NBI Challenge: Early Access and Kickstarter

For the second Newbie Blogger Initiative challenge, it’s asked of us what our opinions are on crowdfunding, specifically Kickstarter and Early Access games. Here are my thoughts.

http://www.newbiebloggerinitiative.com/talkback-challenge-2-early-access-and-kickstarter-nbi2015/

Early Access and Kickstarters, for those not sure what they are, are games either not yet started or finished, but are asking for money. Although both are within the same ballpark of each other, they are different in how they work and I’d like to tackle them separately.

Kickstarters work by asking you to donate a lump sum to the creator and they promise you a reward for your donation depending on the amount of money you give. This goes towards giving the creator a lower risk chance at creating what they want. Some people see this as an investment, which may look like one on the outside, but on the inside the mechanics are completely different. It’s a donation, plain and simple, anything beyond that goes outside what Kickstarter is promoting and is a misunderstanding by the donor or creator.

I fully support what Kickstarter is doing here. I don’t donate more than I’m willing to lose, because it’s a gamble on a promise. I love how it opens up for indie’s, small business or inventors the chance to ask the crowds to fund their dreams, and not depend on publishers or large investors. It lowers risk for those who can’t, or won’t, go towards higher risks, and lastly it helped save Massively from sunsetting.

Early Access works by releasing the game in an early state, before it’s ready for full release, and asking for people to pay for it either with an upfront fee or in-game store transactions (or both). These funds are assumed to go towards completing the game or helping to recoup money for investors before the game is finished. The difference between this and Kickstarter is that early access games are at least in a state you can start testing or playing around with, while Kickstarters tend to be mostly promise and ideas.

I like the idea of early access games as well, but only for the small budget indie games. Large games that use this to try and bring in money they don’t need are hurting early access with their greed.

Mechanic Blueprint - Physics Engines

Finally made a piston lift for a ship.

Physics Engines are really fun to play with. The more you can move around and interact with, the better. They have their faults though, and when those faults show up, they become really noticeable.

I'm pretty sure arms don't go in you like that.

Only a few games try to have a physics engine; Space Engineers, Elite: Dangerous, and Skyrim to name a few that do. However physics engines don’t really exist, they are more of an illusion than anything. The reason they don’t is because physics is hard, like really hard. Not for people to program the equation, but for the processor to work out the math on the scale the game needs.

What they do have are smoke and mirror physics, or just plain fake physics. As my brother told me, everything the game does is usually a good trick to make you think what you do is real. For instance, have you went up to a bush and noticed it was flat when you got there? It’s not a 3-D bush, but a flat 2-D raster image told to rotate towards your character at all times to give the illusion of 3-D.

Oh, what a pretty purple plant... wait a minute, it's FAKE!

An example of how game physics work would be a flight path for a trajectory out of a gun. With some games, when you shoot, the bullet or grenade path is calculated at the time of the shot and it then just follows the path, vs giving it a velocity and direction and apply gravity to it. The latter would take processing power that could be used elsewhere, this is usually more prevalent with mobile platforms. A more basic example would be collision. A game would almost never have collision down to the precise groove of the muscles of your character (mesh collision), they instead put in place a box that is close, or a sphere around your head. It’s a trick to save processing power

I love me some physics, even the illusion of it. Perhaps some day computers will have enough processing power to have full physics in a game and have great graphics too. By then, I’ll probably be a head in a jar plugged into the matrix filling out a bug report and sending it telepathically to the devs asking why the sky didn’t load in properly. It’s probably because I got the Madcats head plugin instead of the official Microsoft one for $5 more.

Welcome Newbie Blogger Initiates!

The Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI) has been great so far. All you that have joined me, thank you. I appreciate your company and look forward to hearing what you have to say and offer my thoughts as well. Perhaps sparring some, and doing some cooperative work together, but in the end, I hope to find myself in a great community.

I’ve already created an introductory post back when I made the blog. Now with the NBI, I wanted to revisit it and give another introduction to my new list of possible readers, peers, as well as vets who are helping us all out.

I’m Tyrannodorkus, you can refer to me as such, or as Mr Tyranny (thought it sounded cool), or just plain Roger. I’m a gamer, as many of you are, and I cut my teeth on Mario on the Nintendo. I’ve had a long time fling with video games, one that isn’t going away anytime soon. My current favorite genre is MMO, which I’ve been a part of for 15 years now, I believe, and I plan to use it as my focus for blogging. The subject I plan to spotlight will be game mechanics, because to me, they are the most important part of the game.

A bit about myself, I’ve mentioned on the NBI forum, I’m the awkward guy who has a tough time talking to others. The past few years, I’ve been a daily reader of Massively, and because of those wonderful people and the community, I’ve been feeling more comfortable interacting in an online text format. I still have issues with voice chat. Some of you may know what I mean, but I get small panic like attacks at just the thought of joining a mumble server, or even having to call the car dealership to setup an appointment. Shame really, but my brother has always been there to help me. It’s time I try and conquer this, or at least learn to control it.

