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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.---
I never actually played Everquest. I just read the Cliffs Notes, and talked about it in chatrooms.
"...and then move on to fun questions like how to make a online game compelling for achievers, socializers, killers and explorers."
It's called Grand Theft Auto 3. Now if they'd only make it massively multiplayer on-line, then the holy grail will have been achieved!
What we really need to know is how to make a decent game without doing any programming, merely posting a bunch of unrealistic demands to a web forum that lets us make cool icons and signatures!
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
when reviews give away the plot...
From what I've seen, they way to capture an audience is to make them wait for hours before spawning a monster, let high level characters be able to farm, and have little to no support.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know, I know you can't learn everything from there and you should pick up a book after a while, but nonetheless a great place to start.
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
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!
Jessica Mulligan does indeed have one of the longest and most respected resumes in online games. I was distantly acquainted with her back in 1989-91 when (as Richard Mulligan) s/he was product manager for GEnie's online games, and even then her knowledge of the field was extremely comprehensive.
Now she's involved in The Themis Group, an interesting venture that basically lets online game services outsource their customer support. (Another notable figure on the Themis team is the esteemed game designer Greg Costikyan.) Given the problems some online game companies seem to have with customer support, sometimes regarding it almost as an afterthought, I wish Themis well. They're good at conveying the important message that an online game company isn't selling the game, it's selling the service.
I agree that it is very uncommon for women to enjoy violent games, but I do remember one Quake goddess from high school...
Also, there may be more flux among likes. TV tended to homogenize interests -- you watch one show that's in line with your interests, and it becomes very easy to also try another show that isn't quite as much as it, and eventually, you watch a pretty broad range.
If someone tries a MMORPG, it may be easier for them to play similar games.
May we never see th
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
This is the source of "reduce killers to increase achievers" and such. I haven't had the chance to see this book yet to verify if they give him the proper credit for his research, however.
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++.
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