|
[In this in-depth design article, game designer and balancer (Street Fighter II HD Remix) David Sirlin explains his methodology in designing intriguing achievement-based 'metagame' CCG Kongai for Flash game site Kongregate.]
While Jim Greer was the technical director at the casual game site Pogo.com, one of the things he oversaw was the Pogo badges system. This allows players to earn icons in various games on that site and show off their achievements to other players. Microsoft used this same idea with their aptly named Xbox Achievements. Now Jim is stealing his own idea back for his new free-to-play casual Flash game site Kongregate.com.
This time around, there's an interesting twist. When you complete the challenges for various casual games on Kongregate.com, you don't just win an icon; you win a card that's part of a metagame tying the whole site together. Jim asked me to design that game -- Kongai, which is currently in a closed beta and will debut soon. I told him there are many pitfalls in this idea and I could think of at least one hundred ways to do it wrong. Jim asked how I'd do it right.
The first thing that came to mind was avoiding the style of game where we have artificial rarity for a few very powerful cards. There are going to be some players who get caught up in the fun of collecting cards, and there will be others who actually want to play this metagame.
For that second group, I want them to have relatively easy access to all the cards. This doesn't conflict with Kongregate's business plan because the challenges aren't meant to be incredibly hard -- they're meant to be interesting enough to bring the average player back to the site.
We could make some cards extremely hard to get, but only if they have no gameplay differences from the easier-to-get version. For example, a very difficult challenge might get you a different border on the card, or different art, or a different icon for the edition of the card.
Along these same lines, I wanted all the cards to be approximately the same power level. I'm aware of Mark Rosewater's stance over at Magic: The Gathering that there should be a lot of bad cards on purpose to give players the fun of not choosing them.
Mark is brilliant, and I love his work, but on this point I disagree. I like the Guild Wars philosophy -- as you gain more cards (or abilities in that game), you are gaining the ability to create a wider and wider variety of decks, but not more and more powerful decks.
Another thing I wanted to avoid was a game that required a lot of cards to play. So-called constructed decks in Magic: The Gathering have 60 cards, but winning 60 challenges on Kongregate.com just so you can try a new deck would be way too hardcore. Even if we gave you 60 to start, winning 60 more to make a totally different deck is way too many. I wanted a game that could be played with relatively few cards.
With these ideas in mind -- no too hard to get cards, no intentionally bad cards, and small deck size -- I needed to actually create a game. I had several candidates, not to mention three other card games I was already working on for my own amusement, but one idea rose to the top: Pokemon Netbattle.
|
Printer-Friendly Version
Since every action's outcome is dependent on the action of your opponent, it really widens the disparity between a good player and a poor player. Just like chess, or Go, players will lose because they are completely and utterly outmatched and don't understand why they've lost. Additionally, while I agree that the mechanics are elegantly simple, it's the kind of system that requires a holistic awareness of the game and doesn't function very well for new players who are only familiar with a subset of the rules (any kind of double-blind system is going to tend towards effect).
RTS games tend to soften the blow a little bit with base building. In this way, the player is given a challenge that is purely internal - their ability to build and manage their own base/resources. The WC3 map, Defence of the Ancients is another example of this factor since players are challenged to fight the AI creeps on one level and the other players on another level.
I'm not saying that this is a flawed design, I'm just wondering what your thoughts on these points might be. Personally I love these kinda mechanics, but as a meta-game for a casual-friendly site like kongregate, I have my reservations.
Sean Chan: Your Carpe Universum game has some great style, but you have things completely backwards on this point. The ability of a bad player to beat a good player in Chess is extremely low. The same is true in Starcraft and in Street Fighter. Clearly, the same is *not* true in rock, paper, scissors.
Most people would expect RPS to be about 50/50 and what I'm showing with this game is that it's not--that good players can use yomi (mindreading) skills combined with valuation (understanding the payoffs involved) to win more than their share. And of course the game has two varieties of secret sauce to make that more possible, as explained in the article. But anyway, you seem to assume a 100/0 split in an RPS game, and I cannot even fathom why you think this.