Tyrannodorkus is something I created with my brother a while back, but had just started using. I plan to post mostly about MMOs and game mechanics, but I left myself open to talk about other games if necessary. I don’t plan to stray from this for now, so I can stay focused.

I also have a Youtube account, mostly to get my voice out there, partly inspired for my love of let’s plays, and lastly because it’s something I would never have done a year ago. If you check it out, please let me know what you think. I’d like to get more feedback, but a polite gesture or a ‘nice job’ is appreciated just as much. You can find it here.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNWT9SFa7qD9z_eu0dM6EA

Finally, from all I’ve learned over the years, I want to help build and be a part of a great community. I want to hear from you and want to know what you think. I’ve always been the silent supporter, so I know it’s hard to let people know you care. There’s more than just talking to let someone know you are there to help. Hitting a like, or favorite, or whatever the system provides is a great way to show support. So please let me know what you think, and let others know you support them.

NBI Challenge: GamerGate

I debated whether to join this challenge or not (you'll see why due to my answer below), but that's not the spirit of joining an initiative to just sit out of the first challenge despite my opinion of the subject. So without further adieu, I give you my first challenge write up.

GamerGate, to me, became tainted. It lost focus and really hurt the gaming culture in the end. To be honest, I stayed away from it. Any thing that was tagged as GamerGate, I avoided.

If you were to ask three people what GamerGate was, you’d might get three different answers. It was about sex for favors, wait, it was about sexism in videogames, or was it about game journalism was corrupt. I’m confused now. That is why I believe it’s tainted and I just left it alone. It was dangerous to get swept up in it because GamerGate had become a rage machine to stir people up.

In the end, I chose not to participate.

Game Persistence & Content Recycling, and Why We Need It

To bring you up to speed, in MMOs, the ‘worlds’ are said to be persistent. What this means is that whether you are logged in or not, things are happening. Other people are logging in game and moving around, resources are spawning and being mined, enemies are being destroyed even when you don’t have the game running. In a single player game, nothing happens until you load it up. For example, in Skyrim, nobody moves around, the time doesn’t tick and the world stays still while the game is off. In Elder Scrolls Online, the game is still going on even though you aren’t playing it. That’s persistence.

Next is content recycling. What this means is that when you beat an enemy, or mine a resource node, or complete a daily quest, you can do that all over again. The enemy will respawn, the resource node will come back and the daily quest will be back for you to take again tomorrow. MMOs and some games do this so you have something to do when you don’t have any immediate goals, or a way for you to level up towards the next bit of content you want to do. This isn’t always fun, and often associated with grinding (repeating a task towards a reward), but it’s something to do in a game you want to keep playing and can’t continue on to the next step of your quest or task yet.

Now, to the heart of this post. There are many complaints and dream games where people don’t want to go through recycled content, but most, if not all, MMOs have you go through it. If you played a MMO then this might sound familiar, “Man, I’m tired of doing these dailies.” Or “Wouldn’t it be cool if when I beat the dungeon boss, that was it. He never spawns again.” Both of these are issues on recycled content.

Now most of you will probably already know this, but content takes time to make. It has to be thought out, planned, programmed, tested, fixed and balanced out in order to bring it to you, the player. Some content tends to cut corners, which is why some of it is buggy, easy or hard, gives too much/too little reward, etc. But the main story is usually pretty balanced out and works most of the time as intended. What this boils down to, is that there is no way a studio can push out enough content to keep you satisfied all the time. So they come up with ways to keep you entertained and busy while still playing their game, hence daily quests and recycled/repeated content.

To get to the persistence part of this post, the game has other players playing the game along with you. Unlike a single player or cooperative player game, MMOs allow other people to play in your world and can be on different quests, or even the same quest but on different sections. That means it would be unlikely for them to offer up a unique quest to one player and not give it to all players because the developers cannot create enough quests for each of us to have our own individual quests.

The current design and model of MMOs do not allow for non-recycled content, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. I am inferring to player generated content and computer generated content. Now player generated content has the same issues as studio generated content, in that there just isn’t enough being created to give us all unique, non-recycled experiences while playing, however computers can generate this all day long every day. The issue with computer generated content is that it lacks special touches and human experience because how early in development computer generated content is.

Landmark seems to be pushing the boundaries the most right now with player and computer generated content where the computer generates the landscape with some added touches by the studio and then the players pulls from that and adds to it with their own final touches and human expression. There is a lot of potential there, but the game is still in a beta state according to Daybreak Studios (formerly SOE). They have a ways to go and more tools to build for this, though. There are other games in development that are also trying to build on these two concepts. Crowfall for one, and Trove as another. Trove however is released to the public to play now if you wish to hop in.

As for the future of MMOs, it’s hard to say. My two cents are that player and computer generated content will become more of the standard and what MMOs should be heading towards. As for now, we need recycled content because we want to keep playing our favorite MMO, else we need to come to peace with the fact that sometimes we need to stop for a while and/or come back with a fresh perspective when new content is released. That’s what makes MMOs so great, because they are persistent worlds that have content added to them over time, unlike a single player game where it’s pushed out and that’s pretty much it, except for the occasional DLC that might come afterwards.

