VectorStorm Blog

Something I don’t understand:

I’m no longer driving into work every day.  This saves me approximately an hour every day.  I’m doing some work at home, let’s call it eight hours a day (In practice, it’s probably a little bit less than that, but for the sake of argument, let’s call it eight hours per day), whereas I used to pretty regularly do 9-10 hours a day, at my old job.

So how is it that I have so little time for development?  I should have more time now than I did two weeks ago, I’d have thought.  But time seems to be behaving rather oddly;  I don’t seem to have nearly as much time in the day as the maths suggest that I should.

Tonight, I got a few little things done in MMORPG Tycoon 2.  First, I fixed the fill on the new, more sharply stylised mouse cursor.  The sharper angles on the arrow are a very subtle improvement, but I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have them;  the shape of the mouse cursor has been bothering me ever since v1.1.

I also spent time getting my head back into the new combat system, and discovered that I’ve run into the same issue that heaps of real MMORPGs do;  how best to award experience points for defeating monsters.

Continue reading “Divvying the spoils”

I’m sure other people doodle sensible things.  Me, I doodle GUI interfaces.  (And then obsess over whether the initial “click-drag” should start from a corner of the shape, or from the middle of the shape)

Anyhow.  I’ve been thinking a lot more about how best to set up MMORPG Tycoon 2′s world building.  The more I think about it, the more I’m starting to realise that thinking about “buildings” is probably too large-scale;  that really, the player shouldn’t be placing “inns” and “taverns”, but should instead be placing “innkeepers” and “barkeeps”.  The buildings themselves are kind of immaterial;  the important thing is the NPC who provides a service.

Or to put it another way:  There’s nothing special about the auction house in Stormwind, except that that’s where the auctioneers are.

Yes, the buildings do need to be there for graphical reasons.. but maybe there shouldn’t be distinctions between “Inn” and “Tavern” and “Weapon Shop” — there should just be a variety of buildings to pick from, and instead you’d have Innkeepers and Shopkeeper NPCs, and the PCs would seek out those NPCs the same way that they currently seek out particular types of building.

Pro:  More like real MMORPGs.  Means that different parts of the world can look very different, since we’re not forced to have the same model for an “inn” everywhere.  Makes it less damaging to the game to let players build their own buildings in some sort of editor, which would really let players be extra-creative in their world-building.

Con:  Makes it much harder to see how services are laid out in a town or city, since the functional pieces would be very small (and probably difficult to distinguish) NPCs, instead of being very large and iconic buildings.  Probably means that I’d need to model building interiors, so there’d be somewhere to place the NPCs.  After all, it would probably be weird for a shopkeeper to stand around and do business just outside his shop.  On the other hand, there are plenty of real MMORPGs where vendors just stand around on plinths;  shops aren’t always (or even usually) located inside buildings.

So I mentioned last time that my usual thing with RTS games is to get annoyed with them and stop playing after level 5 or 6.  Well I’m here to tell you that I’ve gotten annoyed with it.  Sadly, StarCraft doesn’t number its missions, but I think I’ve done about five or six of them from its single player campaign.  I think it’s mostly the length of the missions;  each one now takes me about 60 minutes to slog through, and I’m just really bored of it by the end.

However, I’m still somewhat intrigued by the game design, and by the multiplayer.  Now, I’m not very good at the game (though I’ve somehow managed to win three of my six multiplayer practice matches), but I’ve played enough of the game to start to see the fabric underlying it.

The first thing that I find interesting is that structurally, StarCraft is actually a lot like World of WarCraft — both games are built around numeric optimisation problems.  WoW tries to hide it from the casual players, but its whole end-game content is built around this optimisation.

WoW uses the numeric optimisation to drive its addictive play (play as long as you want, and the longer you play, the better the gear you can get).  By contrast, StarCraft applies time pressure;  your time is extremely finite, but you can get whatever units and gear you want within the time that you have.  It had just better be at least as good as the ones that your opponents are getting.  If you look on the forums (which I don’t recommend you do, incidentally), you can see that a lot of people really get into the number-crunching.  It’s interesting that both WoW and StarCraft fully expose their numbers, to enable those players who like optimisation problems to work on them.  Most games hide their numbers as much as possible, but these two don’t.

I also find it really fascinating that StarCraft II basically has two different game layers running at the same time, with the results of each feeding into the other.  It’s extremely rare, these days, for games to have such separate layers both playable at once.

