Bandology

Around the World

2008-06-10T20:10:00.008-05:00

It's been a crazy few months! We finished up our project as a school project again this spring semester. Since then, 4 of our 5 team members have graduated, 1 team member had a baby, 1 started an internship, and 4 started jobs. : ) As for the plans for Bandology, we're continuing to make progress and changes. We're shooting to get the game completed in time for the IGF submissions this fall. Having full time jobs as well as working on Bandology is hard though, as our time and efforts are now split and we're only working part-time.

Beyond that, we aren't planning on making too many changes to the game's design. We're mainly working on making more animations, balancing out the gameplay, and making the server as strong as possible. I know we keep telling you all to keep waiting, but we're working hard, I promise. We'll deliver soon! Until then, rock on!

Hey Jude

2008-04-20T22:21:00.001-05:00

Long Live Rock

2008-04-19T15:58:00.029-05:00

This past week has been spent implementing and testing all of the changes that I mentioned in the previous blogpost. Given what we've done so far, we really feel like we're getting closer to asynchronous cooperative gameplay. That said, we still have a long way to go in terms of polish, expressing certain ideas regarding how all of your bandmates are doing, and the progress that the band is making as a whole.

This Friday is soft opening, one of the major deadlines for the project. The team has to have a completed product on Friday, and the faculty will give us feedback and a hypothetical grade based on what we have on that day. From the feedback and grade that we get, we have roughly 1 1/2 weeks until Final Presentation to fix the issues and concerns that the faculty have.

Even though our project has longer term goals than just the duration of this semester, the core gameplay experiment that we've been toying with this semester has been the asynchronous cooperative gameplay. While there are approximately 7,234,108 features left to implement, the vast majority of them are tried and true game mechanics in most MMOs; these features won't require intense design so much as they'll need time. We'll be going through all of the iterations and playtests that we've done this semester to show how asynchronous cooperative gameplay has evolved over time.

Until then, here's a glimpse of what our website design is going to be like. Rock on!

Here Comes The Sun

2008-04-11T10:43:00.019-05:00

Since Bandology first came into fruition in the Spring of 2007, the game has gone through so many different iterations and transformations, it's hard to say that it's the same game it was last year, let alone the same game it was a week ago.

After this last playtest, the team's morale was kind of down as we'd hit a brick wall in design. The gameplay itself was fun enough, but everything around it wasn't really working the way we wanted it. People weren't getting a sense of satisfaction when the game ended, namely because the game cut the player off before they could get to a point where they felt comfortable stopping. There were also problems with how random play was roughly equivalent to intelligent play; we've been trying since Day 1 to try to prevent this from happening, and after the last set of changes, this problem snuck up on us again. ARGLEBARGLE!

We sat down and looked hard at these problems (as well as many, many others) and came up with a number of different ways to tackle them.

The game is no longer limited by time. People didn't get a sense of satisfaction by only playing a gig for a certain amount of time. Getting to a point where you die lets you feel like you got somewhere, whereas ending the gig at 90 seconds just cuts you off.
There are levels (songs) to each gig. This is done so that the player gets a sense of achievement and progression as they play through each gig.
Levels get harder, so you can die! This gives players a better sense of how good they are, but also creates more excitement. The current version of our game has no pressure of dying, so it's kind of boring.
The metric of success is now what level you reach. What level each player gets to is now the goal of the game. Now the goal is staying alive to get to the next level, so all of those pieces we considered earlier this semester are more useful and make more sense.
Players can continue from where they left off (ish). Players are able to replay the gig from the first song, or they can restart from certain checkpoint levels such as level 3, level 6 etc. This allows them to not get frustrated/bored with having to start from the beginning all over again.
Gameplay elements are introduced with each level. New pieces/gameplay elements are introduced at specific songs/levels.
Difficulty. Levels get harder by giving more timer blocks, or blocks coming up from the bottom, and speed increases.
Passing a gig - Passing a gig at the moment consists of attaining some total band level. For instance, a bar might have a bar requirement of 20. One way to pass this gig is if each member of a 5-man band gets to level 4. Another potential ending point is if two people in the band get to level 10. Granted this would be really really difficult, but it'd be doable for someone who is incredibly skilled.
Katamari Damacy "Make-a-star" style - Once people pass the minimum requirement, they've "passed' the gig, but they're able to continue playing until the time frame has completed to get a high score.
Gigs still have real-time duration - For now, gigs are still set to a certain number of days to allow for casual play.
Powerups sent and received are tied to each level - All powerups sent during one player's level 1 can only be received and used during other player's level 1. The way that these powerups are given is based on point markers. Say player B gets to 50 points and at that point, player A got a grey breaker at point 45. The grey breaker is put into a stack for all of the other players.

