In our game, the primary point of connection between the casual gamers and the hardcore gamers is in a posse, where the hardcore player can hire a group of casual players to join him in battle. The avatar of the casual player plays a role in the hardcore game, where the hardcore captain can control the casuals around and make decisions for them. The casual gamer keeps playing his casual games but at the same time gets tons of rewards and new challenges from every battle won by the posse.
This sounds simple enough, but to get it working has been lots of work. Earlier this week, Charles and I sat down fully design this idea, and had tons of questions to answer: How loyal are the casual gamers to the posse? When can they leave? How can they join? How are they invited? How are they found? We took figurines from Dungeons and Dragons to represent the players in the posse, and played around with the figurines while writing down some of our ideas on notepad. We decided that casual gamer needs to be harassed as little as possible, but he or she should remain very interested in joining a posse.
The rest of the week has been implementing most of the basic functionality and getting it to the point that is good enough for the first iteration of our alpha. In the meantime, the design of the posse has called for some redesigns of the website in order to accommodate to what we decided, so the website went through an unexpected iteration.
Once we connect the hardcore game to the player-created posses, we should be good to start some serious playtesting to the outside world.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Alpha 1.1
Well, so far Alpha 1 seems to be going well. We've managed to go through 2 seperate iterations of our mystical connection between the hardcore game and the casual games.
In the first, bonuses from the situational casual game (the block dropping and breaking game) were permanent, and linked directly to the number of blocks that a casual player broke. This lead to insane bonuses; at points, some characters had statistics in the 200 range, when normally stats were capped at 18. It didn't help that, at this point, the damage model was also broken, allowing avatars to deal far more damage than they were supposed to.
In the second, bonuses from the situational game were limited to the next turn after a player had gone; on top of this, the damage model was "fixed", actually being an implementation of what was in the design doc (instead of the model in use for v1, which was due to a bug). While this seemed to "work" better, and have longer lasting games, much of the fun seemed to be removed; in many ways, fun seemed to be generated by the simply ridiculous levels that the stats were going in the first match. It should also be noted that during this second set of matches, there was only 1 casual player playing, while in the first match, approximately 4 of them were playing.
We seem to definitely be making progress on our connection, but we're not there yet. I'm out for the night.
- B
In the first, bonuses from the situational casual game (the block dropping and breaking game) were permanent, and linked directly to the number of blocks that a casual player broke. This lead to insane bonuses; at points, some characters had statistics in the 200 range, when normally stats were capped at 18. It didn't help that, at this point, the damage model was also broken, allowing avatars to deal far more damage than they were supposed to.
In the second, bonuses from the situational game were limited to the next turn after a player had gone; on top of this, the damage model was "fixed", actually being an implementation of what was in the design doc (instead of the model in use for v1, which was due to a bug). While this seemed to "work" better, and have longer lasting games, much of the fun seemed to be removed; in many ways, fun seemed to be generated by the simply ridiculous levels that the stats were going in the first match. It should also be noted that during this second set of matches, there was only 1 casual player playing, while in the first match, approximately 4 of them were playing.
We seem to definitely be making progress on our connection, but we're not there yet. I'm out for the night.
- B
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Alpha 1
Alpha 1 was this past Monday Feburary 19, and things are starting to really pick up. We have a barebones version of our experience up, whereby gamers can sign up, login, and play casual games to improve his or her characters' stats. These characters are then imported into the hardcore game that Bill has been slaving over for about a week now. The hardcore game that we have implemented is a rather simplistic strategy battle that is on a 10 x 10 grid. The style of gameplay that we're aiming for is akin to Final Fantasy Tactics or Advance Wars, though our game will inevitably and undoubtedly change due to how we design for the connection between casual and hardcore gamers.
All of our design decisions are steeped in creating and strengthening the connection between hardcore and casual gamers, and I think that there's a lot of promise in that so far. Obviously, our whole project is hinging on that connection, so hopefully we'll be able to pull it off.
Some of the issues we're working on currently include finalizing our art avatar style. We've gone through a number of iterations and concept phases, but we need to just make a decision about them and move forward. We're also at the point where we're trying to get both the design and functionality of all the group interactions such as creating, joining, leaving, and disbanding groups. Here are some potential questions that Edmundo wrote from the players' points of view:
Hardcore side:
1) Do I have to ask anyone to join or can i just draft them immediately?
2) How often can I switch the players in my posse?
3) How can I easily find players that will do well for my battle?
Casual side:
1) Why do I care about joining this posse?
2) Can I find and ask to join someone's group or do I have to be asked
by the hardcore guy?
Both:
1) How can I trust the other side?
2) Is knowing what the others are doing important?
3) Does my group have to know what I'm doing? How is this important?
4) Can I play with my friends? How can I easily find them? Do I have to
know their nicknames?
All of these are issues we're hoping to tackle soon. More later!
-A
All of our design decisions are steeped in creating and strengthening the connection between hardcore and casual gamers, and I think that there's a lot of promise in that so far. Obviously, our whole project is hinging on that connection, so hopefully we'll be able to pull it off.
Some of the issues we're working on currently include finalizing our art avatar style. We've gone through a number of iterations and concept phases, but we need to just make a decision about them and move forward. We're also at the point where we're trying to get both the design and functionality of all the group interactions such as creating, joining, leaving, and disbanding groups. Here are some potential questions that Edmundo wrote from the players' points of view:
Hardcore side:
1) Do I have to ask anyone to join or can i just draft them immediately?
2) How often can I switch the players in my posse?
3) How can I easily find players that will do well for my battle?
Casual side:
1) Why do I care about joining this posse?
2) Can I find and ask to join someone's group or do I have to be asked
by the hardcore guy?
Both:
1) How can I trust the other side?
2) Is knowing what the others are doing important?
3) Does my group have to know what I'm doing? How is this important?
4) Can I play with my friends? How can I easily find them? Do I have to
know their nicknames?
All of these are issues we're hoping to tackle soon. More later!
-A
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
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