Goals

I can only speak for myself, but for the first time in my life, I'm presented with the opportunity to impart change and affect people who aren't just within my personal realm. In creating the game that we've been working on this semester, we've finally come to a point where, in trying to create a connection between casual and hardcore gamers, our focus is now entirely on making people care. For the longest time, we were focusing in on obvious, but honestly somewhat short-sighted ideas regarding how a casual gamer increasing his or her stats helps a hardcore gamer, how a hardcore gamer could give the casual gamer money to buy things for his or her avatar, etc. These were all things we thought we had to focus on and get done.

It wasn't until now, when we've released the game for Alpha 2 to the ETC, that we truly realize what this project is really about. It's about making people know that they're actions matter. It's about making people feel like they belong in a community. It's about making people feel like they're wanted, needed, dare I say even loved. While we aren't entirely impartial due to the fact that we're making this game, we're becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that our band members don't appear to care about the band. We play the hardcore game, we talk to them, we earn them money, we unlock badges, and they don't respond to much outside of the badge system. The hardcore gamers takes actions and make choices and decisions that affect everyone in the band, but somehow the casual gamers don't seem to care. And the fact that hardcore gamers can feel this frustration in dealing with potentially complete strangers for casual gamers, means that there's something to be frustrated about. They're frustrated that the relationship is only one way. They're frustrated because the hardcore players and the casual gamers are focusing on different end goals.

We need to make the casual gamers feel like they matter.

Even though there aren't any over narratives in the games, stories can be easily created out of the things that are happening in the game. Henry's band, "The Emo." features four members: Cutie, Queen R0x0r, Tonto, and Henri. Cutie and Queen R0x0r are the stars of the band, being the lead guitarist and singer, respectively, while Henri and Tonto are the emo guys in the back supporting the band. Now this is a story that comes from simply looking at the avatars, and what comes from the actions that are taken in the hardcore game. We need to make those actions apparent to the casual gamers. We need to tell these stories to the casual gamers. We believe that they would care if they only knew what they were doing.

This isn't entirely a game project anymore. It's more a game project to make people respect and care about one another.

This post comes from an incredibly passionate and intense discussion with the team, and by far the most important discussion we've had this entire semester.

Alpha 2 - omg

Ok, so, Alpha 2 went out as planned yesterday. After pulling an all-nighter, we managed to get through what we needed and get the full experience into a playable state.

Or so we thought. As soon as we sent out the email, we were barraged with a combination of bug fixes requests, feature requests, and general feedback that we've been working on fixing fervently over the last day and a half. Andy will probably be following this post up with more information on progress and testing and all that jazz, but we figured something of a status update was in order.

So far, one of the most interesting things we've found is that one of our largest worries, that hardcore players might harass the casual players to play their casual games to level up (along the lines of "WTF N00b, play more now!!!!!11"), was for naught. In fact, its been the casual players who have been the most vocal about wanting the hardcore players to play more. The casual players fervently want more badges/challenges unlocked, as well as more money, so that they can change their avatars.

Well, that's it for now...time to collapse
Bill

1 Day Left for Alpha 2!

Can we make it?

We have a poster!

New direction

With GDC under our belts, we came back and designed away about where we want to head. We've decided that going to rock star/music route is the best way to go in order to get the most casual gamers. The basic setup is that every person in the group is a band member that has a different instrument, that is easily changeable at anytime due to the casual gamers' whims. The hardcore game is now more like a traditional rpg along the lines of classic SNES Final Fantasys and Dragon Warriors. The group is now using special moves and abilities trying to bring the audience's excitement up.

This design also affords us a great deal of community that no other theme or design would work. Being in a band or musical group works much better than being in some party that's at war with the rest of the war. Fighting and competition are both aspects of games that have the potential to turn off casual gamers, while working together to play bigger venues and getting signed is more of a positive group goal. Our design also works much better in solving the PvP requirement that we had in our previous iteration. The hardcore gamer is able to play PvE against the audience anytime he or she wants without having to wait for someone else to fight.

There are a number of other ideas we're rapidly throwing into this iteration before alpha 2 (8 days!) so we'll keep you posted as more things happen.

Cheers!

GDC Week Begins

This week, we're heading out to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Charles and Bill are already out there since Saturday, so it's been a bit different over here at the office. It feels so quiet. However, there's been significant work done over the weekend for the current CasualCore Alpha: Players can now talk to each other!

We're all pretty excited about GDC. It's the first time we go to the conference (Except for Henry Clay, because he's old... !). The rest of the team leaves tomorrow afternoon and will be spending the whole day in planes probably playing Nintendo DS to pass the time. With Carnegie Mellon's spring break coming right after GDC, it only means that the work on the project will slow down for the next couple of weeks. I'll be in Pittsburgh for most of Spring Break get some work done, however...

