by date
Indie games, MMO's and books
Indie games, MMO's and books
| Name: | Phil Carlisle |  |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Aug 16, 2006 | |
| Rating: |  Not Rated | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
| RSS Feed: |  or Subscribe with  . | |
| Profile Page: | View profile page for Phil Carlisle |
Blog post
One of the fun things being a lecturer at a university, is that you get to have the whole summer off. Think of it, almost 3 months off!
Only, it never seems to quite work out that way.
This summer, I've been either fretting about buying my new house (stress), doing contract work (stress) or doing my game (stress).
So sometimes I just take a half hour and do some random googling. OR I read one of the eleventy billion books I've purloined from the library for the summer.
I dont know if I've written about this before, but I've got a research year coming up. Whilst most of it will be involved in multi-university projects and getting them underway. There are a couple of things I really need to do some work on. One of those, is looking again at the idea of MMO architectures. Specifically object distributed systems with an eye to scalable server systems. I'll post a bit of my early reading research in a later blog, maybe after IGC when I've spoken to Stephen Z and others about it.
My feeling is that outside of the huge issues of content creation. The development issues involved in making a proper MMO (with player counts in thier thousands), really isnt out of the reach of indie developers. The key, I believe, is not the technical details, but the design, content creation and subsequent support issues. So at least for part of that (the technical issues) I can prototype a system that proves me right or wrong, so next year I'm going to try and get a month or two on this and see if it cant work.
Anyway, on the subject of my random googling. I was doing my usual round of checking GG, indiegamer, our own AirAceOnline.com forums etc. Then I thought I'd check out Max Gaming's homepage (seeing as Adrian isnt responding to my mail right now :)). Anyway, long story short, I ended up at thier forums (I guess I wanted to check out how active thier forums are), I stepped into one thread about how one guy was PO'd at another team for not showing up for an organised game.
Then it kind of struck me. This exact same scenario could happen for Air Ace!
Given I think the key to making indie sized mmo games is about community support, its a pretty big miss for me not to have thought about this issue before. Sure, we have clan management interfaces. We have the pilots site where players can come. But think about it! we'd missed any form of formally scheduling team vs team matches!!!
Sure, you can say that teams should organize themselves and they can do all of this via thier own forums. But that kind of misses the point. The point is that WE should help promote the community aspects of our game (I'm assuming you want to encourage community oriented play, rather than singleplayer grinding with occasional party grinds like you get in most MMORPG's). So we need to support things that make it easier for players to organise themselves, but perhaps more importantly, we need to give the community organisers, those people who champion your game and drive others to join in, the tools for them to effect thier organisation.
Perhaps we wont get that set of features setup for v1.0 of the game. But certainly via the pilots site, we will be putting together clan management features that support the whole thing. I'd really like to add some features for an external narrative to happen in order to help team creation and discussion along. That might take the form of an overall battle website that shows the state of a virtual war, played out as team versus team conflicts for sectors in the map.
The details dont matter so much as the concept. That if we want people to be interested in the game, we need to think of more than just the game in isolation. We need to think of the structure of the player community and how we can help them to help us make it grow and become more rewarding for them. The more rewarding the game is for the players, the better the value proposition. The better the value, the more chance we will get people to pay. Its a big cycle, but it starts with the realisation that you cant just make a game and forget about it.
Anyway, I'm done. Off to an IGDA meeting in Manchester tonight, hopefully it will be a good meet. Last time I went to one a whole bunch of Sony QA turned up and it wasnt exactly useful.
Seeya next time!
PS: Adrian! read yer mail!
Only, it never seems to quite work out that way.
This summer, I've been either fretting about buying my new house (stress), doing contract work (stress) or doing my game (stress).
So sometimes I just take a half hour and do some random googling. OR I read one of the eleventy billion books I've purloined from the library for the summer.
I dont know if I've written about this before, but I've got a research year coming up. Whilst most of it will be involved in multi-university projects and getting them underway. There are a couple of things I really need to do some work on. One of those, is looking again at the idea of MMO architectures. Specifically object distributed systems with an eye to scalable server systems. I'll post a bit of my early reading research in a later blog, maybe after IGC when I've spoken to Stephen Z and others about it.
My feeling is that outside of the huge issues of content creation. The development issues involved in making a proper MMO (with player counts in thier thousands), really isnt out of the reach of indie developers. The key, I believe, is not the technical details, but the design, content creation and subsequent support issues. So at least for part of that (the technical issues) I can prototype a system that proves me right or wrong, so next year I'm going to try and get a month or two on this and see if it cant work.
Anyway, on the subject of my random googling. I was doing my usual round of checking GG, indiegamer, our own AirAceOnline.com forums etc. Then I thought I'd check out Max Gaming's homepage (seeing as Adrian isnt responding to my mail right now :)). Anyway, long story short, I ended up at thier forums (I guess I wanted to check out how active thier forums are), I stepped into one thread about how one guy was PO'd at another team for not showing up for an organised game.
Then it kind of struck me. This exact same scenario could happen for Air Ace!
