While working on a much larger piece about subversive game design, a thought occurred to me that I felt didn’t quite fit in to that argument, but that’s worth its own blog post.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about adding ethical dilemmas to games. Many games endeavor to do so, but the results are almost always disappointing. Non-linearity and branching plots are a constant problem in game design; for games with a story, such as RPGs, it’s important for the player to feel like his character is a real part of the game world, and that his actions have consequences. However, since standard game design techniques require everything to be planned out and scripted at least to some extent by the designer, any decision allowed to the player that has real consequences, results in a multiplication of effort on the part of the developer.
Thus, most games handle ethical choices in one of two ways - in the first version, the game world itself diverges only briefly from the core storyline, so that in the long run, the player’s actions do not really have consequences (except perhaps on the player herself, such as gaining different skills depending on whether she decides to be “good” or “evil”). In the second, the consequences of decisions are deferred until the ending of the game, whereupon the player is given a different final challenge and/or victory cut-scene depending on her choices.
Both of these design strategies lead to very shallow, heavy-handed A or B choices with predictable and/or trivial consequences. As a result, rather than teaching the player anything about real-world ethics, these games only help perpetuate the childish notion that morality is generally self-evident. Furthermore, since the consequences tend to be immediate, obvious and reversible, players are not really encouraged to think carefully about these decisions before making them.
It seems to me, though, that there is an interesting game design opportunity presented by the popularity of MMOs. In MMOs, new content is added on a regular basis - additionally, old content is sometimes, though more rarely, phased out or modified, usually for reasons of balance. Here, then, is a real opportunity to periodically present players with opportunities to make real choices, and make the consequences of those choices both significant and permanent; perhaps not on the individual level, since it would be impossible to customize an add-on for each individual user’s decisions, but rather in the aggregate. If each add-on features one or more quests that each have multiple possible resolutions, then the developer could consider the proportion of players choosing each option when deciding what to do in the next add-on.
As an example, imagine there is a quest involving three conflicting parties; an iron-fisted King, a tribe of orcish barbarians in the mountains, and a rebel Duke. The King has stolen a religious artifact from the orcs in order to harness its power to put down the Duke’s rebellion. As a result, the orcs have been raiding villages, looking for their artifact.
Players might choose to “solve” the quest by going into the mountains and killing the leader of the orcs, or they might instead break into the king’s castle to steal back the artifact and return it to the orcs, thus convincing them to stop their attacks.
If the majority of the players choose to kill the orcish leader, the next expansion might have the orc area removed (as they have fled), and martial law instituted in the cities, as the King has put down the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Duke has fled into the forest with his men, and continues the fight as a band of outlaws. There is a new “outlaw camp” area, and a new “brigand” player class. The next quest might involve the abduction of the princess by the outlaws, or some such thing.
If the majority choose to return the artifact to the orcs, then the Duke’s rebellion is a success, and an uneasy peace is made with the orcs. The orcs in the mountains are no longer automatically hostile to players, and their stronghold has shops available to the players. Orc becomes a player-character race, and orcish citizens begin to be seen in the human cities. On the downside, racial tensions ensue, and a new prison opens up (a new area to explore), where many of the prisoners are orcs, who tend to get themselves in trouble due to their short tempers and the hostility of some humans towards them. Perhaps the quest for this add-on involves a prison riot or jailbreak.
In this way, because only the branch chosen needs to be created by the developers, players’ choices can have realistic consequences - realistic in the sense that they are both permanent and not completely foreseeable by the players. Once the players have collectively chosen which option they prefer, the game world will change based on that choice. Several years and many choices later, the mood of the game may have changed dramatically, and players would only be able to speculate what their game might look like if they had, for instance, opted to help the humans’ lumbering operation instead of siding with the elves in protecting their forest.
It’s not a perfect solution, as the players who make the less popular choice will find themselves in a future they are not responsible for… but many real-world decisions, such as voting, and environmental responsibility have their effects felt in the aggregate, rather than on an individual basis. Indeed, if an MMO were to implement such a system, we might even see player-vs.-player conflict resulting, as players who have already made their choice might attempt to influence others, either through argument, or physical means, such as coming to the defense of the orcish leader. It’s impossible to know how well it would work without trying it, but I think it would be an interesting experiment, at least.
As stated in the review yesterday, I’ve only played one game of Neptune’s Pride, and it was a free one. However, in the two weeks or so that it took to play, I learned a thing or two. I ended up winning, but in some ways, I was just lucky… however, I think, based on my observations that first game, I might know how to duplicate that luck in the future.
United we Stand
This may be obvious to players of Diplomacy and other, similar games, but in Neptune’s Pride, the most valuable asset is not money, tech, stars or ships, but allies. Except for giving a small advantage to the defender, combat essentially boils down to a straightforward numerical comparison of forces, and more so as the game goes on, and tech levels go up, and fleet sizes get larger.
Thus, if you’re fighting someone who’s about on equal footing with you, it doesn’t matter that much who has the better strategy - either a few stars will get picked off and you’ll call a truce, or more likely, you’ll both lose most of your ships in the conflict, and someone more powerful will swoop in to claim both your stars.
On the other hand, if two players gang up on one, they will both still have enough ships left to defend themselves from others once the dust settles.
