Zubon

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

Upgrading Function, Keeping Fluff

You may have heard something about a shiny pony. One thing I like is that you can keep the same mount your entire career. How many games let you improve the function while keeping the appearance? Fluff and stats should be entirely separable aspects, hence the glory of the now-common appearance tabs. If you really like how your first horse looks, it would be nice to be able to keep it and just have it run faster. You can even force the player to pay for the privilege, but don’t force fluff changes for function upgrades.

Okay, this is more than I was expecting in the sense of “pay for the privilege”…

: Zubon

My Little Pony Tower Defense

The challenge game of the week at Kongregate is a tower defense game with a backstory about galactic conflict, war, billions dead, yaddah yah. At some point, you realize that the waves of purple stuff are the Smooze from My Little Pony: The Movie, which kind of gives the entire game a different feeling. I choose to believe the red dots are flutterponies.

: Zubon

Level Up at School

The Daily Illuminator notes a Multiplayer Game Design class where

… Students leveled up, with an “A” being Level 12 at the end of the semester.

From the syllabus:
Class time will be divided between fighting monsters (Quizzes, Exams etc.), completing quests (Presentations of Games, Research etc.) and crafting (Personal Game Premises, Game Analysis Papers, Video Game Concept Document etc.).

Reportedly, class attendance and scores were up significantly. …

: Zubon

New Annals in Design Stupidity

We are all familiar with the principle that you can design anything as a bonus or a penalty, right? You can give characters a “hunger” debuff, or you can give them a “well fed” buff for eating food; if you balance enemies with the assumption that everyone will have eaten, the practical effect is negligible, but players like the idea of being rewarded instead of being punished. Similarly, most games give you the normal amount of experience if you are “rested” in some form, rather than saying that you only earn half xp if you play too much. No, it’s not “bonus xp” where you are somehow putting something over the very developers who implemented it.

Most Facebook games reward you for logging in every day or having many friends. Many will even give you increasingly large bonuses for playing many days in a row or for having many friends. I have found two that take the opposite approach to an idiotic degree. Hotel City is the latest from Playfish, and if you go a few days without playing, cockroaches will take over your rooms so you must pay to clean them out. Yes, they punish you for returning to the game after an absence. Food Friendzy randomly hits you with a “21 Club” tile. If you have at least 21 friends playing, you get 21 points for landing on it; if not, you lose 21 points. That sounds like an unfortunate prospect to bootstrap: “Come play this game with me where we get punished for not having enough friends playing. No, not many, we’ll need to recruit about 12 more, why do you ask?” It is also one of the worst excuses for a game I have ever seen, where the entire gameplay is picking tiles at random to get points. Many of those tiles will make you lose points, including “lose all” and one that flips your score from positive to negative. And then they will mock your “strategy” if your score ends in the negative.

: Zubon

Computer Problems

Character Gender

In my experience, and I think the research agrees, male players are more likely to play female characters than vice versa. There is fun speculation about why that is.

The usual in-game reason is a perceived ease in getting assistance, attention, or gifts. A favorite sociological explanation is that our culture treats maleness as the norm, so women already know how all that works but men have this whole alien, Other realm to explore. My wife sticks with female characters because they have more pretty options, while many male options are intentionally and aggressively ugly. Many (heterosexual male) hardcore gamers have decided that, if they are going to be staring at someone’s backside for 40+ hours a week, it might as well be a shapely female backside. And then there’s this guy I know who is a mostly male-oriented bisexual and is married to a woman; his Second Life avatar is female so he can have virtual sex with men and relieve real life pressure.

Personally, I tend to have a balanced stable of characters. Continue reading Character Gender

Shadow of the Colossus MMO

No, one has not been announced, but I have long been wondering why there are so few games of the “it’s all boss fights” style. I can get the notion of having “trash mobs” like matting around a picture, but you probably should not want trash in your game. Grinds keep players subscribed, blah blah, killing 10,000 rats in your new game is not going to be any better than killing 10,000 rats in WoW, so that’s not going to be a huge draw for you. The only place I’ve seen where killing 10,000 rats is different is City of Heroes, where things get to be wacky fun in the late levels with massive AE buffs and attacks while you fight 20+ enemies at once.

Can we skip the crap and get to the interesting part?

: Zubon

Early, Middle, Late

For a game that depends on a stream of income from subscribers or RMT shoppers, the first hour of play must be the top development priority. This is where you hook players. After that, the endgame is important because that is where your players will be spending time indefinitely and where your game’s chatter will come from in the long run. Next is the early game, when you build momentum. The mid-game has already fallen this far down the list, as you have certainly seen in a lot of MMOs, and frankly few care much how good the late-game is because they are already fully committed and racing for the end-game.

I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us. Continue reading Early, Middle, Late

Notes from Google Analytics

I was curious about how the 100+ comment post affected our readership numbers. Yep, double the number of readers on Friday and over 1,000 unique views. I was surprised, however, that it is not winning on the month. Ravious’s latest Guild Wars 2 post is about 50% higher, despite only having 4 comments; his posts that are actually news consistently get a lot of hits. The winner, though, apart from the front page itself? “A Fable,” a year and a half old, but still periodically rocketing up our stats whenever it has a big day on StumbleUpon. “Game Developers and Porn Stars” also keeps getting hits, largely on the strength of search keywords. Sorry if you were one of the hundreds looking for “game porn,” “game porno,” “porn game,” “games porn,” or “porn games.”

This is also the first time I have not seen Ethic’s Asheron’s Call 2 closing ceremonies in the top 10. People may finally be emotionally moving on from AC2. I never did make that Lugian Tactician.

: Zubon