Given I think the key to making indie sized mmo games is about community support, its a pretty big miss for me not to have thought about this issue before. Sure, we have clan management interfaces. We have the pilots site where players can come. But think about it! we'd missed any form of formally scheduling team vs team matches!!!
Sure, you can say that teams should organize themselves and they can do all of this via thier own forums. But that kind of misses the point. The point is that WE should help promote the community aspects of our game (I'm assuming you want to encourage community oriented play, rather than singleplayer grinding with occasional party grinds like you get in most MMORPG's). So we need to support things that make it easier for players to organise themselves, but perhaps more importantly, we need to give the community organisers, those people who champion your game and drive others to join in, the tools for them to effect thier organisation.
Perhaps we wont get that set of features setup for v1.0 of the game. But certainly via the pilots site, we will be putting together clan management features that support the whole thing. I'd really like to add some features for an external narrative to happen in order to help team creation and discussion along. That might take the form of an overall battle website that shows the state of a virtual war, played out as team versus team conflicts for sectors in the map.
The details dont matter so much as the concept. That if we want people to be interested in the game, we need to think of more than just the game in isolation. We need to think of the structure of the player community and how we can help them to help us make it grow and become more rewarding for them. The more rewarding the game is for the players, the better the value proposition. The better the value, the more chance we will get people to pay. Its a big cycle, but it starts with the realisation that you cant just make a game and forget about it.
Anyway, I'm done. Off to an IGDA meeting in Manchester tonight, hopefully it will be a good meet. Last time I went to one a whole bunch of Sony QA turned up and it wasnt exactly useful.
Seeya next time!
PS: Adrian! read yer mail!
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 11/28/08 - GDC AI sessions 09/18/08 - Tell me I'm not going crazy!! 12/05/07 - The importance of good tools for productivity 11/17/07 - Using the way back machine. 09/21/07 - Juggling cats. 09/04/07 - End of Summer. 08/27/07 - Come work with me!! 08/14/07 - The changing nature of entertainment |
|---|
Submit your own resources!| Jonathon Stevens (Aug 16, 2006 at 17:47 GMT) |
After you've done some research, let me know and I'll get my co-designer together and we'll round table some ideas if you want. Him and I are good opposites as I come from more of the 'players should have full control of their character' and 'role-playing' side of things and he comes from the 'players need structure' and 'kill kill kill' (raids, pvp) side of things.
We're of the same mindset on building an extremely scalable server layer so we can account for any number of machines and virtual machines for load balancing and clustering.
| J. Erick Christgau (Aug 16, 2006 at 18:49 GMT) |
| Adrian Wright (Aug 16, 2006 at 20:02 GMT) |
| Sam Redfern (Aug 16, 2006 at 22:06 GMT) |
| Phil Carlisle (Aug 16, 2006 at 22:17 GMT) |
Sam: Yes, we get time for research, but right now I'm doing contract work, so my research went out the window this summer. But luckily I got the whole year to take care of it!
Ade: must have been binned as spam. I'll send again or catch you online :)
| Jonathon Stevens (Aug 16, 2006 at 22:25 GMT) |
For instance, you might be thinking (obviously this is WAY dummed down, but for sake of space I'm keeping it simple) 1 game server and 1 db server. Then, you find out that AI itself does 75% of what you're going to be building based on the DESIGN of your MMO. So now, you add 1 AI server. Then, you gotta load-balance and cluster the game servers, db servers, and AI servers so that you can scale to meet your needs. You keep reading to find out that processing each individual area could be broken up (even in a semeless world) across multiple game servers to where you have multiple CLUSTERS of game servers versus 1 cluster of game servers and so on.
This was probably a bad example as I forgot the point I was trying to make halfway through it. Note to self: Don't pop sleeping pills at 3am, go to work at 7am and pop a buncha caffeine pills. This is what it must feel like to pop a bunch of downers and then pop a bunch of uppers a few hours later.
Anywho, my offer for a roundtable is for either design of the actual MMO system or design of the technology, as I've done tons of research into both (but nowhere near as much as my partner in crime).
| Phil Carlisle (Aug 17, 2006 at 00:03 GMT) |
I read a nice little thing on GameDev about a guy who did a pretty silly implementation, but it WORKED enough to try things. I'm aiming to do similar, only not make a bad implementation. That way I can actually profile how the data flows for real myself.
His advice was "make a guy walk around your world", which I think its a good start :)
I'm doing this to experiment and research with persistant worlds, not create a commercial service. So a good bit of trial and error is ok. Plus I buy into the iterative development model, having seen both sides of the coin, so I'm going to iterate on some MMO ideas and see what works for me.
| Phil Carlisle (Aug 17, 2006 at 00:06 GMT) |
| Vashner (Aug 17, 2006 at 01:25 GMT) |
Design the game with proper testing... don't put items, guns, aircraft etc that need to be "nerfed" later. (not talking to you just venting).
MoM still is a great example of putting database into torque. And using python elimitated a lot of license concerns since it's open source.
You could make a mean mmog if you put your will to it..
| Brian Peal (Nov 24, 2006 at 20:43 GMT) |
| Brian Peal (Nov 24, 2006 at 20:44 GMT) |
You must be a member and be logged in to either append comments or rate this resource.