Mechanic Blueprint - Character Creators

Mechanics are important to me, if you haven't already seen from my previous posts. I believe they are what separate games from every other form of media. In this post, I want to do some theory crafting and share some ideas I have on mechanics. Since I like to focus on MMOs, let's begin with the mechanic that is one of the most important parts and the first one you use.

Character Creation

Character creators are some of the most important, and yet sometimes overlooked, mechanic you use when starting out in an MMO. They let you create your avatar, the character that will represent you in the game world. A good character creator will root the player into the world, allow them to accept what the game tells them to believe is true. A poor creator will leave a rift between the player and the world because they couldn't connect with their avatar.

Do you take this Avatar to be your lawful representation?

A good character creator starts off with plenty of choices. That's not all though, they give you these choices in waves, start you off with a small selection, followed by another selection based off the last choice. To start off with, what race do I want to play. This can range from types of humans that differ between regions, to the exotic, between humans, orcs or even lizard men. After your race selection, it should provide the obvious choice between genders, if that exists for the race chosen. Beyond that, I should be seeing a top level selection of choices that provide me quick and profound ways to alter their look.

Some may stop me here and go, "But wait, Mr. Tyranny. I like to delve into the minutiae and pick everything down to the pore pattern on my skin". This is where I go, "Stop interrupting me, imagination. It's rude and the reader doesn't have time for me to argue with myself, but you're right!".

People, like myself, like getting into the nitty gritty of micromanaging the character's look like a beauty pageant mother, but I understand others just want to get started and throw the mirror out the window. These people are of course playing how they want, and that is rule #1 for me. That is why I say it should only show the top level choices first.

Secondly, these choices help you get into the ball park of where you'd like to take your character's look. Once you are there, that's when we get into the sliders. This is where the magic happens. Sliders let you get to the lower levels of character creation. They let you tweak your nose a half centimeter to the left and change your finger length to be slightly stubby.

I do

These are the basics that make a good character creator. Something simple that allows a lot of depth. Some games that do this well are Star Trek Online and Champions Online for their sliders, and EverQuest, both 1 and 2, and Guild Wars 2 for their race selection. It's understandable that you wouldn't want to spend a lot of resources in making the character creator, but let me implore you to consider that if the player can't connect with their avatar, it makes it harder for them to want to stick in the world.

My Personal Flair

Now it's easy to copy someone else's idea, but now it's time to add my own little flair to the mix. I think it would be pretty neat to have a character selection where you're looking into a room or even walking around and you see a bunch of randomly generated characters sitting, talking with each other, etc. While you are looking, you can select one of these characters that you like the most, or wait for some to leave and new ones to enter and then make your selection and use that as your starting template in the character creator.

So character creators are important in establishing your connection to the game world. These shouldn't be rushed and have some thought put into it, otherwise you risk the player not really caring and becoming less immersed.

Give it a try? Star Trek Online

Should I give Star Trek Online a try?

That all depends. With it being free to play, it won't cost anything to try it, but you may be wondering if its even worth your time.

I started Star Trek Online (STO) a couple months back. The last time I played was from release to 6 months after, so I have a huge gap of missed time. So far, I'm impressed with what I'm seeing.

What is there to like about STO?

Honestly, if you want to play this for Star Trek, you'll be happy. If you want to play this for story, it has its ups and downs. If you want to play this for exploration, you'll be happy here too. Now, if you want to play this for PvP, it's pretty light, and if you want to play this for unlocking everything, that will be very costly. There are a lot of special ships restricted to real money transactions (RMT), which is known as the in game store, and/or long game grinds, which means repeated tasks to earn up to a reward. The big but here is if you're happy with the core ships that are most common in the Star Trek universe, then you will be fine.

But I don't like game stores.

You can play for free forever. "Expansion" packs aren't for access, you can go to all the places, play (almost) all the races. Those packs are basically like large discounted store item packs, stuff you can ignore. When you start the game, you aren't greeted with a store page or anything. As a matter of fact, I almost forget there is even a store sometimes, except when lockboxes drop, and I usually just delete those. You're given a fair amount of inventory and bank space that is local to each character, and you have a reasonable amount of shared bank space. You don't need to make a lot of credits to play casually, and you can probably ignore the alternate dilithium currency unless you want to buy extra ships over the free one you get each 10 levels until 40.

What issues should I be aware of?

The free ships are built well enough to take you through the game, as long as you are casual. If you like to be best of the best, then you'll be hit by the store.

The biggest short coming would be the respec stuff. I know enough of the game to create my character without needing to respec, but for completely new people, that may hit you, but they are pretty cheap for real cash, or you'll have to grind out the dilithium and exchange that for the cash shop currency.

So, should I give Star Trek Online a try?

I think you should. It's a fun game that's casual friendly, lots of stuff to do solo or in groups, and it gives you a great sense of living as the captain of a ship in the Star Trek universe.

Hope that helps you decide whether to try it or not.