But for this week it's at least nice to take short a break from the cold, wind, and clouds that Pittsburgh offers. Yes, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood indeed.

Alpha 1.2 and Midterm Presentations

We had originally planned for Alpha 1 to only be open internally, but what became rapidly apparent with a team of seven hardcore gamers was that we needed to get our site into the hands' of casual gamers. We got a good bunch of testers who've been giving us good feedback and bug reports so far, but our connection at the moment is very thin. The connections currently implemented are:

1. Minigame scores affect each casual gamers' stats
2. Casual gamers' stats are used in the hardcore game.
3. Casual gamers can see their avatars in combat in the hardcore game.
4. Fighter, the situational mini-game. Playing this game provides a temporary boost to the casual gamers' stats. If that casual gamer's avatar is hit in the hardcore game, blocks fall down in the casual gamers' Fighter game.

While these connections are present, they are fairly weak. The stats connection is a very slow, long-term connection and the Fighter connection requires both casual and hardcore gamer to be on at the same time.

We've since been trying to come up with more ways to connect the casual and hardcore gamer together, both synchronously and asynchronously. Here is an absolutely ridiculous list of ideas that came up in terms of how we would create/foster a connection. A number of these ideas have been around since pitch, but some of them just came up during our last design meeting:

1. Casual gamer as Tamagotchi – This idea is pretty self-explanatory, but the casual gamer is more or less a tamogotchi that the hardcore gamer has to take care of by providing with sustenance, shelter, etc.
2. Casual gamer uses party for a more casual purpose – The casual gamer could potentially use his or her part y in a somewhat “Animal Crossing”-esque fashion in that outside of the hardcore game, the other party members are able to interact with each other in a social manner.
3. Group line-up/party menu to show everyone else in your party visually. This should help the connection if nothing else than to show what everyone else looks like in your party.
4. Finding items in the casual games, for instance breaking 5 blocks in Bejeweled, and finding a weapon or item that your character can use in the hardcore game.
5. Badges (both hardcore and casual). Badges are good ways to create meaning for casual gamers and also to create competition for hardcore gamers.
6. Each casual gamer has his/her own personal space, such as a house. The hardcore gamer unlocks stores that the casual gamer can then buy things from such that they can decorate his or her own house.
7. Consumables. This was more of an idea such that gameplay wouldn’t be based entirely on content, that way we won’t have to run into the problem that many MMOs run into, which is having to constantly create new content. This also fosters the connection in that the hardcore gamer can “give” these consumables to the casual gamer. “Hey, you get a pie! Yay!” The casual gamer’s stats go up, and he or she also gets a gift from the hardcore gamer.
8. Inventory/wardrobe. People will be able to store items and clothing that they buy and then freely swap back and forth what they have for their own personal customization.
9. Ladder/Ranking for both casual and hardcore. Ladders and rankings are easy and immediately create competition for the hardcore gamers.
10. Casual resource. A stat that casual gamer increases and the hardcore player spends (money/points). The idea behind this stat
11. Messaging. It’s pretty clear that we’re going to need direct communication of some sort between the casual and hardcore gamers. Whether this is done with preset questions and commands or if it’ll be entirely free text, we aren’t sure, but we want this in there.
12. Wishlist. The idea behind this connection would be for the casual gamer to create a wishlist of items, clothes, etc. that he or she wants but aren’t available to him or her. The hardcore gamer then has to
13. Different money types – The casual gamer gets different money types that the hardcore player then converts for them so they can buy different kinds of items.
14. Elemental alignment – Each minigame increases a character’s elemental alignment, and this elemental alignment works against or with each other in the hardcore game. Think Magic The Gathering.
15. Location-based backgrounds for the casual games – In a world where the hardcore game is on some sort of world map,
16. Every casual games has an effect on the hardcore game/stats. This idea is something we’ll almost definitely implement regardless of what other decisions we come to since all this can do is help the connection.
17. Hardcore gamer’s clothing – Whatever the hardcore gamer’s avatar is wearing is automatically unlocked for the casual gamer. It’s more like a uniform than anything else.
18. Party has collective attributes. Casual + Hardcore trying to enhance the party – A house, city, and ship.
19. Casual clothing is a profession types of games enhance your profession.
20. Clothing affect stats – Casual gamers’ stats go up according to whatever they’re wearing, not their minigame. This way, if a casual gamer wants to be a medic or a mechanic or scientist, they can be that without worrying about how their stats would affect them.

Some of these ideas are stronger than others, but a lot of these are promising, and we're going to go forward with these as soon as we all get back from GDC. Until then, we're going to touch up what we already have and get ready to party in San Francisco!