It's a crazy number of changes to implement less than two weeks before soft opening, but we're making really solid progress already and everyone's kicking major butt. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates and changes. Thanks again for all of the support, feedback, and comments everyone's been giving us. We really and truly appreciate it. : )

More Than a Feeling

2008-04-04T14:49:00.014-05:00

We just finished our first round of testing! We had about 45 playtesters play our game and all-in-all, it we got a lot of incredibly useful feedback. The two major points being:

They want to communicate
They weren't completely clear on how they were affecting each others' gameplay

The first point is easily solvable; we as a team decided to take communication out of this first playtest in order to focus on the core gameplay, so putting that back in for the next playtest should help things immensely.

The second point is a bit tougher. A lot of our gameplay concepts are pretty complicated and have multiple layers in terms of how a player can affect another player. Here is a view of the gameboard (don't mind the fact that the characters are, uh, aliens with no clothing at the moment.)

The basic mechanics of the game are

Place blocks of the same color next to each other. Use the breaker pieces like this blue one in order to break apart these groups of blocks.
Placing blocks into rectangle arrangements gets you a rectangle bonus. The bonus that you get from breaking a rectangle is based on the shortest side of the rectangle. For example, if you have a 2 x 8 rectangle, you have 16 blocks x 2 = 32 points. If you have a 3 x 4 rectangle, you have 12 blocks x 3 = 36 points. This is by virtue of the fact that larger squares are much harder to get than tall and narrow columns.
If you get 8 points in a single turn, you send a white block to your bandmates. These white blocks take on the color of whatever block they fall on top of.
As your bandmates get higher scores, they send you a bonus row from the bottom of the screen. In a way, they're challenging you to do better, but they also give you a bonus to your score if you break them.
If you break a group of blocks with a breaker, but in doing so leads to another group of blocks being broken by a breaker that was already on the board, you get a chain multiplier.
This last part is probably the most complicated/confusing part of our game. Each character is represented on this meter. The color bar in the back is the average of each player's position on the bar. As you drop pieces onto your board, your position on the meter slowly decreases. When you use a breaker piece to break apart blocks, your position on the meter increases. As each player's piece increases, the average band meter can hit higher multipliers. Confused yet? I know we are.

Given how confusing all of this is, we had a meeting today with our advisor Jesse about how to fix these problems, and we've come up with a number of different ways both to convey the information much better, as well as just making the mechanics simpler, which should hopefully make understanding these gameplay concepts easier.

Here are the new and improved rules!

No audience meter

It's confusing. And not really doing its job. We'll put it on the sidelines for now.

Rectangle bonus

A 2x rectangle bonus (such as a 2 x 2 rectangle, 2 x 3, 2 x 4, etc.) gives all of your band mates a white block.
A 3x rectangle bonus (such as 3 x 3, 3 x 4, 3 x 5, etc.) gives all of your band mates a grey breaker.

Chain multiplier

If you get a 2x chain, you get a 2x multiplier to your break, and you also send a 2x multiplier to all of your bandmates. 3x chain sends a 3x multiplier, and so on and so forth.

Bonus row

When you clear your board completely, you get point bonuses as well as sending a bonus row to all of your bandmates.

