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What Went Wrong
1. Three engines. Oasis
was originally built on a DirectX 9 framework. That seemed a safe bet
because we hadn’t considered signing with a publisher that might
require a lesser version. When we did sign with our first publisher, we
had to migrate over to their DirectX 7 technology, which took a
considerable amount of time. When we moved on to our final publisher,
we had to strip out all of the previous technology and start from
scratch. This was made considerably easier by the fact that Mind
Control Software’s own DirectX 7-based Orbital technology had gone
through two ship cycles.
There
were certain benefits to using three engines, but overall, we spent
more time on technology than was desirable. Going with DirectX 7 from
the start, which was an industry standard for small games, would have
been a better idea.
2. Learning Oasis. In creating Oasis,
we were faced with the challenge of teaching the game to new players.
This proved more difficult than we had imagined, as 1) There were more
ideas that had to be understood than we realized, 2) We already knew
the rules, and were a bit desensitized to a newcomer’s frustrations,
and 3) Oasis breaks with convention in some of its rules, betraying some of our target customer’s expectations.
The
game’s tutorial was extremely well crafted for its purpose. Each
important idea was presented in the form of a level in the tutorial.
The player would have to master a concept before they could progress to
the next level. One downside to this approach is that expert players,
those who need little hand-holding, did not have a straightforward rule
set to learn from. Worse, the tutorial is extremely easy to play,
creating the impression that levels can be won trivially. Some of these
issues remain unresolved, but we did create multiple entry points into
the tutorial so that players can refresh their knowledge of important
rules immediately, without having to replay the whole tutorial from the
start.
Our
insensitivity to the frustrations of newcomers was probably
predictable. Long development cycles tend to increase the divergence of
spirit between game creators and their audience. Some of the focus test
results seemed impossible to imagine, though video-taped evidence and
careful observation confirmed them. The feedback that players receive
in Oasis is quite different than that of a traditional
mass-market ultra-casual game. Players may ponder why a city didn’t
fight as well as expected and draw invalid conclusions. That’s rarely
the case in a bubble-popper game.
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More education before play was needed in retrospect.
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Where Oasis
breaks rule conventions for strategy games, it does so cruelly and
deliberately. For example, the fields surrounding each city contain the
lowest numbers of followers found in the playfield. Clicking on a field
yields only one follower. However, games of this ilk generally reward
players for finding and controlling all agricultural land. This created
a valuable point of tension in the design: people in the surrounding
land have taken refuge in the city; thus, deducing where a city is in
the minimum number of clicks is advantageous. If we had gone with
convention, it would have encouraged sloppy play. A tutorial level
might have helped address this point of confusion.
3. Women and the war-game. Depending upon one’s definition, Oasis
is either a war-game or an empire simulator. The player builds an
empire and defends it against invaders. However, unlike most games of
this type, there is no micro-management, levels are played in minutes
instead of hours, resolution is dramatic and fast, and the game
emphasizes discovery and building more than any other element. Thus,
even though Oasis plays like a beautiful game of discovery and
exploration, it looks like a war-game. Well, the war-game market is not
dominated by women, and Oasis is distributed through web portals that typically cater to women in their late 30s and 40s.
The development team was at peace with this conclusion. There didn’t seem to be much that could be done to make Oasis
more appealing to the actual market of potential female players. What
we didn’t know was that many women who self-identified as hating
war-games actually loved Oasis. Their claims that the game was
incredibly addictive and satisfied their desire to explore and build
came as a shock to us. We lost faith in targeting the female audience
after listening to many women’s initial reactions to our little
war-game. In retrospect, we should have worked harder to identify and
fix what was causing such a strongly negative reaction.
4. Difficulty Ramp. When
players migrate from Easy to Normal difficulty the game seems just as
friendly because the first levels of Normal really are like the last
levels of Easy. However, about halfway through a game of Normal players
notice for the first time that there are mistakes that can cost them
the level, and even the game. Typically, these are mistakes that
they’ve been allowed to get away with while playing on Easy. Perhaps
the game has trained them to play sloppily up to this point, and now
they get their comeuppance.
The difficulty ramp in Oasis isn’t really that different than other games, but Oasis
players express more shock and disbelief when their cities fall than,
say, a player who loses in chess or a real-time strategy game. In fact,
players have described the game as “betraying” them when multiple
hordes of barbarians arrive on the playfield. What’s interesting is
that multiple hordes are almost always preferable to a single, larger
horde. Again, it is the shock that is so notable. It is as if the game
creates a sense of comfort and contentment in its players that is
betrayed on higher levels of difficulty. Some players quit when they
reach this point. Others push through by tightening up their play.
Generally,
the shock and horror of seeing one’s cities burn can be averted with
very simple tactics: 1) Find mines early and place ten followers in
each, 2) Find cities early and connect them so that populations will
grow, 3) Find or deduce the barbarian entry point(s), 4) Search cities
closest to the entry points for treasures, 5) Reinforce the cities
closest to the entry points that have the strongest weapons. 6) Don’t
waste turns clicking on fields because they only contain one follower
each.
These
tactics may be easy enough to accomplish, but it appears that the game
might emphasize certain rewards that throw players off of these goals.
In particular, the Oasis is a beautiful blue region that makes pretty
sounds when discovered, and turns a brighter color when fully explored.
That enticement alone is enough to distract players the moment they
find the Oasis. The discipline required to resist is one of the game’s
strengths, but evidently, it may teach players to play for immediate
gratification that does not promote survival.
Oddly enough, the inclusion of advisors, like the Engineer and the General, can make Oasis
more challenging to some players. When advisors were first implemented
and I reported this finding to Marc, his response was, “That’s
impossible. Advisors do nothing but make the game easier to win.
Period.” My response was indicative of side effects we have witnessed,
“When an advisor is available, I want to earn it so badly that I play
poorly.”
Enter
the world of a game that rewards players to their deaths. This is a
wonderful strength to those who stick with the game, but not for the
initiates.
5. Insufficient early platform testing. The inclusion of both 2D and 3D modes in Oasis
significantly increased the difficulty of the development and QA
process. Oddball graphics cards misreport their feature sets and
capriciously violate standards. This tale of woe is mentioned
frequently in the What Went Wrong portion of postmortems, so we were
warned, but our initial success with the graphics cards we had on hand
was good enough that we didn’t start testing the less common cards
until late in QA. In an attempt to fix some very obscure problems, we
ended up introducing some quirks on some less problematic chipsets.
Conclusion
Seeing Oasis
ship was the culmination of a dream that started more than two years
ago. We have experienced the joy of both seeing it win the IGF’s Game
of the Year and Innovation in Game Design awards in 2004, and seeing it
in the hands of the public. The difficulty in bringing this product to
the market can not be understated. The resources that it consumed could
have just as easily been spent on creating several less sophisticated
and less fulfilling games. Only with the support and hard work of many
people could such a game reach the market.
Hopefully Oasis
will usher in a new era of light strategy games that can be played at a
leisurely pace. There are limitless directions left unexplored, and if
we have inspired others to take a crack at this space, it will all have
been worthwhile.
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