And so, the game is a lot like reality shows like Survivor, where the best players tend to form coalitions, and pick everyone else off one by one. There is also a more subtle power struggle within the alliance, of course - whoever reaps the greatest spoils while sacrificing the least for his allies will win the game in the end… unless he overdoes it and his former friends decide he’s no longer on their side. You can worry about this later in the game, though; the important point is that if you’re not in a strong alliance early on, you have no hope of beating those who are.
More generally, we can say that the ultimate goal of this game is to be a member of the larger side in any conflict.
The Neighbour of my Neighbour is my Friend
So, given that allies are of the utmost importance, one’s choice of allies is clearly going to be a big decision early in the game. Like most people in my game, I started off by contacting everyone adjacent to me, and trying to negotiate border agreements. Although there’s nothing wrong with this as a stopgap measure until you’re ready for war, it’s clearly not going to work in the long term - in order to win the game, you need to expand, and you can’t do this while remaining at peace with everyone you share a border with.
Rather, if we go back to what we said in the first section, the objective is to be on the larger side of any conflict. Thus, the most appealing target for you is going to be a player who shares borders with multiple other players, and your best allies are going to be those other players. Best of all is if these other players do not initially share a border with you themselves - then you have an opportunity to cooperate with them against a common enemy, and no reason, nor possibility, for one of you to betray the other, at least until the “sandwiched” player is dealt with, and you and your friend meet in the middle.
The Dangers of Exponential Growth
What this game shares with other 4X titles, like Civilization, is the idea of “booming,” or exponential growth. You collect money each turn, and can invest it in a variety of things, including Economy upgrades, which earn you more money. Theoretically, if left alone, a player who started off investing only in Economy would eventually be able to outpace everyone else in the galaxy. This, however, is a risky path.
The main problem is that ships are not purchased directly. Rather, the best the player can do is upgrade his stars’ Industry, which in turn affects the rate at which they produce ships. This means that Economy has a second-derivative effect on fleet strength - Economy affects rate of income, which affects not the rate of fleet growth, but rather, the rate of Industry development, which in turn determines the rate of fleet growth. What that means is that, while a strong Economy can have an even greater long-term impact on fleet strength than if ships were purchased directly, in the short term, there’s a great deal of inertia in switching from economic development to ship production.
In my first game, I noticed from early on that I was WAY behind most of the other players in Economy (and Science), but ahead in Industry, and thus way ahead in fleet strength. I knew this would put me behind in the long run, so I had to strike quickly… so strike I did, capturing, in the process, many desirable stars, and pillaging their economies. I could also make up for my Science deficit by capturing other players’ Science stars, and by trading military support for technologies researched by others.
That’s the problem with going all-out for economy and neglecting your fleet early on. It makes you both a very dangerous long-term threat, and a very appealing short-term target. Put this together with the principle I arrived at in the first section, above, and you’ll see why this doesn’t work - your objective is to make sure people want to work with you, not against you.
Thus, investing in Industry early on means that the risk involved in attacking you will outweigh the rewards, and people will be more likely to want to work with you than against you. Investing too much in Economy has the opposite effect, unless you have neighbours willing to trade fleets for cash.
Needless to say, this isn’t a suggestion that one should only purchase Industry upgrades - a balancing act is required. It’s merely an observation that at least six out of the eight people in my first game invested much too heavily in either Science or Economy early on, and neglected to defend themselves adequately. I imagine this is a bad habit developed over years of playing against comparatively “nice” AIs, rather than brutal human opponents.
Built like a Walnut
The most obvious way of choosing where to develop is to decide what you’re investing in that turn, and use the “Find Cheapest E/I/S” button, but this isn’t generally going to be correct. Stars with a lot of Economy are appealing targets, due to the immediate cash bonus of capturing one. Science, even more so, as it’s so expensive to purchase. Thus, if you develop the Economy and Science of stars in scanning range of your neighbours, you’ll need to keep them heavily guarded in order not to make yourself too succulent. This means you’ll have fewer ships available for your conquests elsewhere.
Rather, you should think of your territory as a walnut. Keep the delicious part inside, and a hard shell outside. Build up industry around your borders, and find high-resource stars that are as far away from everyone else as possible, in order to build your Economy and Science there. This will be more expensive than spreading everything out, but better in the long-run.
That said, buying one level of economy in a system with decent resources costs less than $20, and will pay itself off in 48 hours if you can hold it that long. So, it is worth spreading your economy out a little, especially since it doesn’t matter to you where the money comes from, as it all ends up in the same place.
By contrast, there’s a strong incentive to concentrate most of your Industry in a few systems, or clusters of nearby systems. When waging war, you’re going to want to pick up ships from systems far from the battle zone and transport them into combat. The fewer stops your carriers have to make in order to achieve “critical mass” (be that 30 ships, 60, 100, or whatever, depending on the stage of the game) and become useful combat tools, the faster they’ll be ready to join the fray. Eventually, you’ll have a sort of “bucket brigade” system going, with depleted fleets returning from the front to fill up at your Industrial centres, while others are already on their way out. If you plan your Industry well enough, and are responsible in sending your fleets only into battles they can win, you’ll be able to make do with far fewer Super Carriers than your opponents. Although they only cost $25 a pop, that’s usually enough for an Economy or Industry upgrade somewhere, so making do with fewer, rather than more, will help inch you ahead.