Hopefully these changes will make the connection between bandmates more direct and clear. We'll keep you posted as we make more changes. If you're interested in signing up for playtesting, there's a link at the top of the page. Thanks!

Don't Stop Me Now

2008-03-24T15:17:00.005-05:00

My apologies for the large chunk of time between posts; it's been over a month since our last blog post, and a lot has happened since then! Firstly, we all got the flu for a week or so, which really hurt the team, and then most of the team went elsewhere for Spring Break, giving most of us a much needed energy recharge.

In other news, we're also going to be presenting Bandology at the Art of Play games conference in the Poetics of Gameplay Master Class. Heather Kelley, Jason Rohrer, and Randy Smith are going to be on the panel, so we're really excited to show them what we have and get some feedback from them.

We're currently working hard at getting the game ready for an alpha test to begin today. It's currently a closed alpha, with our testers already chosen, but we'll be releasing a beta by the end of the month to all of our previous Bandology players. Hang in there, we'll be releasing more information soon!

Like a Rolling Stone

2008-02-18T17:11:00.007-05:00

The team just got back from last week's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. We split up the first two days across a few different summits: the Casual Games Summit, the Worlds in Motion summit, as well as a quick sneak into the Independent Games Summit. I can really only speak to the Casual Games Summit since Carlos and I were the two members that attended it.

As our advisor Jesse Schell had mentioned prior to attending the summit, the general vibe that I got from the vast majority of the speakers was one of excitement. Just about everyone began their talk with how the definition of what makes a casual game is slowly dissolving. A few years ago, it was much easier to say that casual games are games that are played by 30-40-something year old soccer moms. With the growing popularity of casual games across a wider audience though, the definition of what makes a casual game casual becomes much blurrier.

After the two days of summits, the "real" conference began. We got to attend a wide variety of talks, met all kinds of crazy people, and got to meet up with a lot of ETC alums. One of the highlights of GDC was that three games (Skyrates, Polarity, and World of Goo) that were either made at the ETC or originated at the ETC were nominated for some kind of award at the Independent Games Festival. Congratulations!

Since we've been back, the team has been in overdrive, shifting the game from prototype to production. We're really excited about how things are going, and can't wait to show you all what we have in store for you. Hang in there!

B-B-B-Benny and the Jets

2008-02-13T12:01:00.002-05:00

Come Together

2008-02-09T21:50:00.000-05:00

Not a whole lot has changed design-wise this past week; we've mainly been focusing on getting things done. Here are some visual samples showing the progress we've made in character styles and changes since last Spring:

Issues

As you can see here, we have the original character design from Bandology last Spring combined with the list of problems and changes that we want to make. A lot of the issues that we had with the old character designs stemmed from the fact that they looked a bit too much like children. We still like the "round" and friendly nature of them, we wanted to shift them towards a somewhat more adult and approach an edgier feel. Joe made a mockup of how some of these changes might work, but the characters still weren't completely right. The next point that we continued to was
Character Lineup

Joe went back and came up with a bunch of different character types, and we decided on the ones that we liked.
Stock characters

Here are the characters at their barebones without any clothing, or faces, creepily enough. We figured the proportions on these worked well enough. From there, Joe put some outfits on them to see how they might look.
Outfits

And here are the characters with a number of different outfits. Joe made them in order to be the difficult to pull apart and customize. This is to see if we can put icons on t-shirts, have holes in clothing, allow people to wear midriffs, and a number of other potentials. From here, we realized that the heads still look a bit too large, so Lisa and Joe have been tweaking with those as well.

Overall, things are going really well! The team has another week to gear up in preparation for the Game Developer's Conference next week in San Francisco. While there, we hope to do a bit of learning, a bit of networking, and a bit rejuvenating. After that, it'll be a solid crunch to midterm presentations, at which point we should have a solid vertical slice (i.e. one runthrough of the experience) to show to everyone.

Do comment below if you all have questions or suggestions, and we'll do our best to answer them! Until the next time, Rock on!

