity while reducing macroing as well. However, the intensity of the complaints was overwhelming. Someone went so far as removing one of our download mirrors. But on top of that, people were raging on our forums, threatening to quit, saying how much the game sucks now, and so on and so forth. Even players that were previously on our side whenever we made an unpopular change started to complain to me, saying they will quit playing if we don’t change it back.

Corroborated by Brian Green (via Raph Koster’s blog):

The basic player demand is, “Improve the game, but don’t change anything.”

This is pretty scary to me, because I know there will be large adjustments made to Lila Dreams as we add new features and really “figure out” the gameplay (because you never know until you have a full set of players in there if something is really going to work in the long term).

It’s made a little more drastic by the fact that the launch version of the game is not the whole game. But in order to launch something that is “whole enough” and fun, I will have to make concessions to design with the expectation that there will be possibly large changes after that to accommodate the post-launch features. I aim to minimize this, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

Lessons 9 and 10

You have a new quest!

Since I really enjoy blog interaction, I figured we could continue this in comments. As players (and developers?), what are your #9 and #10 lessons?

What isn’t handled well or could be handled better in MMOs you play (or played) that we could learn from? What things have gone right that we could learn from?

Any takers?

I ran across a really interesting article from 2005: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.php. It’s a unique look into how things work behind the scenes of an indie/freeware MMO.

What’s more interesting is I could compare my plans with the author’s experience, and determine if I’m doing anything right. Luckily, most of what he covered I had accounted for. But I thought it is worth highlighting here, and maybe commenting with regard to where Lila Dreams’ development is at this very moment.

So this is part 1, the first five lessons.

Lesson #1: Nobody reads

…before adding the combat, even though we had a big, red bold text on the download page stating that the game has no combat, people were still downloading, and their fist question was, invariably, “How do I kill something?”

You can always be surprised by how true this is. I knew this from other game development experiences, but it’s easy to forget.

Lesson #2: All or nothing

Eternal Lands isn’t an AAA game, but most of the people expect the same quality from any game they download, even if it’s free or beta. Not surprisingly, 99% of the people that downloaded the game didn’t stay for more than, at most, one hour.

Corroborated by Nerfbat.

A game is only as strong as its weakest feature. Games are more often judged by their weaknesses than their strengths, just like anything else. Any incomplete feature or complete but crappy feature will leave a bad taste in players’ mouths.

If a feature isn’t up to snuff, leave it out until it’s really ready for the public. Of course, this means you can’t promise too much before you launch if you can’t get all those cool features implemented with sufficient quality, or players will be disappointed!

I may have already crossed that line (that’s why I clammed up when I realized development would be delayed by the recent change in staff). But the silver lining is that this is an online game, so we can have constant updates and new features after launch. I hope that takes out some of the sting.

Lesson #3: People will cheat

Even in a freeware game. In any game. Even when it’s kinda pointless. I don’t get it, but we have to take measures against it anyway.

Some resources were placed in very convenient places; for example, there were some flowers right outside of the flower shops so a player could easily make a lot of money by harvesting flowers and selling them 10 meters away in the shop. Macroing is a common cheating method that automates a player’s actions by external macros that simulate specific actions.

Lesson #4: Always make tutorials optional

…a lot of the beginners didn’t feel like doing the tutorials either. They just wanted to “kill stuff”. Consequently, many weren’t able to leave the newbie island, because they didn’t read the NPC texts. In order to address this problem I had to implement a text command to skip the tutorial. Even though the first NPC did say that if you want to skip the tutorial just type #skip, this didn’t really help. For some reason, some people can’t even read small amounts of text. So, in a way, the newbie island was defeating it’s own purpose.

This is kind of a corollary to #1, and like #1 you can never get used to how much people will ignore your work on tutorials.

Lesson #5: Always have tutorials

I decided to just remove the tutorials, and let the beginners start on a larger island, which had “stuff to kill” (as they would expect) and didn’t require any tutorials to leave it.

Nevertheless, many people were now complaining that there is no tutorial… so I implemented a different tutorial on the starting island, which enables (but doesn’t require) you to get more familiar with the game and even earn you a few prizes. This worked much better than the first type of tutorial.

