Earthshire May 2007 Update... MMORPG Design

The month of May has been fairly productive though not as productive as I would have liked. At the start of the month I set the following objectives:

-a playable version of the game for one challenge area (even using MoM as is, just something playable).
-a working autogenerated AI pathfinding system.
-a completed design document

Of those I was only able to complete the design. Pathfinding turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated and my scope estimates were off as a result. A UI will be needed to adjust some the elements of the pathfinding system I am using and I hadn't accounted for this. For June I am going to continue to focus some on pathfinding but really try to get a first pass on a challenge zone up and running. Without the burden of the Design Doc sucking up my time this should be doable.

My objectives for June are...

-complete a short design document outlining the first challenge area including (objectives, number of stages, and victory conditions).
-complete a first pass on the zone geometry for this challenge area
-start coding the framework for combat challenge areas, this month focus on:
-spawning NPC enemies
-setup up the timing systems (for challenge time limits)
-starting the challenge with one player active
-building the code based framework for victory and defeat conditions
-ending the challenge on victory or defeat
-AI Pathfinding Work
-add UI to select, add, delete and merge edge points
-add UI to scan for edges using existing scanning code
-break edge list into a list of convex polygons
-add UI to save/load an edge list
-RPG System Changes (need to start implementing our RPG system on top of MoMs current system)
-research the scope of changes needed based on the design document (we now need to go through and figure out what we need to change to get to what the design doc describes)
-make changes to RPG Attributes
-make any necessary UI and code changes necessary for those attributes


That scope is entirely too big for the month but I am still fuzzy with working in the Minions of Mirth source so I really can't accurately predict what I can reasonably accomplish. As I get more familiar with the tools I will get better with my estimations. But I imagine for the next couple of months I will be biting off more than I can chew.

Last month I talked a bit about Pathfinding and how I was approaching the problem from a technical standpoint. This month I want to talk some about game design. Since my biggest accomplishment last month was completing my design document it's rather appropriate that I pull a section from that document to post here. This section is my game philosophy section. It basically outlines my primary philosophical approach to MMORPG game design. It can really be summed by simply saying "Make it Fun; Make it Inclusive" but the document section is a little more detailed than that (though it is not too terriably long of a read):

Game Design Philosophy

In this section we want to outline the philosophical approach that will serve as a guide and foundation for our game design. The principal goal of the game should be to create an enjoyable gaming experience for its players. A game should be fun to play most of the time. Needless frustration should be avoided. That is not to say the game should be devoid of difficulty and challenge. Quite the contrary, but the difficult and challenging factors of the game should only be used as tools to enhance a player's enjoyment. It is NOT a goal to breed a small cream of crop set of players that have an incredible set of skill because we as designers honed their skill through impossible challenges and super difficult content. Games should not "hurt", nor should overly punitive punishment for failure be a design element.

Multiplayer games are quite a bit different from single player games and the design needs to reflect this. A move towards setting the goals on a more community level is necessary. Game play elements should focus on the concept of inclusion to maximize the enjoyment of everyone involved. Mechanics that serve to exclude or divide the community have no place. Putting players together in an environment where they play together but are then subjected to game mechanics that limit this ability (they don't have "access" to the same content, they differ in level too much, etc) is counter productive. Players should always have the opportunity to play with every single other player that exists on the server. Designing game play around the concept of inclusion is of paramount importance. This will draw our community together instead of dividing it based on individual progression.

This is a difficult concept to reconcile in this genre because achievement is often one of the principle driving forces behind the game play. A desire to "win" is a positive force on an individual and community level, the problem for this genre lies in the fact that the reward for achievement is often access to content. When one player has access to content and another player does not this immediately sets up the foundation for exclusion. Achievement based game play is not the problem and rewarding content on an individual level works well for a single player environment. Rewarding with content access in a multiplayer environment runs counter to the concept of inclusive game play.

In order to reinforce the concept of inclusion it is necessary that we get rid of the concept of rewarding players with content. This does require some creative thought when it comes to a reward structure but a multiplayer environment provides us with a tremendous amount of opportunities based on the social aspect of the environment. Exploiting more socially oriented reward structures, as opposed individual based reward structures, makes the most sense in a multiplayer environment.

Player character advancement is also an area of concern. If one player is so far ahead in terms of power that another player's impact is basically negligible in comparison then this creates an unsatisfactory multiplayer environment. The goal is for all players to have the opportunity to make a useful contribution. A decision to not reward players with content advancement creates little need for any extreme changes in power as players progress their characters. Once the game mechanics have been adjusted so that players are not artificially inflated to extreme levels of character power, player skill (not character skill) can then become the primary indicator of success or failure.

As a result of changing the way content is dispensed (basically removing the throttle and the caps) the first obvious concern it that players will quickly consume the content. This is an echo of the single player RPG mentality but it is a valid concern. The solution is to move away from the progressed content of the single player game to more massively multiplayer focused content. Content should engage the whole server not just a single group, be repeatable and scale to fit the active number of players playing it.

Most of these philosophical points originate from the central idea that inclusiveness should be one of our primary design goals. This concept wildly differs from current offerings in the genre. But largely the trappings and game play that qualify this game as an MMORPG will remain:
- Character advancement
- High levels of achievement
- Social distinction based on achievement
- Strategic and analytical combat systems
- A Persistent "always on" environment
- Multiplayer oriented game play
- Difficult Challenges that require teamwork to succeed.
- Challenges that have a world based thematic backdrop in order to lend a larger sense of context to the success or failure of that challenge.



Well that's it for now feel free to debate me on my philosophy. I think next month might be a good time to reveal the name change (it is no longer Earthshire) and to start giving out some more detailed infomation about what I am building here (game world lore, game features, etc). See you then....

Ves