If you read about StarCraft strategy, you’ll see people referring to these two different game layers as “macro” and “micro”.  The common wisdom is that if you’re not very good at one of them, you can make up for it by being good at the other.

For the uninitiated, “micro” is short for “micromanagement”, and is about micromanaging your units to get an advantage in combat, either from formation, placement, using special abilities, or engaging in other tactics.  ”Macro”, on the other hand (and they’ll never tell you this) is also short for “micromanagement”.  ”Macro” is about micromanaging the production going on in your base;  building things at exactly the right moment, making sure your workers aren’t harvesting a resource you don’t need, choosing when to build new tech and when to expand, etc.

Your “macro” determines how many combat units you have available for your “micro”, and one of the major goals of your “micro” is to gather information which can inform the goals you should be aiming for with your “macro” game  (“Gosh, my opponent is making lots of tanks.  Which of my units would be good at destroying tanks?”).

Both the “micro” and the “macro” games are effectively “Diner Dash”;  time-management games, as I mentioned in a previous article.  But “micro” (moving units during a fast combat) is a Diner Dash that’s focused on clicking rapidly and accurately, while “macro” (managing your production) is a Diner Dash that’s focused on judgement and precise timing, often with lengthy delays between clicks.  So if you’re experienced, you can do a click in the “macro” side of the game, then run off to do some micro for a little while, as long as you remember to come back in time for the next click you need to make on the macro side.

Since both sides of the game are about speed and optimising, players are often compared in terms of “APM”, which stands for “Actions Per Minute”.  My average APM is usually between 45 and 50.  This is a fair deal higher than most of the folks I’ve played against so far, who seem to usually be nearer to 30 APM.  But despite my 50% more APM, they still regularly steamroll over me.  Proof that how fast you can click doesn’t really matter, when you don’t know what you’re doing.  If only I had a clue (ie: was able to recognise the units and buildings my opponents have been building), I’d be a real force to be reckoned with.  ;)

Anyhow.  I can’t imagine ever making a game like StarCraft, myself (or even wanting to).  But the “two-layers-simultaneously” design is a really interesting one, which it’s totally worth thinking about some more.  And exposing the numbers is also interesting, since it lets number-crunching players get involved with the game at a deeper level.

Mm.  Plenty of stuff to think about.

Last comment:  Just wanted to mention how refreshing it is to play a mainstream multiplayer game where everyone thinks that manners are important, where everyone wishes people good luck before the matches, and says “good game” at the end.  Is the eternal september finally ending, almost two decades later?  :)

Back in the early days of this  web log, I wrote a short series of articles about “awesome” game ideas, as distinct from “good” game ideas.  One of the three game concepts I put forward in that series was this:  ”A platform game where the player may drastically grow and shrink at will.”

Well, imagine my surprise to find that somebody’s independently designed and implemented a prototype of that game!  (Warning:  requires the Unity browser plug-in)   I’m thrilled to see how well the concept works in practice, and doubly-thrilled that I didn’t have to build it myself, to get that validation.  :)

I wish there were more levels and more polish, but as a proof of concept, I think it really, really works.

Link:  Specter Spelunker Shrinks

Today:

New-style single-stage quests are now in place.  (multi-stage quests are still TODO, probably for post-MS1)  The screenshot here is of a very simple starting area;  a graveyard on the far left (needs a model), a spawn area in the background on the left, an inn in the middle (with an NPC quest-giver standing in front of him), and a grinding zone on the right.  The blue boxes represent subscribers, the red ones represent monsters.  Needless to say, all the graphics are still placeholder.

When you place an NPC questgiver, the quest giver now automatically creates five randomly generated quests, and begins to hand them out to any subscriber who requests them.  My task for tomorrow is to allow the player to modify those quests (and perhaps add extras).  But for right now, those quests are all generated by code.  Subscribers take a quest, finish it, then go to collect another quest and repeat (until they get bored of doing quests and decide to do something else instead).

Each quest consists of directions to go somewhere, and (optionally)  kill some monsters there, and then awards XP to the subscriber for completing the quest.

A few seconds after the screenshot above, for the very first time during my development of MMORPG Tycoon 2, a subscriber reached level 2.  I’m pretty thrilled that the systems have all survived the switch from 2D to 3D well enough to have the level progression still working properly!

So my tasks for the near future:

• GUI for editing quests.
• Subscriber AI improvements allow more than one active quest at a time.
• Show more subscriber AI data, so players can easily see what individual subscribers are doing.