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Developing Online Games
The book's strength lies in the deep experience of the authors and the efficient, occasionally gimlet-eyed voice they use to analyze their collective addiction. Jessica Mulligan's bio lists work on more than 50 online games like Ultima Online, while Bridgette Patrovsky's includes time building games for Electronic Arts, Sony and Interplay Online Services. If you believe that Online games are the latest thing, Mulligan would like you to know that you're wrong. She wrote a column celebrating the 30th birthday of the Online game in 1999. Rick Blomme wrote Spacewar back in 1969 and Dave Arneson started an RPG named Blackmoor in 1970 or 1971. It was so long ago, he can't be quite sure.
All of this experience weighs a bit heavily on the authors. The book is more of a core dump than a logical progression and that means we hear bitter echoes of the past. One section is entitled "Yes, it really will take 2-3 years to complete" and another is called "No, More Programmers Won't Make it Go Faster." These sections don't add much to the usual literature about herding cats, but they do offer a strong reminder that this isn't a task for slackers who never could get around to forming that garage band.
The better parts are aimed at the design of the games themselves. While game players are slaying monsters or saving Princesses, game designers are questing after a full Player Satisfaction Matrix. Good games sate the player's need for socialization, accomplishment, discovery and conflict as they journey from the state of confusion (0-1 month), on to excitement (2-4 months), glide through the state of involvement (5-48+ months) before landing in boredom (until VH1 starts making "Behind the Game" documentaries). The trick to good design is making sure that there's plenty to feed the player's involvement.
For instance, you may be driven to create a new persistent world that emphasizes socialization because you're tired of all that death. The authors gamed that scenario and decided that "killers do have a positive role to play from the point of view of the socializers." Good can't exist without evil acting as a contrast and besides, players can usually find some other passive/aggressive technique for stabbing each other in the back even if knife objects aren't instantiated.
The authors tend to view the online realms as ecosystems. If you want to "increase the number of achievers," then the authors advise that you "reduce the number of killers, but not too much" while maybe "increas[ing] the number of explorers." I suspect that these recommendations are to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do reflect the observations of people who've spent a long time managing these games. I'm even tempted to develop my own Sim Sim that lets you simulate the process of crafting a simulation.
Ultimately it's hard for the authors to offer much more than these recipes and matrices. The details about the management, the strategies for stopping cheaters, and the intricacies of player relations are essential parts of the journey, but those are only half of the battle. Making the characters sing and the world come to life is a job for the artist.
This book is like many of the simple guides for writing a screenplay. They talk about arcs, hinge points and beats, but end up counseling that the screenwriter should aim to make each of these "good," This book can't tell you how to make your characters "good," but it can give you much insight into how others have done it before.
You can purchase Developing Online Games from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Sure, the majority of broadband adoptors, in the home, are online gamers, but broadband saturation is still very low; and the availability, coupled with the price will probably keep it low for a while. I know people in Canada who pay between $25-$30 US per month, and get better speeds with their broadband than I get paying $55 US a month for mine.
Online games need to be optimized, no matter what connection the programmers would prefer. There's still plenty of lag on broadband when playing games, and a lot of it has to do with unoptimized code (which normally is fixed later down the road via patches on the PC).
Uncle Thursday
---In Soviet Russia, I might have gotten the first psot.---
My question is, does this book tackle the big problem of most MMORPGs, namely, that there's very little in the way of plotline? Sure, they're great of killers, socializers, achievers, explorers... but what about people who want to be entertained by a good story? If I'm paying you twenty bucks a month for this thing, and it's not giving me 15-20 hours of involving story/gameplay, I'm better off buying 'classic' games like Deus Ex or Jedi Knight 2 or Real War. Give us something other than levelling via meaninless repeated tasks to look forward to. Give us a storyline that we actually run into! Not just something that'll unfold as news updates every month.
If you really wanna make an online RPG, its best to start with a mud. MUDs take a lot less time, and you can tell right away if the game ITSELF will be interesting enough. Once this 'prototype' is done, use the same engine as a guide to making your 'product online game' engine, and add your wizbangs and graphics.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I really appreciate the fact that this book focuses more on theory and concepts rather than code, but statements such as "...and it should be the first and last book read by game developers..." is a little ridiculous.
Please give a little thought before you post something.
(of curse now, someone will find a typo in my post...;)
The biggest problem with games like Ultima and EverQuest is that there is very little actual role-playing going on. This is news to no one in here, of course, but I do find it interesting how the term 'RPG' has been kind of mutated.
