|
Years ago on my own site, Sirlin.net, I created a thread asking people to name a game that satisfied my long list of requirements for a good competitive game. I could not really think of any game that met them all, so I asked my readers. An unusually high number suggested Pokemon Netbattle, and it took them a while to get through to me that they didn't mean the Pokemon trading card game, which is a totally different game.
What they meant is the turn-based battle system that's inside all the Pokemon role-playing games on GBA and Nintendo DS. The fans of the game extracted the combat portion only, including all equations and stats, and created a PC online version that removes all of the RPG elements.
Even though I do not have much experience playing this game, when Jim asked me for a metagame for Kongregate.com, I remembered all the good properties of Pokemon Netbattle, and it seemed like a good fit. It has good strategy, requires only one action from the player per turn (simple), and has small decks of 6 cards.
Here's a quick note on "good" versus "new." If I copied the Pokemon game exactly, it would not be new. I personally don't care at all about new, I only care about good. Besides, this game would be new to the vast majority of our audience at Kongregate because most people are not familiar with Pokemon Netbattle.
That said, I decided to make lots of changes to how the game works, but they were all in the interest of creating a better game that's easier to learn. None of the changes were made for the sake of being new.
I'll tell you how the game actually works, but first I'll list the major areas I changed from the Pokemon game:
- Character switching mechanic changed
-
Attack type system vastly simplified
-
All math equations vastly simplified, replaced with simple arithmetic
-
Mechanic for multiple hits added
-
New mechanic for fighting at close/far range
-
Meter management system added/revamped
Most of you probably have no idea how these games work in the first place, so first, here's a quick explanation of the Pokemon game. In that game, each player has a deck of six characters. Each turn, each player makes only one decision, but it's done in a double-blind simultaneous fashion. Your only choices are a) do one of your character's four possible attacks or b) switch to one of your remaining characters.
So you might decide to do your attack A and your opponent might do his attack C. Then these choices are revealed simultaneously. The faster attack hits first, then the slower attack hits second. If one player chose to switch out, then his incoming Pokemon will get hit by the enemy's attack. When you lose all your characters, you lose the game.
These mechanics are very simple, but learning the game is actually not simple, so there was a lot I thought I could improve on. To understand this, let's look at how a Pokemon player should go about deciding what to do during his turn. Why choose Attack A over B? Why switch characters instead of attacking?
A lot of the strategy of the game comes from a concept called resistance. There are 17 attack types in Pokemon (such as fire, grass, psychic, dragon, etc.). There is a 17 x 17 chart telling you how good each attack type is against each other attack type. In some cases, you'll do double damage, others you'll do normal damage, others you'll do half damage, and in others, no damage at all.
If you understand and internalize this chart, you can use attacks that are very effective against your enemy's resistance, and force him to attack with attacks that are weak or have no effect because of your resistances.
|
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.