No System Undefended
A common mistake I observed in my first game was players only leaving ships in developed systems. Small, resource-poor stars may not be appealing to develop, but they can serve as entry-points to your sector of the galaxy; having claimed them, an opponent will have a much better view of where your forces are located, and a convenient staging ground to launch fleets deeper into your space, where - if you’re employing the walnut strategy - you won’t be adequately defended.
Leaving one ship behind in each system you visit is an excellent policy. The cost is minimal, even early in the game, and the difference is substantial - although it won’t stop an enemy fleet from taking such systems, they will lose W+1 ships every time they do (where W is your Weapons tech level), while you only lose the single ship. Since war in Neptune’s Pride is a straight-up numerical comparison, this is a trade you want to make all day and night, equivalent to sacrificing pawns for bishops or rooks in chess.
I’ll be the Bait, You be the Trap
As the saying goes, the best offense is a strong defense. Fleets get a pretty substantial advantage on the defense, so destroying someone else’s 100-ship fleet might cost you 120 of your own if you attack, but only 80 if you trick them into blundering into a huge fleet of your own.
This leads to one possible exception to the above “Walnut Rule.” If you’re not sure if you can trust a given neighbour, try building a Science upgrade in a lightly-defended system within his scanning range, especially if you can see a large fleet of his stationed nearby. In the meantime, move a larger fleet of your own to a system just behind the “bait” system, outside of his scanning range (be sure to check the Player Browser, as his scanning tech may not be the same as yours).
To make the bait even more appealing, you can tell him that you’re starting a war with a player at the other end of your territory, and let him see you jumping some fleets away in that direction. He’ll assume that you’re committing your forces over there and the time is ripe for a sneak attack.
Just make sure that your “trap” is close enough, and your Speed technology good enough, that you’ll be able to get it into the “bait” system before his attacking fleet gets there.
Once the trap is sprung and his fleet annihilated, there will probably be several poorly-defended systems for you to snap up in its wake, since he will have collected ships from them for his attack. Best of all, and especially if anyone else was in range to see what happened, you’ll be able to point the finger at your new enemy as the one who violated the border treaty, and come out looking like the good guy.
The Right Tech for the Job
Not all technologies are of equal value at all stages of the game. People tend to rush for Weapons early on, because the game is, after all, about fighting. However, there’s generally quite a bit of build-up before the fighting gets going. Rather, Speed is probably the most important tech at the very beginning, in order to expand your borders as quickly as possible. Scanning is also more valuable than most players seem to believe, as it allows you to claim the best stars, rather than wasting time jumping blindly to distant stars, only to discover that they’re barren.
After a couple of Speed upgrades, Range becomes important as well. However, unlike the other techs, which continue to be useful no matter how high you get them, Range seems to peter out around level 4 or 5 in most galaxies. You need to get those first few upgrades early on, in order to be the first to reach remote star clusters that are out of other players’ grap… but other than that, its only advantage is in allowing you to plot a straighter line between distant points, and a high enough Speed tech can easily compensate for a slightly more crooked path with more waypoints.
Scanning and Speed are also very valuable in battle, as they allow you to see where your opponent is going, and get there first. This goes with the point above about baiting your opponent into blundering into a strong defensive fleet.
Of course, choosing which technologies to research is greatly dependent on your allies, and ideally, you’ll be trading with enough people that you can get a little of everything - nonetheless, my feeling is that, all other things being equal, it’s good to focus on Speed and Scanning early on, and trade for the others. Partly, this is because they’re so useful, but also because they seem to be researched less often (especially Scanning) by other players, so you’re more likely to be able to trade them. Perhaps, as people gain more experience, Speed and Scanning will become more commonplace, and researching something like Range from the get-go will be the way to get something of value. Time will tell.
That’s all I have to say for now, but it’s already a longer piece than I’d meant to write. As I said in the review, it’s a surprisingly deep game for such simple mechanics. Please feel free to comment and discuss your own findings, and I’ll include them if I write a follow-up after my second game.
Gameplay: 8/10 Graphics: Minimal Sound: Minimal Originality: 9/10 Overall: 8/10
Play at: http://np.ironhelmet.com
Neptune’s Pride is a multiplayer, real-time strategy game with the emphases on “real,” and “strategy,” and a heavy dose of diplomacy. Whereas Starcraft and its ilk unfold at a breakneck pace and stress reaction time and memorization of effective development sequences, Neptune’s Pride is slow-paced, maddeningly so… and that’s what makes it brilliant.
Starting from a small number of stars and a handful of ships, the players seek to expand their territory and vie for dominance of the galaxy. This is not remotely original. What makes it special is that space travel is slow, as it’s meant to be. Of course, your fleets, even with starting technology, still travel at physically impossible speeds, measured in light years per day. But compared to most so-called “real time” games, where events happen on the scale of seconds, sending your fleet to a “nearby” star and seeing an ETA of 8, or 12, or 14 hours is a very different feeling.
