Continuity is a student project (JEALOUS!), and bears the hallmark of student projects/amateur game developers/free-to-play Flash games: a stick figure as the lead character. Countless free-to-play Flash games star the very same character. The stick man is, i believe, the most famous and popular of all video game characters – moreso than Mario, Pac-Man or Tim Langdell.

Brand and Deliver

i attend many many video game events where someone in-the-know preaches from the pulpit to people not in-the-know, mostly students and hobbyists and amateurs. And the one tip that i hear repeated again and again, particularly in the free-to-play Flash (and even iPhone) climate where there’s a lot of competition and it’s tough to be heard above the noise, is to “build a brand.” Put another way, “develop your own original IP.” They say this because generally speaking, students, hobbyists and amateurs don’t build brands. But what does building a brand or an IP mean, anyway?

Well, for starters, it means not using a stick man as your main character. You can’t own a stick man. No one can. And your stick man game, even if it’s innovative like Continuity, won’t stand out from the throngs of other stick man games. No one will approach you and ask to buy the rights to your stick man game IP. No one wants to develop comic books or fridge magnets or Band-Aids based on your stick man, because it’s not an ownable or exploitable thing. And, very likely, no one will remember your stick man game. i’m struggling to keep the name “Continuity” in my head as i write this article.

i suspect the creators of Continuity are more passionate about programming than they are artwork. The bones of their game are reasonably solid. Now imagine what they could do if they found an artist and put a little English on it. Maybe Continuity’s main character is a fugitive on the run from the law, or an anthropomorphic kangaroo, or a sorceror who can bend reality to his will? Maybe she’s just a cool-looking chick in a hat? i dunno. But any of these completely trample “stick man”.

Stick Em Up

Let’s do the opposite: let’s take a strong brand and use a stick man instead. i don’t feel that the main character in Braid, “Tim”, was incredibly interesting. But he was short and wore a tie and was at least halfway there.

Now let’s wipe him out and replace him with a stick man and box art:

From awesome to n’awsome in sixty seconds.

Or let’s go with something like Super Mario Galaxy. Mario doesn’t say much, but his personality shines through the way he’s drawn and the way he animates. He’s a pleasantly plump Italian plumber who utters adorably stereotyped phrases like “It’s-a me!” and “Bowser Koopa sleeps with-a the fishes!” So here’s the game with its very broadly appealing brand identity:

And now, Super Mario Galaxy with stick men and box art:

Even though Braid has a wonderfully unique gameplay mechanic to offer (despite horrible, horrible grade 12 poetry class writing), and Super Mario Galaxy is a super-solid 3D platformer, if you take away the brand, you take away MOST of the experience. That’s right, i said MOST. Not half. Visuals are not half of a game. Even though your team and man-hours may be split 50/50 between code and art, a well-coded game with bad art (or stick men) that can compete commercially is a rare beast indeed. i’ll boldly put it this way: art and sound are 70-80% of both the player’s experience, and your ability as a designer to market and profit from your game.

Sharp-Dressed Man

The one interesting exception i’ll throw out here is Fancy Pants Adventures, a free-to-play Flash game with great programming and tight platform controls. These games star a stick man as their lead character, but dig the difference: a pair of yellow pants and a shock of hair.

Can you own a sitck man with a pair of yellow pants and a shock of hair? Sure you can. Can you build a strong original IP with such a minimally modified figure? Absolutely. In this case, the pants and the hair are all it took to elevate Fancy Pants Adventures from a generic and forgettable free-to-play platformer, to a memorable series that has done extremely well for the developer.

Now let’s take a look at the same character with no pants and hair:

Visual style and brand identity are not nice-to-haves. If you have any hope of rising above the thousands of hobbyists, amateurs, and even certain professional developers in the free-to-play space, visual style and brand identity are HAVE-to-haves. Free yourself from the tyranny of stick men and, at the very least, put a hat on that guy. Then you can go from this:

To this:

The difference is brand recognition, noteriety and, hopefully, money in the bank.