Don't Fear the Reaper

2008-02-03T09:38:00.000-05:00

Another week in the world of Bandology, another blog post. We're still working on design and pre-production tasks at the moment, as well as preparing for our quarter-semester presentation today. Here's a recap on what we've been working on this week:

Prototype 3: Bejeweled++

After the first prototype that Carlos made that tried to create connections between the band and the audience using a pipe-game mechanic, we took another look at what we were trying to do, and decided to focus on creating a game that was closer to the aspects of playing music i.e. notes, rhythm, dynamics, tone, and a number of other things. What Carlos ended up creating was this:

Carlos took the game of Bejeweled that we'd created last semester and added a number of features on top of it. First, he added a Magic: The Gathering-esque color circle to the side. Each of these colors loosely represented a certain tone or color in music. Throughout the gameplay, one color would be chosen as the main color, and all jewels of that type that are destroyed are worth 4 times the normal score. This color can be interpreted as the melody. Jewels that are adjacent to the melody color on the color wheel are considered harmony jewels, and would then be worth twice the normal score. Carlos then added the song "Don't Fear the Reaper" to the prototype. The melody color would change at various points throughout the song.

Another feature that was added was a timer function, where players had to keep playing in order to keep the timer from dropping below a certain level. This created a much more urgent and pressuring gameplay experience than the traditionally casual Bejeweled.

This prototype didn't really work, mainly because the players rarely felt like they were actually affecting the music. At the very least, players felt like the gameplay was driven by the music. The gameplay itself also didn't feel very much like performing either; it was still a match three game. Most of the dev team also didn't like the constant time pressure of having to play as quickly as possible, as it was more in line with the slightly more hardcore old-school puzzle games like Tetris and Dr. Mario as opposed to the more laid-back casual games of the current era. That's not to say that those games are bad, but we wanted to focus on hitting the most casual of casual. So on to the next prototype!
Prototype 4: Rez + Puzzle Fighter

It was probably kismet that as we were having our meeting discussing the previous prototype, Rez HD had just been released on the XBOX360 that day. We got everyone to play Rez, to see what it was like to play this cult-favorite rail-shooter/sex-toy/music game. What we picked up from Rez was the feature that, even though the player isn't necessarily playing the game to the rhythm, the game gives rhythmic feedback. So as the player shoots 4 enemies down, the enemies are destroyed at a rhythm that synchronizes with the techno soundtrack, either adding additional notes on top of the melody, or filling in the soundtrack with additional eighth or sixteenth notes.

In thinking about music and song structures, we thought that there was a common phenomenon of building up musically, and then having a high point where all of the build up is released, either in a chorus or a insane solo or something or other. The first game that we thought of that might be close to this was Super Puzzle Fighter. In this classic arcade puzzle game, players build up a large number of colored tiles and then breaks them, sending a nasty gift to the players on the other side. We thought that this gameplay mechanic fit nicely, in that players could build up musically, and then break their tiles and send the music to the audience on the other side.

We're currently paper-prototyping out how this might feel, but we're making positive steps, and will update you all as soon as we have more to share.
Pipeline and web framework

Edmundo and Lisa have both been working hard to addressing a lot of the pipeline issues that we had from last semester. We've been going through all of the avatar customization system, optimizing how all of the Flash and Actionscript 3 foojaz operate so that we won't run into the same framerate issues we had last Spring. Additionally, Edmundo's been working hard at setting up the server that we'll be using. We're switching the web framework from PHP to Pylons, for a number of reasons.
Project Art

Joe's been working hard at getting a lot of the project art finished up so that he can dive into the production art full-on. Here are some pretty pictures!