The graphics and sound are extremely minimal, too, just simple dots to represent stars, chevrons for fleets, and lines for plotted trajectories. There is a pretty nebula in the background, but that can be turned off for those seeking the ultimate in stripped-down experiences.
You’d expect that a game paced so slowly would take advantage of the added time to allow players to do more of the fussy micro-management that characterizes many other “4X” (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) strategy games, but in fact, Neptune’s Pride goes completely to the other end of the spectrum. Most of the time, there’s really very little to be done except wait.
If one has the cash, stars can be upgraded in terms of Economy (cash production), Industry (ship production) or Science (technology production). However, cash is only paid out once every 24 hours, and one is generally wise to invest most of it as soon as possible. Fleets can be moved around, but as stated earlier, they take hours or days to arrive at their destination, and cannot be redirected in mid-trip. Moreover, waypoints can be set, so that one can plan a multi-leg journey in advance, and let the fleet plod along on its own. Finally, one can switch one’s area of technological research; the four options are Weapons, Range (that is, the distance that one’s ships can travel in a single jump), Speed and Scanning. That is all there is to it - three stats per star, one per fleet (number of ships is all that matters), and four kinds of technology.
Despite all this, for the entire course of my first game, I found myself compulsively logging in about once every two hours. And, in fact, I came to the conclusion that doing so was instrumental in my victory. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, one’s visibility is limited to a certain distance from one’s occupied stars, as determined by one’s level of Scanning technology. Especially in the early middle game, when players’ expanding borders first make contact with each other, it’s critical to take a look around frequently, to see if any potential enemy ships have entered scanning range.
Secondly, and more importantly, Neptune’s Pride is a game of communication and diplomacy. Battles are a straightforward numerical comparison, with no luck involved and the advantage going to the defender. Thus, it’s very difficult to make headway in a one-on-one confrontation. Rather, the game places an emphasis on strategic alliances, persuasion, sharing of information and, of course, betrayal. Although a single fleet may take half a day to make a single jump to an adjacent star, the ramifications of that jump may involve several players, and may necessitate several exchanges of in-game messages in order to avoid (or instigate) a war. Thus, the players who log in most frequently have the most opportunity to communicate with one another, and therefore have an advantage compared to players who plan their movements for the coming day and then don’t log in for another 24 hours.
Someone over at RPS mentioned Neptune’s Pride in passing, in an article about another game. He brought it up as part of a list of games that he says he wishes the gaming media were giving more coverage. I found it funny, because I’d been thinking for a while about making a blog post about it, but I know exactly why it’s not covered very much.
The reason why I was waiting, and the reason few people have written about Neptune’s Pride, is that any respectable journalist wants to give a game a fair shake before writing anything about it. For a multiplayer game, that implies playing at least one full game… but in the case of Neptune’s Pride, that can take a week or more. That’s a big time commitment for a game reviewer who has new titles showing up for review on a daily basis.
So, now, I’ve finished (and won, I’m proud to say) my first game of Neptune’s Pride, and I think I can now assess it fairly.
First of all, and most importantly, it’s a fun game. From beginning to end, there will be plenty of tense moments, watching your fleets inch their way across the void, worrying about whether a larger enemy fleet is hovering just beyond the range of one’s scanners, negotiating for much-needed support from a neighbour of dubious character…
Also important, from my point of view, it’s a good example of minimalism in game design, as I discussed in my post Density, not Volume. I can think of a few flourishes that probably wouldn’t hurt the game, but I definitely can’t think of anything else that could be taken away. The mechanics of the game take only minutes to grasp fully, but have pretty deep implications.
One thing that’s sorely lacking is email alerts. The game reminds you once per day that it’s still going on, and that you’ve had your daily paycheque come in and should log in to spend it… but other than that, you simply have to log in to see what’s going on. Having an option to turn on alerts for e.g. new ships coming into scanning range, battles being fought, etc. would help immensely, especially for those who work 9-5 jobs and can’t be logging in constantly.
Another addition I’d like to see is some sort of numerical player ranking, similar to an ELO rating in chess. Aside from pleasing those with competitive natures, like myself, it would serve the important function of keeping losing players in the game - if finishing in 6th place resulted in less loss of rating than finishing 8th, players with no hope of taking 1st would be given an incentive to keep struggling, and looking for alliances with stronger players. As it is, my experience in my game was that only one losing player kept going until the end - everyone else, once crippled, either simply stopped playing and was placed under AI administration after 48 hours of inactivity, or began “donating” all their stars and fleets to whichever opponent they hated the least, or whichever was most likely to hurt the one who’d attacked them.
Although I love this game, and I’m glad someone made it, I have grave doubts about its possibilities for financial success. I’m a big fan of the micropayment model, and that’s how Neptune’s Pride works - you can play small, standard games for free, or buy credits to play in larger and/or custom games. Joining someone else’s custom game costs the equivalent of $1, while creating one’s own is $2. These are reasonable prices, and in fact, I doubt many people would pay more than that for a single game of anything, especially not something as minimalist as Neptune’s Pride.
The problem, however, is that the game’s innovation is also its probable financial downfall. It simply takes too long to play. Most gamers these days lose interest in a new game after a week or two, if that. That’s how long it takes for someone to get through their first free game. Even those who like the free trial enough to by credits will probably get their fix after only one or two games, and not buy any more credits. Given that some of the larger games could go on for over a month, even the most dedicated users will only be netting the site maybe $10-15 a year, which is a low subscription fee by any standard.