UUG

This is last call to buy tickets for the Toronto Unity Users Group, which runs tonight at the Gladstone Hotel. Here are some fast facts about Unity 3D to refresh your memory:

1. The game engine has been around for a number of years, but the recent port to the PC and the price reduction to FREE has garnered a boatload of attention.
2. It’s kinda like Flash, except it uses 3D graphics, and it’s actually tuned to make games. So instead of bending it to your steely will as Flash requires by adding 3rd-party physics, for example, Unity comes with many crucial game features right out of the box.
3. There is a world of opportunity in marketing for folks that can use Unity. Unity 3D games can be played directly in the browser. Advertisers looking for something shiny and new (“new”) will be plenty impressed by the technology.
4. Can’t do 3D? If you live in Ontario, there’s plenty of under-utilized, inexpensive talent coming out of the colleges and universities. It seems every school has at least one 3D art program, but the demand for these graduates is rock-bottom in the province.

Here’s an example of what Unity 3D can do in skilled hands:

MUG

On Wednesday, there’s a double-shot of Unity goodness. There’s a half-day workshop at George Brown College. After that, i expect most of the participants will pub crawl a few blocks over to Kensington Market, where the Rich Media Institute is holding the monthly Mobile Users Group for Games and Apps. They’ll be talking about (among other things) the u3dobject framework, which enables you to communicate between Flash and Unity.

When i read the MUG description, i was worried that it stepped on the UUG workshop. Then when i read about the content of the meeting, i was really concerned – not only was it stepping on the other event, but it was about Unity 3D! As it turns out, one event begins as the other ends. i know that the UUG organizers, DimeRocker, had met with Shawn Pucknell at the Rich Media Institute, so i’m glad that everyone is playing nicely together.

Streaming Colour Studios’ Owen Goss is a regular at the event. Here’s his latest vblog developer episode:

No Elbow Room

It wasn’t the case last week, when the Vortex Game Competition ran concurrently on top of the DIG London conference, which split a few loyalties. But as anyone who’s tried to organize a Christmas party in December can tell you, sometimes there are just no openings. Other times, the event has to happen because it’s reliant on a funding schedule – that was the case two years ago when interactive ontario’s GameON: Finance conference ran the week before GDC in San Francisco.

i am THRILLED that gaming is so red-hot in Ontario that the calendar is so packed with events. i sincerely hope that we all stay well-connected enough so that there’s enough breathing room in the schedule to give everyone a break. If you’re running a game-related event in Ontario, please check the calendar first to ensure that you’re not encroaching on another initiative. And if you know of any game-related events – in Ontario or abroad – that should be on the calendar, please feel free to add it to our events page and we’ll update the calendar PDQ.

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When you own and operate a Massively Mutliplayer Online Game you are, in very many ways, a day care worker. You’re trying to keep a group of players happy all day long. These players are all at different stages of development. Some learn faster than others. Some are well-behaved, while some draw on the walls and throw wood blocks at the other players.

The content you develop for your MMO costs you money. If your game is free to play with an enhanced subscription or micro-payment model, you need to structure your game to get the most mileage possible from your content. Your game’s structure determines how quickly players will use up your content. If your game is level-based, prepare to have a lot of cranky toddlers on your hands.

Many of the most popular MMOs today follow the levelling systems introduced by pen-and-paper role-playing games from the 1970s:

1. Your character has a statistical list of abilities
2. When you take actions, your score improves incrementally
3. Once your score hits a certain threshold, your character “levels up”
4. Levelling up improves your character’s stats
5. The score required to reach the next level gets larger
6. The more your character’s stats increase, the more of the game world you can experience

i have a few problems with this time-worn system. For starters, it’s time-worn. Just like any well-established genre, RPGs have sunk into distinct ruts. Levelling systems are a rut. Elemental (ice, fire, water, earth, lightining) magic systems are pretty tired too. A number of articles i’ve been reading lately wonder why so many MMOs and RPGs take place in traditional Tolkien-inspired fantasy worlds with orcs, trolls, ogres and elves. The same question was raised at the 2007 Game Developers’ Conference.