A simultaneous-move game with RPS choices is far more friendly to beginners than Chess or Starcraft vs experts. In all my years of explaining that expert players have an uncanny ability to guess right far more often than chance, no one has ever countered with "no, they guess right basically every time, so much so that their guessing win ratio would be close to that of a master Chess player's win ratio versus a beginner." So I kind of don't know what to say here.
At this point, the game is no longer theoretical. After playing it for months now, it is indeed true that good players can mysteriously guess right far more than their 50/50 share and it is indeed true that even they cannot win 100% versus weaker players (or even as much as Chess/SF/SC players would win) due to bad guesses and some randomness. Pretty much anyone can get in there and attack/switch/intercept and have a shot.
While a poor player has the same potential to win as a veteran, after a certain point, he's just randomly picking actions (he doesn't know any better). Which is fun, as much as snakes and ladders is fun.
There are two elements that we're working with here, alea and agon (I have no clue who came up with these terms, can't remember where I read them either). Alea is chance/randomness, agon is competition.
A game like Starcraft has a diminished element of alea (in the sense that if you haven't scouted them, you won't know what strategy they're going for and if they're random, what race they are), how much of it is dependent on how much scouting you do.
I would say that what you call yomi would come under agon, I consider it a competitive element because it's directly concerned with dealing with your opponent. The main difference is that Starcraft has additional layers of appeal (ontop of alea/agon) to a player in the form of an internal challenge of base building. Developing self over competing with opponent. I messed up by using Chess and Go as examples because they don't really have that (in Go, all of your moves only have meaning in relation to your opponents pieces), sorry.
What I'm trying to get at is that some games have an element of challenge that is completely independent of the actions of your opponent. This is building a bigass base in Supreme Commander and churning out experimentals to step on units. It is using Zangief's pile driver because it's the most difficult move to do, as opposed to performing it because it's the right way to defeat your opponent. In Magic: The Gathering design jargon, it's the Timmy pyschograph. It's about appealing to a sense of fantasy instead of just focussing on the winning.
A player like that can lose the game and still walk away happy, because he's achieved his goal. A goal that has nothing to do with winning, but rather about pushing his limits and doing something he's never managed to do before. In such a case it's the self-improvement and personal challenge that is the reward rather than winning. If the appeal of a game is solely winning, you'll only end up pleasing half of the players (less in multiplayer FFA structures). By extending the appeal to smaller, personal challenges within the context of a competitive game, I think it's possible to stretch that margin further.
I'll bring it back to Raph Koster's theory of fun. If fun is about learning in a safe environment I say that we can take that a step further by allowing the player to experience that fun without having to win. It serves to keep competition positive and friendly rather than confrontational (which can get ugly, especially with children). I'm not saying that this Kongai game format is difficult for players to get into (on the contrary, it's very easy to pick up and play) I'm just saying that it might not have that much retention with a casual audience as it could be if it were broadened a little bit, maybe you have some mechanics for that that we haven't seen yet.
As for Carpe Universum, that's still kinda missing the mark for me, it's not achieving what it was meant to do in it's current state (it's currently tempo driven instead of beat
driven). I didn't really set out to build a game with no deaths, it just kinda came up because I didn't code in the bits for handling player death. But as a music driven game my intention for it is to allow anyone to play through much the same way you would listen to an album or medley of songs, but if you want to be competitive on the high scores then you define goals for yourself and you get to be as competitive as you want to be.
Possibly yes. There's something to be said for simplicity though, and removing everything other than what is the point. That's what I tried to do with Kongai. For my other card game, Yomi: Fighing Card Game, there is some hand-management and hand-manipulation you can do, so it does have more of the 1p aspect you're talking about. Is it better to include this 1p aspect or cut it out to make the game simpler? I think the answer is not so clear. Even if I had an opinion on that, I would not be able to say it here. ;) Perhaps you will eventually try both Kongai and Yomi: FCG and give you opinion then.