Virtual Femme

Quests, as a word in the gaming community, has been dumbed down beyond belief by the churn-n-burn questing style introduced by World of Warcraft that has continued in Everquest II, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and just about any new MMO that has come out since then.  I remember when quests used to be epic, and a game might be designed around ONE quest with a bunch of puzzles to solve.  Now, bringing three boar farts to an NPC is considered a quest.  (Though, actually, having to figure out how to capture boar farts might be more involved than most of the quests on these games now.)  Seriously, the sheer number of ‘quests’ in these games makes one feel like they’re on a forever grind of never-ending bitchy, needy NPCs.

Interrupting the Story

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Almost all online roleplaying games require some sort of gems system for their virtual world.  Some games opt to go with real life gem counterparts, and they skip the need to create gems particular to their own world.  The most important decision that these games have to make is which gems to use.  Other games have a mixture of both gems found in the real world and created gems.   These games have to decide which real gems they will use as well as the characteristics of the gems they create, which can be extremely problematic.  Threshold, one of the games on which I work, has real gems as well as created gems.  The created gems are used for specific systems, such as enchanting or giving players specific buffs, and the real gems are simply considered loot.  Other games go with a completely created system.  Primordiax is one of these games, and all of its gems for all of its systems are completely original.

Whenever I create anything from scratch, I still try to make sure that it is grounded in reality.  That way, people who know anything about the gems will not be jarred out of their suspension of disbelief.  One of the best gem resources I have found online is Treasure Hunting: Searching America for Hidden Secrets, a blog written by Kalilea.  There are gorgeous pictures to peruse, and there’s a lot of facts about actually finding gems.  Check it out if you need some good, solid gem facts.

Maxis definitely made it quite easy to create beautiful and interesting items in Spore.  Obviously, it was in their best interest to make it easy since so many of the creatures and buildings end up on other people’s games.  It would be horrid to end up with some pretty blah and bland looking items done by a lazy player.  They obviously spent a ton of time programming their creation interface to be used even by the most inept gamers or people new to the game like me.  I was completely impressed by how easy it was to make something decent.

Obviously, I’m still practicing in my free time, which is a pretty rare commodity.  I’ve added the Spore Widget to my blog so that people can download what they want or just see what I’ve made.  (Again, notice how easy they made it to share my Spores!)

Okay, I recently got Spore, and so I’ve been playing that for 2 days.  Honestly, my husband took me to Wal-Mart at 12:15 am Sunday to get it as soon as we could since I have such limited playing time.  (It’s nice to have someone who understands my gaming obsessions.)  I didn’t actually even know it was coming out because they don’t seem to be advertising much.
So far, I have to say that this game is spectacular and gives me a lot of the gameplay and depth I’d been missing in playing MMOs.  I get more into my Spores than my MMO characters, but I think that’s because I don’t have to deal with any annoying people and can wallow in the growth of my Spore from cell all the way to space explorer.

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“I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else; hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”

– Lucille Ball

People often ask me how I get my inspiration for my writings.  Sometimes things come to me as I’m driving around, taking a shower, or cooking.  More often than not, I am inspired by other artists: authors, painters, sculptors, musicians, film makers, and architects.  The key for receiving inspiration is to constantly receptive to input with the game or area I’m designing in mind.

Books serve as one of my favorite sources of inspiration.  My job is to paint vivid pictures in people’s head and give them enough to create something of their own via role-playing.  An author’s job is to draw people into their world and characters in order to ignite our imaginations.   We’ve got very similar tasks.  When I read a book, I always have the nuggets of future areas or instances in mind, and sooner or later, I’ll run into something – a turn of phrase, a vivid scene – that sparks my imagination for an instance.

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I am a gigantic fan of seamless, realistic worlds. In the old days of multi-user dungeons (MUDs), players would always start in a central city, and devs simply tacked on cool areas onto it. There really was very little rhyme or reason when it came to world and area design. “That’s cool!” became the standard of which new areas got implemented and “This seems like a good spot!” was the mantra for where the area got added.

Things are a bit different now in worlds where roleplaying is required. While most players can admirably suspend disbelief and take the world as its given, roleplaying becomes far more easy when the world is as believable as possible as well as basically correct when it comes to details. The average roleplayer playing a text game does a fair amount of reading, and they possess a good deal of information on various topics. When a detail runs contrary to what they know to be true, players are jarred out of their state of suspended disbelief, and they have a “WHAT?” moment. So, designing areas and instances in a roleplaying game requires at least rudimentary research in whatever type of area I’m building unless it is purely fantastical.

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Quantifying any day-to-day activity into game mechanics is an extremely difficult endeavor. Simple actions that we take for granted can create a coding nightmare. For example, most of us probably take making change for granted. We use increasingly smaller denominations of coin to make exact change. This is something most of us learn in grade school. How do you write code to make change, though, assuming that you have differentiated currency? Think about that for a bit. You would first start by simplifying the currency. Most games go with a coin system that is a factor of 10 in some way. Either 100 of a type of coin creates the next type or 1000 of one coin creates the next type. Then, to make change, it’s simply a matter of division and subtraction.