The obvious answer is that established products sell better than untried ones. Sequels and spin-offs thrive not only in the game industry, but also in teevee land and filmywood. It often takes a young, upstart company to prove a new concept for a huge publishing giant to sweep in, buy that company (or steal the idea) and make good on it!

I Have a -5 Bonus to Tolerance

The second trouble with levelling systems is that they are dumb. If my character’s stats are Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity, and i kill the same rat species 500 times, i will eventually level up. Why did my Strength stat increase? Probably because my character got so much exercise thwacking away with his sword. Why did my Dexterity stat increase? This one’s a bit of a stretch. Maybe my character became a better sword handler during all that hacking and slashing? Maybe he learned how to do some cool sword twirls while he mundanely murdered a mob of matching monsters?

Fine. But why on Earth did my character’s intelligence stat increase when he levelled up? Was he reading an encyclopedia while he was fighting? Was he listening to some sort of Books on Tape series that i wasn’t aware of? The total abstraction of abilities to numbers forces artificiality on the game experience, an experience that could be much more enriching.

Skills vs. Levels

Games like Oblivion are more skill-based than level-based, and i prefer them. Oblivion still has levels and thresholds, but players improve their skills by actually performing those skills. To improve your acrobatics skill, jump. To improve your stamina, run. To improve your intelligence, read a book. To improve your magic casting skill, cast magic. It’s a very logical approach to character growth, and it’s much more rewarding than abstracted box scores that turn gaming into an undergrad statistics course.

The danger of levelling is that your players are encouraged to eat through your content as fast as possible. There’s a definite competition between your players to see who can reach your level cap first. And when players do reach the level cap, they complain on your boards that there’s nothing to do! Massively is hosting an interesting discussion about the pleasures and pains of levelling up quickly in an MMO.

RPGs Play You

The comfort of RPGs is that they require very little skill of the human player. i don’t have to be physically strong in order to complete a RPG. If my character dies, i can jump back into the game and monotonously beat up weak creatures until the game decides i’m strong enough to tackle larger creatures. i don’t have to be genuinely charismatic to sway the opinions of in-game characters. i improve that number stat, and suddenly the game gives me extra conversation options to woo the different people i meet. i know that i won’t be able to complete a twitch-based game that requires fast reflexes, but i can always rely on RPGs to let me methodically chip away at the game content, plodding through randomly-regenerated monsters until i finish the game … not by my own skill, but by dull brute force.

Some MMOs shake this format up a little. In Puzzle Pirates, encounters really are twitch-based. The player who can zip through a game of Puzzle Fighter (aka “swordfighting”) the fastest wins the encounter.

But at the risk of sounding like John Lennon: imagine an MMO without levels. Imagine a game where only the smartest players solved the game’s puzzles and riddles. Only the fastest players could compete in twitch-based challenges. Only the most creative players earned praise and attention for their in-game designs. Only the most methodical players could keep track of complex game stats. Imagine an MMO that played to the strengths of the human beings backing each digital avatar, so that players really had to band together and use each other’s actual skills to succeed in the game. Then success would not be based on who could repeatedly click on the same monster for hours on end.

i don’t know what that MMOG looks like. But i’m working on it.

Update: One day after this post, an author at Massively wrote this pithy observation:

Killing a boss on launch day may mean you’re one of only a handful of people to do it – ever. The chance to actually be heroic, in a genre that more often than not defines heroism as ‘investing time’, is exciting.

The rest of the artice, titled “MMOG – missing a sense of mystery” is worth a read.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/27/hot-mmog-dev-tip-4-levels/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/22/hot-mmog-dev-tip-3-wow/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/22/hot-mmog-dev-tip-3-wow/#comments Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:06:32 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=43 i worked for over a year as sr. game developer on a massively multiplayer online casual game for kids and tweens called GalaXseeds. i learned a great deal, and am happy to share these tips about MMOG development.