A Fish Called Bando

2008-01-28T18:01:00.000-05:00

Bandology got a fish today! His name is Bando, and though he's only been in the office for 4 hours, Bando has already livened up the office considerably. Here are some photos of him:

Won't Get Fooled Again

2008-01-26T14:11:00.000-05:00

Week 2 = over! This week was filled with problem-solving, designing, and prototyping. One of the conclusions that we've come to after a week filled with thinking is that lot of our designs revolving around the world of Bandology shouldn't change; a lot of these features worked really well and we have no intention of changing them drastically. The progression for bands, the band member interactions, the customizability of avatars, the personalization of band information- all of these things are remaining in tact in some way, shape, or form. The fuzzy and tricky point of Bandology is the core gameplay mechanic. The core gameplay mechanic that existed in the first release of Bandology consisted of borrowed (read: stolen) casual game mechanics and a somewhat bizarre and abstract hardcore game that made varying amounts of sense depending on the player. We also didn't really have any games that captured the feeling of being in a band, or performing music live. Additionally, while our players absolutely loved creating bands, becoming super stars, and immersing themselves in the world of Bandology, the gameplay progression for casual players was pretty dreadful.

In looking at these issues that plagued Bandology as well as some commonplace problems found in online gaming, we were able to narrow down the focus of our core gameplay, which is to solve these two problems:

Eliminating grind:

Probably one of the most difficult problems to solve in online gaming is eliminating grind, especially when most MMOs want to reward and benefit players who spend more time playing the game. While it's not to say that there will ever be a situation where casual and hardcore players well ever be on a completely level playing field, we hope and strive to create a way in which players of all skill levels and time commitment can play together, since one of the cornerstones of Bandology gameplay is to create a fundamentally casual MMO.
Asynchronous cooperation:

Another problem with MMOs is something of a subtler issue. Generally, in order for people to play together in an MMO, everyone is required to be online at the same time. Whether this is done casually or scheduled as in a raid, the general set up for multiplayer play is for everyone to be online simultaneously. The notion of having scheduled times to play a game, or requiring a large amount of time spent to playing a game eliminates nearly any semblance of casualness, yet we want people to be able to play together cooperatively.

While we don't have any hard and fast solutions to either of these problems, we have a number of ideas that we're prototyping. Some of our thoughts behind eliminating grind revolve around having weekly group contributions to the band in the form of "playing a gig." The core gameplay that we're creating is tied to players playing in a gig, so every band member is basically playing their part in a live show. One game play session will be short, so that the minimum required play time for every band member should be 10-15 minutes max for 5 days or a week. After they've played once, how they played is their contribution to the gig for that week, and the casual player can simply log off and wait for the next gig to pop up. However, let's say there's a point value tied to their contribution; if a player wants to play again in order to contribute more or do better, such as, get a higher score, they're more than able to if they're so inclined. While this still creates some degree of grind, we feel that setting the minimum requirement to be low enough should prevent too much pressure on the casual player.

The asynchronous issue is a slightly trickier point that we're trying to solve as well. Carlos is currently working on a prototype that turns Bejeweled into an asynchronous cooperative game. Yes, yes, we're borrowing Bejeweled again, but the idea is that our asynchronous cooperation mechanic will be able to be layered on top of numerous games, so we're using Bejeweled as a test case. Here is how an asynchronous game of Bejeweled might play:

Player 1 plays a timed 5-minute game of Bejeweled. We log every move and block that Player 1 destroyed.
Player 2 comes in the next day and plays her 5-minute game of Bejeweled. As she is playing her game, bonus blocks and powerups might pop up at the same time that player 1 may have destroyed 4 jewels or 5 jewels in a row.

It's rough and sketchy at best, but babysteps.

Also, here's some concept art to tide you all over. Cheers y'all!

Jamming

2008-01-21T17:43:00.001-05:00

We have this song stuck in our heads:

And... We're Back

2008-01-18T22:44:00.000-05:00

After a very restful break over the holidays, the Bandology team is back in full gear, and we've had one week under our belts to get ourselves situated and ready for the cold Pittsburgh winter. I'd like to extend a warm welcome to the two new members of our team: Lisa and Carlos!