Furthermore, I suspect that many players will not get the strategy right away… and given the game’s slow pace, the trial-and-error method of strategy formulation adopted by most players will take too long to get them there. Many will simply decide that they’re not good at the game, and abandon it early. As for me, I learned a lot in the course of just one play through. I’ll do my part in helping this game’s chances of success by posting a strategy guide tomorrow, with tips to help first-time players. It may seem a little pretentious to be making assertions about “correct” strategy after only playing a game once, but I doubt many people have played two or more full games, and we all know what they say about one-eyed men in the Land of the Blind.
This is not gaming-related, but I’m plugging it wherever I can. My friends here in Montreal have a yearly film festival called M60, for 60-second shorts. This year’s theme was “Deception,” and this was my submission, which I’ve finally gotten around to posting on YouTube. Check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jRKoSp6zQ4
It’s now been about a year and a half since I joined the indie game development community and began seriously working on my own games. I’ve learned a lot, since then, and also undergone several minor revolutions in terms of my ideas about how I fit into the community. It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve finally started to feel like I have a long-term plan. That being the case, I think it’s a useful exercise to create a mission statement for myself (or, rather, for the organization that is Bene Factum, on the off chance that it ever consists of more people than just me).
Here’s a first draft. Feedback welcome, not so much in terms of the mission itself, as that’s personal, but in terms of anything that needs clarification or greater precision.
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Bene Factum is an organization dedicated to promoting independently-developed games - digital and otherwise - and to encouraging positive approaches to game design and development. The eventual goal is to encourage independent game developers to focus on craftsmanship and simplicity, to present themselves as an ethical, community-focused alternative to large game studios, and to emphasize their differences from the large studios, rather than attempting imitate them.
Bene Factum’s role within the game development community is twofold. First and foremost, Bene Factum is a commercial entity, providing consulting and freelance services to independent game developers, including art, graphic design, writing and game design consulting. Secondly, Bene Factum is itself an independent game development studio, though its emphasis in that area is not commercial profit, but rather experimentation and an effort to change the attitudes of both game developers and consumers.
The attitudes and policies Bene Factum would like to encourage within the indie community are as follows:
Having recently decided to make a split and treat game art as my job and game development as a hobby, I’ve started a new project, more experimental than previous ones. The working title is Reverie, and I’d call it a roguelike, though it has less to do with the Big Four (Nethack, Crawl, ADOM and *band) than they do with one another. For one thing, it’s intended to be much shorter, beatable in a single sitting. For another, pretty much all the numbers will be hidden from the player - the game will be much more narrative and less about min-maxing than other roguelikes, and many things about it will be intentionally mysterious to the player.
That being the case, I don’t want to say too much about it, but because I love procedural generation so much, I wanted to share some examples of the maps that are generated for the huge forest in which most of the game will take place. My top priorities were to have lots of connectivity to encourage exploration, and a very organic feel, unlike the blocky dungeons that are most familiar to players of roguelikes.
Anyway, here are three maps (the lower one of which has been magnified 2x). Black pixels are impenetrable trees, light green is open grass, the two darker shades of green represent different densities of brush, and the yellow lines are dirt paths.
Gameplay: 5/10 Graphics: 4/10 Sound: 7/10 Originality: 7/10 Overall: 5/10
Available for download direct from Sinister Design.
When I saw this game mentioned on Rock Paper Shotgun, I went straight to the creator’s website and bought it, without even trying the demo. This is an indicator of how much I loved the concept. It’s a turn-based, top-down, tactical battle game. Turn-based games in general are a sadly-neglected genre these days, especially turn-based strategy games. Even within the genre, Telepath Psy Arena 2 is unusual in that it does away with randomness - attacks always hit, and always deal a fixed amount of damage. Characters are persistent from one mission to the next, and death is permanent. Although it’s easy enough to purchase a replacement for a slain ally, all the money invested in training the character is lost, and it can take a while to get the replacement’s power up to par with the rest of the team.
There’s a lot to love in that concept, and it seems like a recipe for success. Unfortunately, the game does almost everything else wrong.
For one thing, the game is riddled with balance issues. The player’s characters have much higher movement than similar characters on the enemy side, so there’s little challenge in outmaneuvering the enemy. In particular, the Assassin character type can move 9 squares per turn, which is greater than the size of the map in its smaller direction, and quite early on, acquires the Leap ability, which extends the character’s movement range as well as allowing it to pass over friends, enemies and some obstacles. Combined with its ability to deal massive damage when striking from behind, investing a heap of money into an Assassin’s strength attribute (boosting attack damage) allows an insta-kill of almost any one enemy per turn, anywhere on the map.
The creator would probably argue that the Assassin’s offensive capability is balanced by its relatively weak defense, and that moving it far from the rest of the player characters to kill a distant enemy is likely to result in the Assassin being killed, but this leads us to my next major complaint about the game, which is that it’s infinitely grindable.