Of course there will be tutorials in Lila Dreams. This game is a lot different from a conventional MMO, and I view that as a liability as much as a feature. So, I’ll try to compensate by having plentiful, repeatable (but optional!) tutorials to ease players into things.

This is harder than it seems, because consider that the control scheme itself is even a little unconventional (although we’re trying to keep it as intuitive as possible). If a player can’t easily grasp the controls quickly, that’s a big deal. But I think we can make it fairly painless, and the control scheme is not crazy, it’s just not “click here and watch your avatar move to that spot.”

Next time, I’ll talk about the other five lessons.

Since I don’t want our beloved community to languish during this lull in our development, I thought I should update everyone on our current activities.

Dave is feverishly learning the code base. It’s big, really big. I know, because I’m learning it too! I’ve promoted myself to real programmer status, and actually it’s pretty fun. So Dave and I are staring up at this mountain we need to climb in order to get production moving at full steam. But we’re not afraid.

(I’m gonna talk a bit tech-head now, because I don’t want to talk game design until we get this baby moving again.)

Actually, I’ve begun to rewrite our tools from scratch. The version we’ve used up to now was a kind of Frankenstein of rushed hacks and patches. It also wasn’t set up to support the workflow I want the project to have. I’m fixing all that now.

Dave is working on getting the server to send assets to the client (whereas before they just got grabbed from a public URL). In the process, we’re building a new asset management system, and exploring all the deep, dark corridors of this MMO engine’s dungeons.

Fun, exciting, and I’ve actually got a very optimistic outlook for the future of the game. Lila is far from over.

Wow, a whole month went by. I wish I could say we’ve been too busy working on the game to post, but the reality is that we’ve been looking for a new programmer most of that time.

The good news is that we found a gentleman named Dave Robinson wandering around in our back yard one night during a full moon. It turns out, he’s a programmer, and he’s crazy enough to want to join Lila Dreams’ crack development team as our server specialist! It’s crazy because this is an ambitious project (to understate it), and we are but three sexy men. Four sexy men, actually, since our own Ted Ludzik is also a big part of the process.

I’m still talking to other good folks about becoming our client/Flex programming specialist, so there will be another person joining us eventually.

Now, Dave will sweat in our programming shed under the heat of the Summer sun, and figure out how the game we have works. Then we’ll get back to adding new things to it, and one day… Lila will breathe her first breath. Please bear with us as we get the ball rolling again.

Like they say: nothing worth doing is easy. This must be worth doing, cause it sure as $&*^ isn’t easy!

Update

We’re now on the lookout for a Flex 3 specialist to work on the client and tools. Please see the help wanted page for updated details.

* * *

Some things are changing here at Creatrix Games, and we are looking for a potential lead programmer for Lila Dreams.

If you have Java and Flex experience, we want to hear from you. If you know somebody who might be interested and qualified, we want to hear from you!

For all the gory details about the position, please read this page.

Don’t worry, the project isn’t stopping. We’re just shifting things around a bit.

Here we have a conceptual scene of a group of three memekins in the hills near Jalopy: a Naturalist (bottom, left), a Trapper (middle), and a Painkeeper (right). I won’t say much about the details since none of this is final yet, but one key fact is that you are what you wear.

This week, I present another concept drawing of one of the game’s locations: Elevon. It is a manifestation of Lila’s ingenuity and logic, populated by gentlemen scientists and their quixotic experimentations. They even have a rocket.

This is a city of science, but a strange mix of it. Retro and bionetic (living machinery) mingle amid the step pyramids upon which buildings are constructed. Exposed gears and pipes peek out of the pyramids and suggest mysterious goings-on. You can never tell with inventors.

Surrounding Elevon’s pyramids is a vast stretch of desert, where only thorny plants and hardy iguanas thrive. Well, there might be more out there, but don’t go exploring unprepared.

Better late than never, they say. It might not be Tuesday, but here’s a little something I wanted to share anyway. (I didn’t mean for that to rhyme, but sometimes… you’ve just got it.)

Behold, the icy shores of Northlook Island!

Ta-ta! Now I must get back to doing secret game design things.

Ok, so I didn’t post anything last week. I’ve flogged myself for six hours and twenty-nine minutes for that. But, really, I didn’t want those wonderful memory stories to stop coming! Go back and post one if you didn’t already.