As Edmundo posted in a previous blog post, we've been spending a lot of time looking back at what Bandology was as of last June and doing lots of design work to make Bandology as amazing as possible. We had our first meeting with our faculty advisor Jesse Schell on Thursday, which has always been refreshing and enlightening. We discussed what a lot of the core problems are with Bandology and how we can fix these problems. After (not-so) much deliberation, we've decided to very graciously sever the ties that Bandology has with CasualCore. RIP CasualCore, you shall be missed.

With that in mind though, it's a brand new day for Bandology. We're setting off in exciting new directions, and we can't wait to show you what we have in store next!

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T15:38:00.000-05:00

Happy 2008 to anyone who is reading this blog! To celebrate, here's some music:

If you've been missing out, Radiohead released their newest album, In Rainbows, last year as a pay-what-you-want download from their own. Since then they've taken it offline (probably because the album is coming out in "normal" stores), but we support that kind of stuff. This video, released last night as a New Year's celebration, showcases their new album.

We'll be back working on Bandology in full force on Monday, January 15! For now, we're taking a break, working a little bit, doing some research; basically getting ready for some crazy amount of work.

A Tale of Two Bands

2007-12-09T01:51:00.000-05:00

During the last week of February, right before we went to the Game Developers Conference, we hit enlightenment when one of us proposed the idea to theme our "casualcore" project into a game about bands. Once we agreed that we needed to do this and Bandology was born, it became a game about forming bands, touring around the world playing gigs, gaining fans in every venue, and having leader boards (the charts) to compare against other bands. We also had the idea that players made money along the way to buy new clothes and accessories to wear, and that they could also get achievements we called Patches.

Today, our producer, Andy, bought Rock Band and we played it for a while. It's awesome; I think it's ten times better than Guitar Hero III. On the band career mode, players can create avatars, play in gigs, tour around the world, gain fans in every venue that they play, and get achievements along the way. Oh, and they can get money that can be used to customize avatars, too, and there are leader boards online as well. Sound familiar?

Oh wow. It seems that we both created pretty much the same concept, except that Rock Band is out there for the world to play and Bandology is not (we're working on it, really). The games play styles are completely different, but the themes are too similar to ignore.

However, Rock Band is not our competitor in any way. We're trying to reach a different audience at a different time span for a different purpose. Still, it's easy to be labeled a Rock Band clone even if we came up with the concept in February while Rock Band was announced on April 1, 2007 without too many details on what it would be like.

It's now time for us to think for a bit. We got a month left before we go back into full force on the project. Rock Band has given us some good ideas of what we need to do to make things work right, but also we want to do some things that Rock Band doesn't offer, or that are different from anything else people have seen out there. We're already breaking expectations by not having players play instruments, but how far can we go away from the norm before it just becomes too weird to anyone's liking?

For now, we'll keep playing Rock Band. I suggest you go out and play it, too, because it's awesome, but never forget about Bandology!

Fixing A Prototype

2007-11-19T00:23:00.000-05:00

I apologize for the lack of information since we last took down the first Bandology beta. That first beta was released on May 04, 2007 and we shut it down on June 01, 2007 to make lots of changes, fixes, and the like. We were overwhelmed by the positive response and the large audience that played our game (thanks everyone!) Since then, all of the team members either got summer internships or got full-time jobs at various video game companies. We continued to design and work on Bandology in our free time when we could over the summer. So far this fall, all of the team members have been assigned to different semester long projects, so Bandology has remained a side project for most of us. Once January rolls around, the team will be starting fresh and working full time on Bandology once again!

We know we said that we'd be reopening Bandology by October 15, but we quickly realized that there was far more that we needed to fix and adjust before we could re-release it to the public. Instead of giving another date, we'll just follow the Blizzard and Valve method of saying, "It's done when it's done." While we are incredibly happy with the response that we received, there were a number of issues that needed to be resolved as well as a number of features that were hacked together at the last minute simply to kick the game out the door and into the public. We took this summer and this semester as an opportunity to take a step back, look at what we accomplished, and think about what we could have done better, what we could redesign and redo, and very simply, what was broken and needed to be fixed.

