Creatrix Games is more indie than ever! Go, underdog!!

The project has slowed to a crawl, unfortunately, because I had to backtrack and am reworking a lot of code from scratch. So, this has destroyed our milestone schedule, and as a result I am not getting any more funding until functionality is back to the point where our previous milestone left off. The sucky part is that much of the code done previously was not viable in terms of being a basis for building upon, so I can only salvage small parts of it. The rest goes in the trash.

The real wrench in the works here is that I still need to eat. (Why?! Why must my mammalian metabolism demand daily fuel?!) I’ve had to divert most of my attention to other projects in order to not starve, lose my house, and become a hobo. This vicious cycle has left me with almost no time to work on Lila Dreams, although it has not drained any of my determination. It just means the game is going to be released a lot later than any of us had ever wanted. Still, I’d rather release late than never!

The good news is that there is running code and a solid, new technical architecture, so at least I have confidence that I can actually get it all put back together eventually. As with many things in life, it comes down to simply finding the hours in each day to get something accomplished.

I do foresee income from my other ventures reaching a point where I can get back to 80% of my time being spent on Lila Dreams, so nobody had better start nay-saying! There’s a bright future for this project. It’s still gonna be awesome.

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.

Willian Gallis, from the site KongBr, did an interview with me a little while ago. On his site, the text is in Portuguese (he translated it–unfortunately, I don’t speak the language). He generously gave me permission to post the English version of the interview here. Thank you, Willian!

Willian Gallis: First of all, I wanna thank you for this interview.

Jason McIntosh: My pleasure!

Well, the first thing everybody always wanted to know is: Who are Creatrix Games guys?

Greg Tice (the game’s visual designer) and I have been making games and games designs for a long time together. Creatrix has been around for about two and a half years as a company (as in, being full time developers) and we made a few downloadable games in the past. I have no “real” game industry experience, other than as an indie developer trying to build an established company. When we started Lila, I brought Neo Binedell on board as the lead programmer.

We have a second (non-MMO) project in the works, and there are other people involved in that team. So Creatrix Games is made up of a couple of teams, all working remotely via the Internet. It works out well, actually.

So, it’s your first big game?

We made a casual game for Playfirst, which was funded, so I guess this is our second “big” game, though none of them are big in terms of budget.

And how is the experience of developing one of the first Premium Games for Kongregate?

Working with Kongregate has been great. We are given basically as much creative freedom as we want, and you can’t really ask for more than that. It’s been lots of fun, but really challenging because the game deisgn and the actual development are very ambitious.

What [is] the major idea behind Lila Dreams?

The player is a being called a “memekin” which exists in the psyche of Lila, an 11 year old girl. So the game world is all in her mind, and all the locations and game elements usually take on some aspect of her personality, thoughts, and memories.

There isn’t really any single “goal” for the game, since it’s more like an ongoing world that you can explore. But there are creatures, villains, and some characters to meet. The game is very light on story, though, and is more about exploring and going on short adventures with others.

And from where the inspiration for this game came from?

I don’t think there is any single inspiration, other than I knew that I wanted to make a game in a world without a lot of rules. But I didn’t want it to be a typical medieval fantasy world, so I chose to make it all in a little girl’s mind.

I saw something about Lila’s mood affecting the whole game. How it is supposed to work?

The idea is that players can collectively change Lila’s mood, and the emotion of her mood determines some benefits and changes to the game world. Certain areas opening up or closing, creatures appearing or disappearing, and other changes like that are determined by Lila’s mood. There will also be visual markers to depict her mood, like sky colors and various statues and things in the geography.

I loved this concept. But how exactly can the players change her mood? Doing some specific quests or just acting weird?

Acting weird? I wish we could use webcams and players that behave the strangest would change her mood!

Haha. That would be nice.

There are some mechanics to make it happen, but those are top secret right now. The mechanics are intended to allow every player to contribute to which mood he or she wants to choose. But the outcome depends on large groups working together.

The cooperation is very distributed, though, so it won’t be like raids or something in WoW. It’s much more casual than that.

Are there other types of player interaction? Like Player battles, Cooperative quests, etc.?

Players will be able to group and go adventuring together in instanced labyrinths.

I have all kinds of ideas for other things, but the initial release will be only a slice of the full design due to budget constraints. After launch, we hope to be adding new things all the time.

Another thing I heard is that the game won’t be a grind MMO. How is the game gonna work?

Weeellll.. that is all secret at the moment. But I have tried to remove as much grindy gameplay as possible. There are no levels or experience points, for example.

