I am actually pretty interested in playing Free Realms. It’s maybe the first honest attempt by a big studio to create a solid F2P game. That’s both encouraging (hey, there must be viable income there) and discouraging (big studios drown out us little guys).
But it’s got some good ideas, and it diverges from the hardcore conventions quite a bit in some ways. For example, you can explore without having to fight unless you want to. I definitely find that sort of choice appealing.
So I was watching this video of the game, and noticed that you can change “jobs” at any time. Sound familiar? And they level up independently. Well, I hadn’t really mentioned that part about Roles, but there are skills for each one that you can improve independently.
I guess I shouldn’t feel disappointed, but I do. Well, at least now I know that the idea is solid, and I’m on the right track. There’s a positive spin.
Meanwhile, I’m continually working on refining my game engine technologies, coming up with new concepts to launch that are small enough to finish quickly and will inch me closer and closer to getting Lila Dreams back in production.
This is maybe not a comprehensive plan, but I wanted to at least state publicly what I intend to do about this project. There are a lot of people interested in this game–that motivates me a lot. And it’s also very helpful that I just plain old really want to play it, too! So here’s what’s going to happen.
It’s a holiday, so that slows everyone down, I think. But also I’m crunching for a deadline and so the Flash game I’m working on for that is consuming all (like 12 hours a day) of my time. The upshot, of course, is that all that effort will have multiple payoffs, one of which is building a starting point for Lila Dreams’ client and tools. I’ve implemented some things that had only been hopeful thinking in the past, so it’s really a good thing in the long term.
Once this small project is wrapped up (at the end of December), I can start to put some part-time effort into Lila Dreams again. This will involve building up more code libraries and refining all the stuff I’m doing right now.
One way I want to do this is to create some small multiplayer games. I have a basic server implementation, but it’s not tested and is still incomplete. The best way to get this into shape to handle a full MMO is to use small games to refine it. So, you can expect some progress in that area. Those little games would also help refine the code behind Lila’s client. And, heck, maybe I could make some money on these other games, too. That would really help!
Obviously, then, Lila Dreams will not be in full production for a while. But, in the mean time, I will be releasing games and polishing up the code libraries that Lila Dreams will be constructed upon.
Let me put this in perspective: I’m so anxious to continue work on Lila Dreams that sometimes, after a 12 or 15 hour day of coding my other game, I get in bed with my laptop and just browse the source code as I drift off to sleep. No, that won’t get anything accomplished, but it keeps everything fresh in my mind so my subconscious can crank away on it.
It might be a snail’s pace for a while, but I am going to finish this game.
P.S. I’ve had some offers to help, and I will be contacting folks about this when the time comes. So, if you are one of them: I haven’t forgotten!
Just a quick post to announce that I’ve started another little blog specifically about game programming (with some business stuff in there too). It’s called “Game Geek Speak.” If you’re into Flash and/or Java programming, you might like it.
So there I was. This huge, volcanic Mount Doom of work lay before me. It was dark, grim, and the trees looked taller and meaner than usual. Programming knapsack in hand, I pursed my lips and intrepidly lifted my foot for the first steps up that steep climb…
…then I realized that I was going to need more money. Hmm. Ok, so now I’m working on that problem first. And I haven’t gone up the mountain very far in the mean time.
I guess, to keep with the metaphor, I actually left the mountain and went into town for supplies. One of my goals is to make some small games. I’m building a Flash (Flex) game engine for that, and I’m finding that a lot of the things being built are directly applicable to my beloved MMO (pardon the tech-dork spew I’m about to force upon you):
Game state system with stackable rendering layers? Check.
Component architecture for fabulous flexibility in game object creation? Got that.
Plans for more shiny game engine geek stuff? Hell yeah.
I don’t expect any of that to mean much to anybody. But it felt good, because I am making progress here! Maybe not directly, but this is all stuff that Lila Dreams has to have, so I will eventually pick it up and toss it into the existing MMO chassis–and have one hot ride!! Wooooh, yeah!
But it’s also exciting to me because this is groundwork for a bunch of small games that keep kicking around in my head. I think maybe the Universe has routed me down this path for my own good. I’m learning, I’m doing, I’ve almost got a nice little base of operations to work from so I can build up, up, up. And–eventually–that big, scary mountain won’t be quite so big anymore.
While I’m here in this self-aggrandizing reverie, I will mention (against my better judgment) that I might even start a Flash game portal site. No, not like any you have ever seen. It’ll be… er, I’d better not say anything more. Mmmyeahok.
In summary: Bad news, no progress on Lila Dreams lately. Good news, some progress on Lila Dreams lately (albeit indirectly).
Stay with me here, I’m coming back to the foot of the mountain as soon as I get a chance. Only this time, I’ll be more ready than ever.
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, loseWeight Exercise 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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
…then I realized that I was going to need more money. Hmm. Ok, so now I’m working on that problem first. And I haven’t gone up the mountain very far in the mean time.
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.