Home
Game Development   
06:42pm 27/03/2008
  OK, so t's been a long time. Here's what I'm working on in-between filling out job applications and basically trying to forward myself financially.

A long time ago, Sean "Squidi" Howard started posting game ideas he'd never have the time or patience to work on himself. some of them are really actually quite good, and one in particular has repeatedly struck a chord with me as something I'd want to work on. Conveniently enough, his site states that any game idea he posts there is fair game, "No Strings Attached." And so I've decided, with the aid of my discovery of the game creation engine BYOND, to actually set out and build the damned thing (The Communist Zombie MMO, for those of you who were wondering).

As for the moment, I'm less concerned with the heavy authoring that goes into a MUD, and more concerned with the nuts and bolts of how to make the thing work. There are a few ideas inherent to the game, and I'm going to go over them, and how I propose to deal with them, in this post.

First off, his idea involves eschewing character advancement in lieu of player advancement. To this end, he suggests an extensive "Badge" system. Withing the confines of BYOND, this involves saving the contents of a database for each player, with simple binary switches for each badge. Player-side, I can create a GUI window which will display a badge-grid, for easy visual reference. Keeping track of these accomplishments won't be at all hard. Coming up with them is another story, but as I said, the authoring waits for another day.

The Idea which I initially thought of as preventing the game from getting off the ground is what gave me the  impetus today to actually work on it. He has an idea of occasional random events which start off optional side-questy things, such as a shortwave radio transmission coming in from some folks trapped in a gas station on the edge of town, or similar things. In order to convey the idea of a world out of control of the players' hands, I figure the idea can be orchestrated thusly:

1. First we create a global event loop; basically a count-down timer, which we set to one week of real time.
2. To each random event, we attach a random number generator, which ranges from 1-6048000 (BYOND measures time in 1/10 seconds. that's the number of second-tenths in a week.)
3. We instruct each event to occur at the given increment during the countdown.
4. If no-one is there when the event occurs, they missed it.

Expanding on this structure, we can determine the overall rarity of events by instituting a second event loop to increment once per week. Rarer events can be keyed to both this event loop, and, once the required increment for the second loop arrives, to the weekly one, so that they will only be dropped into weekly rotation once in a while. The end result is a world in which a lot of things happen, but many aren't discovered by players for quite a long time, especially those events keyed to a certain type of room, or to a single room. this can lend a static list of possible events a certain mysterious quality, preventing any new addition to the game from being discovered immediately and reliably, and preserving a sense of exploration for players. we can add to this effect by NOT including a global chat channel, which has the additional benefit of making players feel isolated: a staple of the zombie genre.

Further event rarity can be implemented via more event loops, leading up to an Apocalyptic Loop on which are several potentially game-ending events. Literally. The end result of failure of the player base to follow an Apocalyptic Event to it's successful conclusion is that a global message is sent out, or perhaps a series of global messages, ("Suddenly, the night is lit glaring white with an incandescence of unimaginable proportions".. "There is a sudden roar, followed only by the ringing of your ears!" ... "Everything, your own body included, is violently destroyed in a wave of wind and fire!" )and the game is shut down. This makes for a perfect time to update, adding more events, more locations, and so on.

Ideally, the more common events should be vastly numerous, to ensure that even a small player base finds at least one or two each week. The more common events should also be smaller. The larger and more rare an event, the more rooms it should be keyed to have some sort of notification in. The Apocalyptic Events should trigger in such a way that they should never be able to take the player base by surprise, but should also be huge challenges to complete successfully. I picture the world ending utterly about once a year or two. You've got to be able to shut down once in a while, yes?

Certain of Squidi's ideas I have no interest in implementing. He had an idea that the game should punish you for quickly acquiring new badges by having zombies become more and more aggressive towards players who consistently and quickly achieve. Boo. I have no interest in punishing players for enjoying a game, or even striving to find and unlock things. I understand that the idea was set to prevent someone from looking up badge requirements on a wiki or whatever, and waltzing through the game, but enough of the badges can be set to random occurrences that I don't feel that would be much of a problem.		  
    Post
 
  iaminyourhead
 
 
days  
 
 

Advertisement

Advertisement