Now take something much more complicated than making change like cooking. In one simple stir fry, I may use up to 10 ingredients and 3-4 utensils without thinking twice about it. I cut, cube, stir, toss, season and taste before I’m done with one dish, and I may cook 3-4 dishes a meal. Of course, give my husband the same ingredients, tools, and time, and he’d probably produce a charred lump of something inedible. In a roleplaying game, the goal is to make the process believable but not cumbersome, fun and yet challenging. How do you streamline something as difficult as cooking?

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One of the things I love most about world building is researching the areas that I’m about to create.  Currently, I’m working on one of our thirty-eight biomes, specifically savannas, and I’m having a wonderful time reading about various grasslands, how they form, and what kind of life they usually support.  A lot of it came back to me from my college days as a biology major, but I haven’t been in a biology classroom for ten years.  I remember now why I loved biology and ecology so much.  Savannas, also known as tropical grasslands, are probably featured whenever there’s a movie or a documentary about elephants or lions, so I’m already thinking about what kind of magical, mythical, or downright scary beasts I can put in the zone.  In addition, I’m planning out what kind of areas could go in the zone.  Maybe we could have a hollowed out tree much like the one Rafiki inhabited in The Lion King.

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Every now and then I feel like I’m at war with code. Most of the time, I write due to the fact that we actually have more coders than we do writers, and good writers are extremely hard to find. Every now and then I code because sometimes I’ve just got to get down and dirty with the nitty gritty parts of the game. (Also, I don’t want to wait for a coder to get around to adding my stuff into the game.)

Coding really comes in multiple parts:

• Figure out what the end result is going to be.
• Map out how to get there within one’s coding ability.
• Write the code.
• Upload it.
• Begin debugging.

Hopefully, the code will load, and I’m able to skip the very last part. That’s always a wonderful dream for a writer turned coder by necessity.

My victory was over a clan ability spell called inferno that serves as an area of effect spell (AoE) against all foes located in a room. It should have been easy. I based it off of a spell that already works and exists in the game but had been taken out because the base damage was a mess. The trouble began when I had to adjust the timer (how often you can cast a spell) and the casting time (how long it takes to cast the spell) based on the caster’s clan rankings. I had forgotten to define a few variables which broke the spell before it even got the first simple spam (message sent to the player). That’s a pretty newbie mistake to make, honestly, but coding is much like math. If you don’t use it often enough, you forget all the steps.

The spell operates in two parts. The initial casting checks for all the variables such as whether or not the character has enough spell points to cast the spell, whether or not the character’s clan tribute has been paid, whether or not the thing the character is trying to attack is in the room, whether or not the room allows combat, and a multitude of other things. Once the player makes it through all the checks, the casting begins, and the player receives a confirmation message. Then the second step of the spell begins, and this part was a bit more complicated for me.

I needed to pass a bit of information from the first part of the spell to the next part of the spell which occurs 4-6 seconds later. I never find that part easy as all the variables that are passed through have to match. And of course, I end up having problems. See if you can spot the problem:

if( (count/rank) >= 4) call_out("inferno_effect", 4, tp, room, damage);

else call_out("inferno_effect", 6, tp, room, damage);

void inferno_effect(object tp, object victim, int damage) {

It’s a very simple mistake, but it took me a bit to find it. Again, it was a newbie mistake. I finally got it all worked out, and I felt like I’d soloed a raid boss. Of course, it was just one spell in the whole scheme of things.

I’m learning to get into this blogging thing. Sometimes writing, in general, organizes my mind or relaxes me, so I can go back to projects feeling refreshed. When coding and designing games, there are simply so many things to do that organizing the game itself is a gigantic job. I find myself with so much to do that I simply freeze up.

We recently introduced a project management system to our second game, Primordiax . We had our meeting last night, and it was extremely well received by the rest of the devs. While, initially, the system itself seems like a lot of additional work, I expect productivity to increase dramatically. People really do like specific tasks that they can check off and feel they’ve finished. Having a deadline seems to be very good for those who are creative. We tend to bounce around from project to project and fitter about writing things that interest us immediately. Then we get bored and flutter to our next project. That’s not the most productive way to go. I had gotten to the point where I was spending so much time assigning projects to everyone else (It was a constant flow of “I need something to do!”) that I wasn’t able to have any time to get my own projects, which are considerable in number, done. I personally don’t like managing, but in a small company, I don’t really get a choice of doing exactly what I like to do. Luckily, one of the people we keep on staff and a good friend of mine was able to step up and take over the project management system.

The system itself is pretty simple at its core. It consists of a task, a way to claim it, and an assignment with a due date. The difficulty comes in creating the tasks and having someone to check the tasks in and out for those interested in doing the work. The system inherently creates a competition between developers as well, which is an unintended side-effect but should be beneficial to the overall progress of the game.

Last but not least, putting up the task management system allowed me to note that we need more builders/writers. If you’ve got interest, contact me!