To give you an update on just a few of the things that we've been thinking about, here is just a random smattering of ideas and designs that we've been working on:

Refined casual games
More paths and goals for bands beyond leader boards
Different band manager/leader game
Better band formation and matchmaking
More outfits and instruments

Those are just a few of the features we've been thinking about and working on. We appreciate you all being so patient, and we'll try to do a better job of keeping you all updated.

Rock On!

I Am The Walrus

2007-04-09T04:54:00.000-05:00

Well, over the past 2 weeks we've been hard at work rolling out new features and designs for our hardcore and casual games, in an attempt to alleviate the problems we've seen so far. We've been concentrating on trying to drive the connection between the casual and the hardcore players, and make each care about each other. This is the driving factor of what is at the heart of this project; we need to make our players care about each other.

Alpha 2 managed to give us a lot of good data, by telling us what was working an what wasn't. The patch system, for example, was incredibly popular. At the same time though, it wasn't driving the connection; as a result, we've more tightly integrated the hardcore and the casual player's dependence on each to try to encourage more of a connection. Patches are now tied both to the current city the band is in, and to a weekly allotment that the hardcore player can assign. The patches also will now give the band bonuses in the hardcore game, which will be displayed on the patch screen. Now, the patches will have endogenous value, and require both communication and coordination between players to achieve maximum effect.

We've also added forums, and have been furiously working on the wall/message board system within the world, so that bands can chat with each other, as well as chatting with other bands. After all, without a method of communication, there is no way for a community to form.

Anyway, we've added a lot more in in prep for the Alpha 3, but I'm getting tired. Hopefully we won't be killed responding to all the feedback we're going to get once we unleash our world upon our next round of guests. Alpha 3 goes out some time later today; I'm going to collapse now.

I'm Looking Through You

2007-04-02T01:15:00.001-05:00

A lot of work has been going into the UI for CasualCore. Edmundo & Joe have been working to give the entire web site a UI overhaul, as our current testing has shown that guests can't understand key features of our site. Henry and I have been working on various elements of the hardcore game, to make sure that players are not overwhelmed by the game, and can actually play it. Chris, Andy, and Charles have also been working to improve feedback on a lot of the other interaction methods, by adding more feedback to casual games and to avatar customization. By making it easier to explore the world we're trying to create, we're hoping that our guests, especially the casual players, will care more about this experience.

So far, this work has already seemed to bear some fruit, as various members of the team have found their casual players to be more communicative. We've finally had a number of players using the wall to communicate with their hardcore players, instead of bugging them in the hallways of the building. Hopefully, this means that when we launch alpha 3 to a wider audience, communication between people who don't already know each other will happen.

Goals

2007-03-30T03:13:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-28T01:13:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-03-25T00:54:00.000-05:00

Can we make it?

We have a poster!

2007-03-21T21:06:00.000-05:00

New direction

2007-03-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-05T23:27:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-04T17:29:00.000-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
Badges (both hardcore and casual). Badges are good ways to create meaning for casual gamers and also to create competition for hardcore gamers.
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.
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.
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.
Ladder/Ranking for both casual and hardcore. Ladders and rankings are easy and immediately create competition for the hardcore gamers.
Casual resource. A stat that casual gamer increases and the hardcore player spends (money/points). The idea behind this stat
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.
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
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.
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.
Location-based backgrounds for the casual games – In a world where the hardcore game is on some sort of world map,
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.
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.
Party has collective attributes. Casual + Hardcore trying to enhance the party – A house, city, and ship.
Casual clothing is a profession types of games enhance your profession.
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!

Posse Comitatus

2007-02-25T00:58:00.000-05:00

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.

Alpha 1.1

2007-02-24T01:14:00.000-05:00

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

Alpha 1

2007-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

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

Hello World

2007-02-21T15:59:00.000-05:00

Well, here's the start of our dev blog. Let's see how often we update it.