Any battle can be replayed multiple times. I’m not sure whether there’s a limit to how many times, since the game does seem to keep track of how many times you’ve beaten a given battle. It’s irrelevant in any case, as the game also allows you to fight battles against random assortments of enemies of whatever difficulty level you like. This sounds like a nice feature, but the problem is that it means that, rather than forming a better strategy in order to get past a difficult level, the player need merely spend an hour raking in cash by beating up on easier foes, and buy his way to victory by upgrading his characters.
The reason for the inclusion of this feature is obvious - if the player had to progress through a series of ever more difficult battles, without being able to engage in optional ones to earn money, then there would inevitably be a moment of Pyrrhic victory, in which the player’s team would be left so crippled that the subsequent battle would be unwinnable. This feature is not a good solution, however - aside from the above problem, it also means that character death punishes the player, not by having fewer assets at his disposal for the next battle, but by forcing him into a long series of boring, repetitive, easy battles in order to purchase and train a replacement. This is not good game design.
Technically speaking, the game is amateurishly programmed. There is little animation or special effects, and nothing in the gameplay should require much processor power, and yet the game crawls. Part of the blame probably lies with Adobe, as the game is written in AIR, and I’ve found that ActionScript in general runs poorly on Mac. Nonetheless, I’ve seen plenty of more elaborate ActionScript games that have run smoothly, so I’m positive that a more talented programmer would have been able to make this game perform well.
All of this could be forgiven, if the game’s most important aspect had been given more attention. I am referring to the AI.
If you make a game single-player, turn-based and luck free, you’re committing yourself to writing a strong AI opponent. Simply pitting the player against ever-stronger, but equally stupid opposition is fine for an action game, but it feels cheap in the context of a strategy game. Imagine purchasing a chess game, and discovering that increasing the difficulty simply gave the computer more queens, rather than having it make better moves.
Without having seen the game’s code, I nonetheless have a pretty good idea of what sort of decision-making it employs: first, it checks if it can kill any of the player’s characters. If so, it always does so. If not, then it attacks the one with the fewest hit points remaining. If it can’t attack anyone, then it simply moves one square in a more-or-less random direction. Enemy characters with healing abilities always default to using those, rather than attacking, unless there are no injured allies in range. It never makes any attempt to keep its characters’ backs covered, either, which simply increases the power of the Assassin character. This extremely predictable, simplistic behaviour on the part of the opponents makes the battles rather tedious.
I wouldn’t recommend that anyone buy this game. It would certainly be worth a download if it were a freeware title, which is what it feels like, but it isn’t executed in a professional enough manner to be worth the price tag, low as it is ($12.99). Those craving a challenging, turn-based strategy experience would be better off checking out Battle for Wesnoth, which is actually free, and open source. Meanwhile, game developers thinking about making such a title can learn two important things from Telepath Psy Arena 2 - firstly, they can learn from its mistakes, and secondly, my immediate and unhesitating purchase of it should confirm that there is a market for such games, and that it’s woefully under-served at the moment.
Gameplay: 8/10 Graphics: 8/10 Sound: 8/10 Originality: 9/10 Overall: 8/10
Play at: http://armorgames.com/play/4206/knightfall-2
Knightfall 2 is a highly original puzzle-RPG featuring a somewhat nonlinear series of quests, and gameplay that incorporates mechanics similar to Bejewlled and Collapse, but with the addition of roguelike elements and a few unique twists. That’s quite a mash-up, and probably hard to visualize, so allow me to go into more detail.
I say it’s a puzzle-RPG, but it’s really more puzzle than RPG. Although there’s some semblance of a plot (just the usual stop-the-great-evil stuff), it’s completely forgettable, and neither influences nor is influenced by the player’s decisions. Furthermore, while most puzzle-RPGs only use the puzzle portion of the game as a sort of abstracted mechanic for combat, here, the player’s movement, fighting and collecting of items are all woven into the puzzle mechanics.
The player’s knight starts each level in the centre of a grid of square tiles, along with at least one monster, a key, an exit door, and occasionally one or more bonus items. Unlike most games, the player has no direct control over the main character. By using the keyboard or clicking arrows on-screen, the player can rotate the grid, while by clicking on tiles in the grid, the player can destroy orthogonally-connected groups of tiles of the same colour. Depending on which way the grid is oriented at that point, all blocks, characters and items - even the exit door! - above the destroyed tiles will fall down to fill the gap, while new tiles fall into the grid from above.
In this way, the player can either move his character around the screen to fight monsters and collect items, or else bring them to him. Each monster has its own attack pattern, represented by highlighted squares on-screen when the player mouses over the monster. The easiest monsters only attack horizontally adjacent squares, while the more challenging foes can hit a wide range of squares. The player, meanwhile, slays monsters with his drill-lance by dropping onto them from above.
Destroying blocks costs energy - only a single point for groups of three or more, but there is an energy penalty for destroying single blocks and groups of two. When the player’s energy runs out, he starts losing health instead; getting hit by monsters also depletes health. Energy is restored between levels, while health is not, though there are plenty of healing items available. Destroying blocks and slaying monsters also earns the character experience points (towards leveling up in typical RPG style) and fills up a meter at the bottom of the screen, gradually allowing the character access to various magical abilities, ranging in power from simply shuffling the tiles on-screen to wiping out all enemies on the level. Power-up items work in a similar fashion, being stored in the player’s inventory until used for various effects.