So, the equipments will be one of the ways of measuring the player skill?

Equipment will be a very central part of it, yes.

These equipments are the usual ones (swords, armors, etc.) or something new?

I’m trying to stay away from medieval stuff as much as possible, and since we’re talking about a world made of psyche, there will be a mix of things, including medieval, modern, and futuristic stuff.

Any chance of having a Plasma Rifle? I always wanted a Plasma Rifle.

There might be something like it. But we’re trying to be unconventional and stick with the theme of the setting, so it won’t be like a totally incoherent mix of swords, guns, and lasers.

It will all have a connected feel that fits the style of the world, so probably you won’t see a plasma rifle by that name, but maybe functionally there will be a weapon in there that would be similar.

Another interesting feature I saw is about the [creatures]. What can you say about them?

We’re going to have quite a large bestiary. Each area has a set of creatures that inhabit it, so there will be different types of things to encounter that fit with their habitats. We’re trying to make their behaviors as varied as possible so you always find something new.

And what can you tell about the cities?

There are a few major cities, and I hope we can get them all in the game by launch, but if not we’ll just have more stuff to give people later! Cities will be the main social areas, as well as centers for recuperating after a long expedition.

Most cities have a story and are based on some aspect of Lila’s personality or life. So, depending on how much time we have, I’d like to give each city some mysteries to be discovered by players. We’ve certainly got plans for it, but again budget is such a constraint that we will probably defer a lot of this kind of content until after the game’s initial launch.

There is a lot more I could say, but I don’t want to disappoint players if we don’t actually get to implement some of it.

Are you guys planning to open a Alpha Test like some of the other Premium Games?

There will be closed Alpha testing, and then probably closed Beta, then an open pre-release period. My guess is that a lot of the testers will come from the Kongregate community for the closed phases.

Of course, betas are buggy and incomplete, but that’s the price of admission, I guess.

Ok Jason, thank you very much of the interview. Do you have any message for the Brazilian Kongregate community?

I would love to see Brazilian players in the game! I usually only think of it in terms of North America because that’s where I live, but the thought of an international audience is really exciting and humbling to me.

First, a disclaimer: The things listed here represent my ideal implementation. What the actual implementation and form of classes turns out to be may differ from what you read here.

In other words, we’re going to try and implement all of this stuff, but we might not be able to or we might find some changes that are more fun during the process. Don’t be surprised if the game is a little different from this plan.

1. There are classes in Lila Dreams?

I haven’t really spoken much about specifics, but I thought I would reveal that there will be character classes in Lila Dreams. [Edit: After this post was published, I changed the term "class" to "role" in the game design, so what you might think of as "classes" in many MMOs would be called "roles" in Lila Dreams. Henceforth, the confusion shall be minimal! (I hope. *gulp*)]

These are maybe not what you’re used to, though. We’re not talking about monolithic, long-term classes that require months of dedication like in World of Warcraft or many other MMOs like it.

Which leads to thing number two that you didn’t know…

2. Classes are dynamic

Your character will be able to play any class that you are in the mood to use. This has some neat effects:

• You will never be unable to play with your friends because they “don’t need another healer in the group.” You can switch to any class very easily.
• Specialization is possible, but not required. If you get bored playing one class, there’s not a lot of investment necessary to try another class for a while.

But there is some investment necessary…

3. Classes must be unlocked

Each class must be unlocked by performing a set of tasks for a teacher. This is to:

• Limit player information overload by not giving access to everything all at once.
• Give new players high-reward, immediate goals to work toward.
• Each class “quest” (I hesitate to use that loaded term) serves as a tutorial about the class.
• You get a taste of the kinds of activities the class will perform to judge if you will find the class fun to play.

Once you’ve unlocked a class, you need to know that…

4. Classes come with baggage

In this case, “baggage” refers to the abilities, stat modifiers, and Perks/Quirks associated with a class. When your character plays a specific class, these various effects will apply.

You might gain some abilities, be restricted in the use of others, get bonuses with some equipment, penalties with others, and so on. There are a lot of factors that a class can apply to your character.

And all those factors lead to the realization that…

5. Classes are contextually constrained

The idea behind this is that class capabilities are determined, to some degree, by the current environment and things nearby the character.

This is to introduce unpredictability into the strategies used while playing a class, so that it doesn’t become a matter of simply min/maxing the best gear and abilities. You will also have to consider constraints or benefits of your surroundings during play, which I hope will bring in a fun layer of unforeseen conundrums to wrangle!