World of Warcraft Cliff Notes

You may have heard of it?

Want to learn all about World of Warcraft, but don’t want to spend the time or money? It’s exactly like studying crack cocaine without actually having to smoke it. How Stuff Works has written a World of Warcraft primer to keep people in the know and free from addiction.

i’m taking the easy way out this week and simply linking to the article. Look for more articles from Untold Entertainment in this ongoing MMOG Tips series, geared for people who’d like to better understand MMOGs (particularly casual MMOGs, which exclude WoW entirely.)

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/22/hot-mmog-dev-tip-3-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/18/hot-mmog-dev-tip-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/18/hot-mmog-dev-tip-2/#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:41:15 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=22 i worked for over a year as sr. game developer on a massively multiplayer online casual game for kids and tweens called GalaXseeds. i learned a great deal, and am happy to share these tips about MMOG development.

Tip #2 – Reward

One of the key elements of good game design is the principal of risk vs. reward. Every time your player risks something, he gets a reward. The quality of the reward should be proportional to the degree of risk. If the player risks losing a health point by fighting an enemy, the defeated enemy could drop additional ammo, coins, or health. If the player risks losing an entire life by battling his way through a level, the reward for completing the level could be a new weapon, extra lives, or a new story segment. This is nothing new – if you’ve played a few games in your life, you’ve cottoned on to this principle.

Every challenge you set up in your MMOG should be rewarded. If you have too many unrewarded challenges, your players might see your game as a waste of time and will move on to something more fulfilling. Gone are the days when players can play a game, and are rewarded by the simple joy of playing. Virtual capitalism has run amok in the MMOG space; assuming you’re developing a game that falls in line with its competition, you’ll have to reward your players for every task, big or small.

Launch day is too late to start thinking about your maintenance plan and the rewards you’ll offer. The structure you plan for and build from day one will determine how often and how richly you can reward your players. The better your reward structure, the more addictive and exciting your game will be.

1. The fastest reward you can develop will overrun your game.

This is a very easy trap to fall into. When your product is live, and you have a finite maintenance budget and a limited production schedule, you will gravitate toward whatever is easiest to build or implement. Before long, your game will become overrun with that one reward type.

In the Sitekick Project, an online collectible loyalty program/game hybrid i designed for YTV.com, players own a little yellow robot. The robot runs on Chips, which are programs that can be discovered and collected throughout the site.

Chips can do many amazing things! Some Chips change your robot’s appearance – you can dress up your bot with different hairstyles and costume pieces. Some Chips contain MP3s that you can listen to using a music player Chip. Some Chips change your robot’s environment, while others launch or contain mini-games. One Chip lets the user print out a customizable cut-and-glue 3D paper model of a race car.

Obviously, the fastest, easiest Chips to develop were the “Face Pieces” – the paper doll Chips. Extra functionality takes extra time, so it’s very easy to just sit and bang out a series of Chips that are essentially still images. Since these were the fastest, least costly rewards to produce, they soon became the only Chips that were produced.

You can look at the encylopedic “Chipendium” to see this … most of the interactive or animated Chips appear early in the list. As the project went on, paper doll Chips become more and more prevalent, until they entirely take over.

The result is that the application became the reward type. With nothing but paper doll elements being produced, Sitekick has become a paper doll application. As such, it’s quite popular. Paper doll apps do very well online. Most MMOGs avatar systems are essentially paper doll apps. But now that the majority of the 500+ Sitekick Chips are paper doll pieces, it seems odd to have that handful of functional Chips. From a player’s perspective, they feel like they belong to an unsupported feature.

So make lean rewards!

When designing your MMOG, maintain a strict bottom line cost for your reward development. Try to get the development time and cost per reward as low as possible through shared code libraries, a streamlined production process, and fast, easy-to-use admin tools.