As you’d expect, each level is completed by collecting the key, and then making it to the exit door. Each quest has between three and eight levels, and the longer quests have a boss stage at the end. Each boss features a unique mechanic, both in terms of how it attacks, and how the player must defeat it.
The gameplay is fun, though too easy; I only died perhaps three times in the course of beating the game, usually due to lack of attention, and continues are unlimited. The game would benefit greatly from the addition of difficulty modes. The main challenge is working out the strategy for the first time, but once the player has learned to predict the consequences of destroying a given group of blocks, most levels other than the boss fights tend to be a cakewalk.
The overworld map consists of a bunch of nodes connected by paths, similar to Super Mario World. Some nodes represent quests, while others are shops, taverns (for healing damage between quests), or just NPC encounters to advance the plot, such as it is. It’s an appealing alternative to a linear progression of levels, but unfortunately, aside from the bosses, there isn’t really much difference between one quest and another, so it amounts more to an illusion of choice than a real, strategic decision.
The game’s graphics are much better than most Flash fare, featuring pretty decent pixel art. The contrast between the player character and the tiles is not always great, but the grid is so small and simple, there’s never any question of not knowing where everything is - it’s only a mild aesthetic problem. The sound and music are likewise above average, though nothing that will leave a lasting impression.
This is definitely a game worth playing, and it’s very addictive - it takes a few hours to complete, and I was unable to tear myself away until I’d done so. There’s a lot of potential here for a Knightfall 3, and if the author chooses to produce it, I hope he will add difficulty levels so that the more hardcore among us will be able to give ourselves enough of a challenge to feel the sense of accomplishment we crave. More variety in the quests would be welcome as well - perhaps featuring special “terrain” tiles, different sizes/shapes of grid, etc., rather than merely varying in terms of proportion of the various monster types.
I apologize for the lack of blog posts recently - I’ve been out of town a lot, and rushing to finish some contracts during the times I’ve been back. I promise there will be some more substantial content in the near future.
In the meantime, here is a robot mask I created to promote the M60 film festival here in Montreal. Click the image to get a full-resolution version that you can print out on cardstock and wear!
Cut out the X-marked pixels for eye holes
I was recently reading an interesting post on Emily Short’s blog about how she handled conversation in her most recent Interactive Fiction project. You can read the post in question here.
The gist of it, for those who’d prefer a synopsis, is that she’s moved away from the conventional model, in which the player chooses something to say, and the NPC responds, then the player chooses something else to say (possibly with new options now), and the NPC responds again, and so on. Instead, she’s given the NPC as much agency in the conversation as the player - the NPC will now have a list of things he or she wishes to say, and an order to say them in, and will go down the list until they’ve said everything they want. In the meantime, the player can say or do whatever he or she likes, and these words and actions will tend to add and/or remove elements from the NPCs list.
These elements can be either immediate or postponed - which determines whether they’re added to the top or bottom of the list - and either obligatory or optional - which determines whether they’re removed from the list or not when the topic of conversation shifts.
Reading this, it occurred to me that you could use such a system to create a highly non-linear RPG, by simply extending it to cover actions as well as words, and also to include entities other than just NPCs (e.g. the environment, a whole group of monsters or even a distant kingdom could be an entity with a list of things it “wants” to do). Also, these actions would need to have a setup and a recovery time, as global events in an RPG don’t fall as neatly into a turn-based structure as conversation in a piece of IF. Aside from these changes, however, the basic idea remains unchanged.
Today, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how one would go about designing such a game, and I think the answer is to take the player out of the game to begin with, and come up with a story that would take place without any player intervention at all. Once you have that worked out, you can break it into one or more cause-and-effect chains, in which actions taken by one entity add actions to other entities’ to-do lists, and so on down the line. The player’s actions could then prevent some of these events from taking place, or change their outcome, or cause entities to take other actions entirely. In this way, there’s guaranteed to be a story of some sort going on, and the player can meddle in it however much he or she likes.
I think this system would be best suited to small games, because the system gets very complex very quickly, and the non-linear nature of the gameplay would give the game a high degree of replayability, so a long play-time might be more of a drawback than a positive. To manage the complexity in a larger game, the thing to do would probably be to divide the game world up into a number of isolated “islands,” (e.g. towns) whose entities only interact with others within their own island, and only major events in one place affect what happens elsewhere.
As an example, here’s an idea for a very small game I came up with, consisting of a very small number of locations and NPCs.
There are two towns. The one in which the player starts, we’ll call Hometown, and the other we’ll call Awaytown. Both towns have a few important NPCs, and a number of generic NPCs who only share rumors with the player, or give him minor tasks with minor rewards, and little impact on the main plot.
There are two ways to get from one to the other - a pass through the Mountains, and a Road through the Woods. The mountains also contain a wizard’s hut and a cave full of faeries, while the woods contain a bandit stronghold.