Traditionally I would not call something like Final Fantasy an RPG, but that's what it is in computer game terms. You don't get to shape your character's identity, or their destiny. You don't get to 'act' the character. You merely plod along the pre-determined timeline towards your only fate; in the case of FF, sometimes this line abandons you, to search for the next game thread. That's not what I want RPGs to be.
An interesting approach to online RPGs: throw away the Massively Multiplayer aspect. It's possible (in my mind anyways) that this is just an unattainable fantasy, to have a fluid, engrossing, plot-driven world where everyone is a character. The qualifications just aren't there. They've already identified these little subgroups (achievers, killers, etc.) and those players, for the most part, don't seem that interested in the role playing itself.
Rather, I like the dynamics of Neverwinter Nights. Small groups of people, who are like-minded. It's what you look for in your typical RPG anyways; the party comraderie, the give-and-take, clasing of personalities... a great story to tell later, if successful.
What if, rather than selling a packaged online game for all comers, you started a sort of RPG Society? You'd apply for membership, pay a monthly fee, knowing that every player is absolutely into the role playing. Applying would consist of your character history and thoughts about what you want to get out of it. Keep the number of players on each server small. Several instances of the game world. That way you' d be guaranteed of a much better experience. Pipe dream I know, but a nice thought.
I mean, look at what has happened to Star Wars Galaxies. Ugh. It's already become fucked up before they've even released it (yeah, I'll smuggle stuff on foot. In Star Wars.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The authors spend four lines discussing the best computer language for the job (C/C++)
Am I the only C and C++ programmer who finds the "C/C++" label annoying as hell? Having it come from HR people who don't know any better is one thing, but hearing it from programmers drives me up the wall. I sometimes suspect it comes from C++-only programmers operating under the mistaken assumption that because C++ is a superset of C, they know C, too.
Despite similar syntax, C and C++ are completely different languages. C++-only programmers write C code that's on a par with the code produced by C-only programmers dabbling in C++. Perl, PHP, Objective C, and several dozen other Algol-descended languages have really similar syntax, but no one says "Algol/BCPL/C/C++/PHP/Perl/Pascal" with a straight face.
My guess is that if the authors are extolling the virtues of objects, they are primarily extolling the virtues of C++.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"ohhh, a game whose commercials show people beating each other up with a baseball bat or something... "
No, that's not what this game is about. Though I'm curious how you could mistake a game called "Grand Theft Auto" for a game where the point is to beat people. *eyeroll*
"senseless violence glorifying immoral crime. grow up."
One should know what they're talking about before telling people to grow up. If you had actually played the game, you'd know that senseless violence is the fastest way to lose in that game. Run over a pedestrian, the police chase you. Fight the police, more chase you. Etc.
I find it hard to accuse it of glorifying violence when playing it trains my reflexes to avoid hitting people.
The reason that GTA3 is controversial is because a lot of parents (mothers mostly) have no clue what their kids find in video games. So when some jackass politician *cough*Joe Liberman*cough* comes along and says "the style of entertainment you're uneducated about harms your children", suddenly their fears get voiced. They say stuff like "GTA3 makes prostution a good thing! Just watch, the woman gets in the car, and his health goes up when they have sex! That's immoral!!" And the mothers are like "My babies would never have sex! That's wrong!"
The reality of that aspect of GTA3 is a little bit different. The prostitute does get in the car. The car does shake around. The health of the player goes up. None of that is in dispute. However, they are not actually depicting sex. If you turn the camera a bit, you'll see that both the driver and the prostitute are sitting in their seats staring out the window. They're not touching in any way, that's unmistakable. The car's just shaking around, it's not clear why. The point? If the player doesn't know what a prostitute is when they play this game, they're not going to find out by playing this game. For somebody to understand what's happening here, they'd also have to be educated on the dangers of sex with prostitutes. It's called innuendo. Nothing new here that a child isn't exposed to by watching a little TV, even the news. (ZipperGate comes to mind...)
In any case, the point of this post is not to defend GTA3 specifically, it's to point out that just because you've heard a compelling side of an argument that does not mean you really know what you're talking about. There's always other points of view. If you're going to run around calling people immoral without understanding the other side of an issue, then you shouldn't be telling people to grow up. Finding information supporting your point of view is easy. Complete understanding of an issue, that's a grown up method of debate.
"Derp de derp."