2. Commit to Supporting Your Feature Set

In your maintenance plan, commit to developing x number of “easy” rewards, and y number of rewards that are more costly to develop. Bite the bullet on that one! There’s no sense in developing a reward feature that you will never support because its rewards are too expensive or time-consuming to build. Eventually, players will start wondering why there’s a pet shop with only one kind of pet in it, or why there’s a crafting system that always produces the same three swords.

3. Structure your rewards around numbers.

The simplest way to reward your player is to make a number go up or down. In GalaXseeds, players can be rewarded with (among other things) money, XP and Level numbers. Numbers go up, numbers go down. Easy. Your software handles this “reward generation” for you. You can even link number rewards together. When you level up in GalaXseeds (number goes up), your inventory capacity increases (number goes up). Countless RPGs have blazed this trail – many of them amount to nothing more than baseball box scores with a graphics overlay. Kill a monster for more experience (number goes up). Gain a level (number goes up) to improve your Strength stat (number goes up).

The more items and features you design around numbers, the more quickly, easily and abundantly you can reward your players. GalaXseeds has a few different item types – among them are Gear (furniture) and Get-Ups (costumes). Developing an item is obviously more costly and time-consuming than allowing your game to dynamically tweak numbers up and down. But you can wrap a costly reward in numbers to get more bang for your buck.

Sure, you have a fridge … but do you have a level two fridge (number goes up) that can hold three more pieces of food (number goes up)? How many style points does your bowtie have? (number goes up)

Then, just design a mini-game or activity to tweak those item numbers up and down (furniture battle? i dunno:). There you have it. Lots more gameplay, lots more reward … much less maintenance work.

You can even tie simple programming mechanics into this reward system. Maybe you give your player a telescope. When the player looks through it, he sees an empty starfield. But the more games he plays/trades he makes/things he buys etc, the more random stars appear in that starfield. This solution is simple, it’s programmatic, and your artist just has to draw one simple star.

3. Overdoing one reward devalues it.

While it’s easiest to tweak numbers up and down, be careful not to lean on this too heavily, and be careful to go easy on your in-game economy. If you keep giving players money with nothing to spend it on, money as a reward will be devalued. No one will want money any more. And once your player stops desiring your reward, there’s no incentive to play, and all but your most loyal fans will move on to a new game.

This goes beyond money. If you keep giving players the same item – the Golden Whatsit – no one will want a Golden Whatsit any more. If you keep increasing a player’s level, and there’s no power or privilege associated with higher levels, players won’t care. It becomes a meaningless stat with no inherent value, like score. One type of gamer is highly motivated by seeing his “score” number (money number, level number, etc) go up and up and up. The rest of us are after something more meaningful.

4. Create aspirational rewards.

One of the rewards in GalaXseeds is room access. Reach level x, and you can enter Area Y. Accessing a new area may not be a compelling enough reward. It’s not enough for players to simply visit a new area. They had to do something there. As GalaXseeds progressed, more and more content was added to these special access areas.

This makes sense. There’s this whole idea of functional vs. fashionable items. In some cases, having a non-functional hat is enough of a reward. Being able to visit Area Y isn’t a compelling reward because there’s no way to “wear” Area Y … you can’t take it around with you or brag about being able to go there. To solve this, you could put a special item in the Area Y that only players who went there are able to wear. That way, they can parade their success and privilege in front of the other players, inspiring those players to pursue the same reward. GalaXseeds does this with its monthly parties. Club Penguin does this with its visiting pirate. Puzzle Pirates puts rare resources on different islands that only more experienced players can access.

You have to do some soul-searching when it comes to developing aspirational rewards (just as you have to commit to developing more time-consuming and costly rewards to support your feature set, even though the temptation is to just bang out the quick content.) The challenge when you develop level 70 Happy Pants is that most of your players are at level 1, so you’ve just spent time and money on content that most players won’t experience. But if you DON’T develop level 70 Happy Pants, there will be no reward for your level 70 players. They’ll feel that your game was a waste of time, and they’ll leave angry. And the level 1 players will have nothing to strive for. They’ll think “what’s the point of levelling up?” Suddenly, your whole levelling feature is a wash.