So, that’s a brief summary of my plans for the class system. There is, of course, a lot more to it, but I can’t let all the cats out yet.

Tell me something I don’t know

Got cool ideas for classes you think fit into Lila’s world? Let’s hear it!

This week, we feature another vignette from Lila’s life, written by our own Ted Ludzik!

Lila drew.

Her father tried to support her creativity. It felt like a good parenting thing to do. But Lila was always so far away when there was a pencil in her small hand.

“Hey, that’s the cottage,” he noticed one time.

“Kinda.” Her eyes were half-lidded. All the energy was in her hand. It skittered from the lollipop-grains of cedar shingles to the ridges of walk-way stepping stones.

“It’s… really good,” he offered.

“Thanks.”

“That’s not the lake though, is it?” His finger motioned to what looked like two giant rivers that crossed in a swirling X at the base of the rough-hewn cottage.

“No.”

Distantly, Lila thought she might make her father and other people feel excluded, lonely even, when she fell into her doodling. But she couldn’t help it. Dad would go back to his model train magazine. Her friends would give her a big “Coleslawyalater!” She always forgot to thank everybody for letting her go.

The crossed rivers on her page had gouged giant chasms in front of the cottage. They both started at their own huge springs of light that frothed like volcanoes, adding to the flow in the rivers. The rivers that created these Chross Chasms, she realized, were her fanciful take on the diagram from her Health and Activity Class. She hadn’t known that the optic nerves actually crossed over one another somewhere between her eyes and brain.

But who sat in the cottage at the crux of these rivers and watched everything that eddied by?

She flipped to a new page. Lila drew a family of three inside the cottage.

Oliver, the father, was bent backed and wizened. He sits on the porch all day long. The porch juts over the convergence of the rivers, precariously supported by randomly nailed struts and planks and even by stray roots of the nearby Family Trees.

Oliver has a pin-cushion’s worth of fishing poles hanging out off the porch: carbon fiber, bamboo, graphite, fiberglass, straightish tree-twigs. They all dangle one or more fishing lines into the rivers below. They jitter and shudder, reacting to every vision that flows over their lures. Oliver watches them all over his walrus-stache, though he never grabs for a single rod, no matter how hard the sights below are nibbling.

His hands are busy, she drew, whittling at cartoon-like speed. Lila’s hands buzzed as she drew the blur of his hands and knife. Sawdust and curly shavings bury his feet.

He whittles what his poles detect in the rivers below, what the rivers carry directly from Lila’s eyes: perfect replicas of iPods and truck tires, or shirt wrinkles and sitcoms on plasma TVs. Oliver could whittle anything: Godzilla breath or the sparkle from a sun showered raindrop. Like everyone, he made mistakes. But he can’t stop to check his work, because the next sight is already bumping against his lures and has to be recorded.

So, he tosses every whittled vision (or Whision) over his shoulder and in through the front door of the cottage…

…to his graceful three-armed wife, Arthura, who weighs and interprets each Whision to help her write her three massive books.

The Book of Nothings: using ink squeezed from the barely visible cobwebs of the silkwurms of southern Lucidon, Arthura records Lila’s failures in life.

The Book of Wishes holds Lila’s wants and desires as penned with a gossamer quill that was once the wing of a Halogenetic Bug.

And Arthura’s most muscular arm records in the largest book of all, The Book of Days. Only the hide of the Crunkled Megasaur is strong enough to bind together the results of all of Lila’s reality.

Of course, the confines of the cottage would soon be stuffed full of Whisions, if Arthura and Oliver’s adopted son Hermacles did not spend his days rapidly corralling huge arm-loads and whizzing them all about the Wurld. Most of his deliveries make it to the vast Libraries to be sorted and filed.

But so great are their number, it’s inevitable that many Whisions are accidentally dropped to become part of the cerebrostratum or given as tokens by Hermacles to his many tavern friends and lady-loves. Some are misunderstood by the Librarians, and flushed through the sewers into the abysses of the Underwurld, where they could merge and mutate or split and shatter, some even gaining a semblance of life.

Lila tired thinking about the activity of the three, momentarily guilt-ridden for seeing so much and making them work so hard every day. Fortunately, she realized, every night when she closed her eyes to sleep, the gushing rivers of vision must dry up completely. The family could rest. The canyons would be empty and dark.

Her hand cramping around her pencil, Lila decided to give the trio a little break and closed her eyes.