With the titillating title of this post, I have to deliver something. And I’m absolutely dying to share what we’re doing behind these tightly closed doors, so I’m going to allow myself a smidgen of satisfaction and show off some of the pre-Alpha art Greg has done.

First, though, what the heck is “pre-Alpha?” Am I some kind of space cadet geek or something? Actually, the game production schedule is broken into some big pieces, and we just call those ridiculously ambiguous names: pre-production, prototype, alpha, and beta. Lila Dreams is in prototype now, where we’re building the main parts of the game that will support all that fun stuff we have planned. Next comes Alpha, which means we have all the major features done (but they’re probably not very fun and definitely not refined). So, “pre-Alpha” means somewhere before Alpha.

Lesson aside, here’s what you came for. (Disclaimer: this art represents one tiny slice of the game world. Don’t go thinking it’s all about monsters and combat and stuff–that’s only one focus of several. You probably already know that if you read this blog regularly, but someone just coming here for the art might get a different impression.)

The first of our test creatures is called a Barnockle. It’s a little multi-eyed thing that sits on pretty much any surface (sticky butt, you see) and shoots out little poisonous spores at anyone who comes near. (It’s on the left, there.)

Then we have a Shakroo. This is a boney-insectoid creature that has to hop to stay alive, so it hops a lot. Just don’t let it hop on you or those pointy feet will be stabbing you in the face. In.. the.. face! That’s gotta hurt.

And then is the conflicted Wocky. Except, it’s us that is conflicted, because it seems like a gigantic, cute, furry-tailed thing. In reality, it’s nasty and mean, and tends to stun with its sonic attack. Don’t get any ideas about petting one without special preparations which are classified right now.

There you have it, some Lila Dreams art that may or may not end up in the actual release.

While the above pics are static mock-ups, they were made with the in-game art. So what you see there is how the game actually looks right now (minus the glorious multi-layer scrolling). These are not official “screenshots,” just to be clear, but they’re a really good approximation.

Well, Joseph asked, and since I’ve mostly spilled the beans on as much gameplay talk as I am comfortable with, I thought maybe I could discuss some of the technology we’re building for Lila Dreams.

Some graphics snobs will scoff at a 2d game. The client is what? Flash? The server is what? Java?! Ha-ha-ha-ha! “Your game is so low-tech players have to pedal to keep it running.” (Ok I just made that up–it’s bad, I know.) But, seriously, there’s a lot to love about 2d art. Especially when you’re on a budget!

One central technology for the game is the “2d bones” animation system. That’s just fancy-talk for little bits of art attached together like a paper doll puppet that has joints. Only digital. This has a ton of great benefits over traditional animation techniques.

Avatar Customization

Since player avatars are made up of various pieces, it’s really simple to mix and match. So, instantly you get a huge range of customization options. And because the system uses hierarchical rotations, we can do cool things like attach items to your avatar’s hand and the item will move with the hand. It’s gonna rock.

On-demand Animations

Because the art is in pieces, and there are no “cel” frames, we can create animations separate from the art, then mix and match animations. For instance, maybe there are several styles of walking animations (one of which is a limping walk, just for Chris Pasley). Since the animation consists only of motion data, and not artwork, that animation can be used by any avatar.

But wait! There’s more. This opens up a particularly large amount of options for emotes! You could have hundreds of emotes. I could design a dancing mini-game around that fact. (Wait, did I just type that out loud?)

This just goes on and on.

Creature Comforts

Well, maybe not comfort, but body parts! Interchangeable ones. So the game can randomize body parts for creatures and the issue of a room full of clones goes away. So maybe for each creature there are several head, torso, and limb variations, and each creature would have some random configuration of them so that each one appears a little different from the others. How cool is that?

Animation for Everyman–sorry, Everyperson

One more nice thing about this system is that to create an animation, you don’t have to be able to draw. You just drag joints around and set keyframes. So even if we can’t all be an artistic god like Greg, we can maybe make some really cool animations. This has the benefit of allowing us to spread that workload around the team, or maybe even to talented community members! That way we can generate mountains of animations without killing a single starving artist.

So, there’s a little taste of the kinds of things we’re doing in terms of technology. We’re doing a lot of other stuff, too, but we have to parcel this out across weeks so there’s something to talk about! It’s for your own good, so don’t complain.

And now, we present concept art of a snail mail courier.