The major NPCs:
HOMETOWN Hometown Sheriff, who is secretly corrupt and in cahoots with the Stablemaster (below) Bartender, who needs a cart wheel, and knows various rumors e.g. about the bandits Bartender’s son, who is in his late teens Goldsmith, who makes jewelry, but is currently out of gold, and expecting a shipment soon
AWAYTOWN Awaytown Sheriff, who is a good guy, and wants to take down the bandits Stablemaster, who is in contact with the bandits and supplies them with horses and information Cartwright, who has a young son
ROAD/WOODS Bandit Lord, who stays in the stronghold most of the time Bandit Prince, who is the Bandit Lord’s son, and leads the group of bandits who attack the player and/or any NPCs who attempt to take the road between the towns.
MOUNTAINS Wizard, who has a powerful magic amulet Faerie Lord, who is dying Faerie Council, who need the magic amulet and a human child for a ritual to create a new Faerie Lord to replace their dying leader.
The Plot, without player intervention:
And so, we see that the story has a sad ending if the player does nothing; most of the nice people end up dead, and the bad guys come out ahead. Fortunately, the links in that chain are quite fragile, and the player can bend or break any one of them, and radically change the flow of events.
Early in the story, if the player talks to Bartender or Hometown Sheriff, he could be tasked with going to Awaytown to deliver the letter and/or acquire the cart wheel. If he goes to get the wheel, but doesn’t bring the letter, eventually Hometown Sheriff will find someone else to deliver it, but it will slow down the advancement of that part of the story. Meanwhile, if he does take the letter, he could deliver it as promised, advancing the story normally, or he could open it and read it. If he does so, he could expose Hometown Sheriff and raise a mob to lynch him, or he take the evil route and blackmail Hometown Sheriff into letting him in on the action. Alternately, he could take the letter to Awaytown Sheriff, who will propose that he go back to Hometown, steal Hometown Sheriff’s seal, reseal the letter, and deliver it… so that now, with the player’s assistance, Awaytown Sheriff can arrange a sting to catch the bandits - player, Awaytown Sheriff and a small posse meet up with the gold caravan and hide in the wagons to surprise the bandits.
Another way the player could find out about the Stablemaster/Hometown Sheriff conspiracy is if he happens to be out and about at nighttime in Awaytown, when the bandits come to meet with Stablemaster. The player might end up seeing them and eavesdropping.
Meanwhile, if the player chooses to travel via the mountain pass, he may run into the Faeries and/or the Wizard, depending on how much exploring he does. If he meets the Wizard, he’ll find out about the stolen Amulet - if he manages to figure out that the Faeries have it, and get it back, he’ll have the Wizard on his side. If he meets the Faeries, he may find out about their dying leader. If he’s particularly clever in conversation, he may even get some information about the ritual they have planned. The alternative to creating a new Faerie Lord is, of course, to save the current one, which requires some rare herbs from the Woods. If the player gets these in time, he can avert the abduction of Cartwright’s son. The Faeries may also reward him by giving him the amulet, which they no longer need. He could then keep it (and risk the Wizard’s wrath, if he sees him with it), or return it to the Wizard.
If instead, the player takes the road, he’ll be attacked by a small group of bandits. Assuming he wins the fight, Bandit Prince will attempt to flee. If captured, he will attempt to bargain with the player, saying he’s impressed with the player’s combat prowess, and inviting the player to join them. This would kick off a whole “evil” plotline, in which the player is with the bandits. Alternately, the player could turn Bandit Prince over to either Sheriff. Hometown Sheriff will, of course, set things up so Bandit Prince can escape, which will possibly help the player realize what’s going on. Awaytown Sheriff, on the other hand, will interrogate Bandit Prince to find out the location of the bandit stronghold, possibly leading to an attack on it, possibly with the player’s assistance… and, possibly even with the help of the Wizard and/or the Faeries, if he’s achieved happy resolution on that side of things.
Of course, the Bandit Prince might also escape, only to show up again later. Or the player might kill him, in which case the Bandit Lord, outraged over his son’s death, would seek revenge - either against the player specifically, or by attacking one or both towns, if he doesn’t have a way of determining who killed him.
Meanwhile, if the Faerie Lord does die, then the player might go to try to rescue Cartwright’s son himself, or he might join the party that ends up getting caught in the avalanche, or he might go up afterwards, to rescue them after they’re caught in the avalanche.
If this all sounds exceptionally complicated, that’s just because it’s nonlinear. There are any number of other possible interactions that could take place too - I’ve just tried to cover the main possibilities, but there are any number of ways the player character could involve himself in everyone’s business, either for altruistic reasons, personal profit, or loyalty to a specific NPC that the player has decided that he likes. Whatever happens, the overall story will probably be fairly short, but dense - this isn’t an epic game, by any means. However, the player should be able to play it several times, with a radically different experience each time through… almost any NPC or group of NPCs can end up being an ally or an enemy, depending on what the player does, and certain locations (the inside of the faerie cave and the bandit stronghold) might not even be seen at all in a given game!
Also, the possible permutations and combinations of PC-NPC and NPC-NPC interaction grow exponentially as more are added. With just four main areas and a handful of entities, the game is already quite complex - just a couple more locations to visit and a few more active parties with their own agendas, and the story would be truly unpredictable and surprising. The ultimate goal, of course, is to make an RPG that is actually a role-playing game in the true sense of the term, similar to the experience one has playing a pencil-and-paper RPG.