World of Warcraft handles aspirational rewards very well by ensuring that the experience at its maximum level is exciting and rewarding, and it’s different depending on your character type. The result is that there are many players reaching the top level and then, instead of leaving the game because there’s nothing left to do, they choose a different character type and start all over again. That’s the kind of player commitment MMOGs should strive to foster.

i’m a huge advocate for aspirational rewards – game content you can’t experience until later – for its sheer stickiness. These are some key factors to making aspirational rewards work:

a. Your players have to be able to showcase, flaunt, or brag about an aspirational reward. How are you going to know that you want the +99 Sword of Ass-kicking unless you see a level 70 parading through the town square with it?

b. Aspirational rewards have to appear attainable. If i get the sense that i’m going to lose 90 hours of my life trying to get that Sword of Asskicking, i might move on to something else. If there’s some glimmer of hope that i could get that sword – me, a brand new bright-eyed player – i might give it a shot.

c. Players must know the path to the reward. Microsoft released a game called Viva Pinata that messed this one up.

Their game is all about collecting pinatas. As with Pokémon, the game gives players a blank encyclopedia (do this in your game!!), providing players with some idea of which pinatas players are missing. At no point did the game drop a hint has to how players could collect certain pinatas – they left that up to the extra $40 game guide, i suppose. i stopped playing that game after checking a cheat site. In order to earn one of these special pinatas, i had to use a certain tool on a certain object on a certain frame of animation. In a game with many tools and hundreds of objects with thousands of frames of animation, this was too much to bear. There was no way i could discover these pinatas on my own, fair and square. If the only way for me to complete the game was to cheat, i was ready for a new game.

5. Find clever ways to reuse rewards.

Japanese role playing game designers figured this one out quickly. Their games were huge, but cartridge memory was small, so the enemies in the back half of the game were just repainted versions of enemies you fought earlier. Green slimes? That’s so first level. Powered-up players battle golden slimes!

They used the same technique of tweaking number values. Crank up a green slime’s attack, defense, and hitpoints. Then paint the sprite yellow and change its name. Voila – the golden slime is born.

i, for one, hate battling golden slimes. What a chincy way to add enemies to your game.

But furniture? Bring it on! If i can get a blue couch to match my blue dresser, and the colour “blue” isn’t available in the GalaXseeds paint shop, i’m a happy player. It’s a very easy reward to set up, and somehow repainted furniture doesn’t seem as chincy an addition to your game as repainted enemies. Ditto Pokémon. i knew that if i searched long and hard enough, i could find colour variants in the game’s creatures. No special abilities – i would just have a blue Pikachu. And i could show off my blue Pikachu to other players via the “trade” and “online battle” features. Rewarding.

6. Start building items now, and don’t stop until your graphics guy dies.

My final tip is this: of all the rewards you can muster, items will likely be the most ubiquitous, and therefore the most needed. And of all the items you can create, functional items will trump vanity items. Players don’t just want the pointy hat – they want the pointy hat that enables them to fly.

Plan ahead now to get your item development flow as tight and speedy as possible. Then start churning out items. Create a massive stockpile of items. Pile items to the virtual ceiling. You will always, always, always need items. Better still, create a crafting system whereby players can create their own items.

Give your players a book or catalog or encyclopedia to keep track of which items are in the game. The bigger the list, the more exciting your game will be and the longer people will hang around trying to collect all the items. (See: Sitekick Chipendium, Club Penguin Catalogs, Pokémon Pokédex, etc)

Reward items with more items. If your player collects all of the superhero costume pieces, reward him with a special additional mask or cape.

Do these things, and thy game shall be awesome.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/18/hot-mmog-dev-tip-2/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/11/hot-mmog-dev-tip-1/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/11/hot-mmog-dev-tip-1/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:28:06 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=20 edit: the content of this post is being reviewed and will return shortly!

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