“If you have trouble grabbing the beam, just keep trying—we promise it works, but lots of readers have told us it’s not always easy.”

I’m a pretty good AC player, but after 10 minutes of trying to do that one standing jump, I gave up and stopped playing for a long time in frustration.

When game developers talk about “games should be so easy that all players can complete them; no-one should ever have to give up / fail to complete a game because something is too hard”, I usually disagree.

But in this instance, where the game is extremely, excessively difficult on something that the designer obviously intended to be extremely simple – and where the player has spent hours being taught that this will be easy – you have something different going on. It’s a failure of the control scheme; in fact, it’s a bug.

It’s a side-effect of the heuristics that AC uses to decide “what the player is trying to do” – heuristics that are far from perfect, while being very good.

In the first game, it took me a long time to get past the intro – no, really – because if you *try* to jump over gaps, then you fail. The heuristics were so heavily weighted towards “allowing” you to jump off buildings that running over a small gap became very difficult – until you learnt that the character “automatically” jumps small distances.

On the whole, I’m very impressed by the AC2 heuristics – compare it to Mirror’s Edge (a beautiful game, but feels a lot less fluid). I find them a bit too simplistic – I would love another 25% or so of user-control, and another 50% of precision on directional control – but (as ME shows) they got closer to perfect than any other game so far.

BUT … what do you do about a bug like this, one severe enough to make me stop playing the game entirely?

They had a huge QA team already (this is Ubisoft, after all), and such a vast amount of content in this game (multiple entire cities, modelled in fine detail), that there’s no way they could be sure to catch this bug.

Or is there?

This is the raison d’etre for a whole segment of in-game analytics / metrics: data-mining to discover undiscovered bugs.

Good metrics for game designers are VERY hard to describe, and IME the vast majority of the industry doesn’t know how to carefully hand-pick the few numbers they really need out of the millions of stats availalbe. Here’s a good example of how to pick well.

If the game reported

“the quest-point at which people stopped playing”

…then you *might* discover this bug. But it’s too coarse-grained.

If the game reported either/both:

“the segment on the map where people stopped playing”
“the segment on the map where people spent most-time during a mission”

…then you’d quickly and easily discover this bug. By “segment” I mean, essentially, a small patch of polygons approximately 6′x6′. This is relatively easy to measure algorithmically using greedy-polygon grabbing and hashing – although it would take a little care to make sure the measurement of the value didn’t take much CPU time (it could easily be pre-compiled for any given map, of course).

I’m not 100% of the “stopped playing” part – this is a console game, and while that info would be useful, it would mostly stop evenly distributed over quest-end points. Where it was more / less likely, it would be obvious just from knowledge of the story. ALTHOUGH: still well worth doing *in case* there were anomalies there – that should set off alarm bells.

However, the “spent most time during a mission” is more cut-and-dried.

This probe gives you a set of local maxima. It’s categoriesed by mission, making it one level finer than doing it over the entire world-map (which is too much, too uncategorised info), and it’s also coarse enough to correlate closely with user-behaviour (it merges results mission-by-mission; recurring bugs are very likely to show up by people doing the same mission and getting stuck at the same point).

The mission-based merge of results also has a nice side-effect: it tends to iron-out any anomalous results due to people wandering around the open-world game.

So. With a little bit of probing, using probes that you could/should have invented at the start of development (i.e. without knowledge of exact bugs that would occur) this bug could be ironed out. The three remaining questions are:

1. does Ubisoft do this level of automated-bug-detection,
2. do their designers bother to look at the anomaly-date,
3. and if so … why hasn’t the game been patched?

In the previous post I poked Earth Eternal for claiming to be the “*REAL* MMO for your browser”, and disappointing on that front (although it could be awesome on all other fronts). I finished with:

So … EE may be a great game … and it may be launchable from within a browser … but it’s a long way from a poster-child for browser-based MMOs. It’s still fighting the browser as much as it’s complementing it.

It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now.

I’m not in the loop on this stuff any more, but it set me to wondering what I’d be chasing if I weren’t doing iPhone exclusively right now.

What about you? Are you fighting the browser?

The Executive’s impression

Game developers aren’t stupid. Executives aren’t clueless. But some are.

In the minds of those who make games but “don’t do” browser games on principle, I’ve found “a browser MMO” often means some or all of:

1. A text-only game running off a single Perl webpage, where each action causes the whole page to be refreshed.
2. Non-real-time interaction (because, you know … web-servers aren’t powerful enough to run anything in real-time)
3. High-latency, jerky, shallow movement of characters and objects
4. Weak 3D graphics – 5 years or more behind the curve of Console graphics
5. Fat client downloads that “no-one” can be bothered to wait for, and would be better-off distributed on a DVD

What’s reality? Well, here’s a few observations…

Drop-dead gorgeous graphics … are the norm

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape.

Right now, crappy Flash MMO’s are still re-treading the ground of Dragon Fable (which is coming up to it’s 4th birthday) et al – albeit that’s now the “standard” and there is better and better appearing. But just as it only took a few games to adopt this approach and show how good it could look, widespread adoption of Unity, and a few high-profile innovative products, will drag forwards the rest of us.

(by “us” I don’t mean professional developers, I mean primarily the amateur and semi-pro teams who don’t yet work for a living – the students etc)

2 years ago I wouldn’t have thought it would be necessary to say this (I assumed that FB would have kicked everyone’s butts) but maybe it’s still relevant: going forwards, I suspect “browser MMOs” still need to be a lot more “browser” and a lot less “traditional MMO” if they wish to stand out.

The facebook question

Browser MMO, huh? So … Why is there no option to use Facebook Connect to login? In 2010, I think that’s what browser-MMO probably means to most people: “it works from Facebook”.

The massive, fundamental changes to Facebook that are coming in this year may push a lot of content-providers off FB, and back to the web – but users will continue to demand single-sign-on access, and shared access to friends lists. This already works, off-site, thanks to Facebook Connect (both for websites and for other hardware platforms, e.g. iPhone).

I may be completely wrong, but my suspicion is that many developers still want to “use Facebook”, by which they mean:

“use (the large number of accounts on) Facebook (to get lots of users in our game without having to do so much advertising)”.

…while (again, merely a suspicion) users want their games to “use Facebook”, by which they mean:

“use (the apps, data, and list of friends I already have on) Facebook (to reduce the effort I go through to play the game)”

The problem here is the developer is chasing more signups, and the user is chasing ease-of-access. IMHO, the FB changes are going to cut off most of the former, leaving the question: who will do best at fulfilling the latter?

The Glottal-Stops and Square Pegs of User Experience

When people surf to your MMO direct from the Web, do they get a feeling akin to the glottal-stop? Do they feel like they mentally “stumbled”, as the paradigms and user-interface go through a sudden change?

Embedded within an ordinary web-browser, does your MMO look like a square peg forced into a round hole?

The effects are subtle, but they decrease virality, decrease engagement. The effects are tiny, but with millions of web-users out there, they can be cumulative. Each time a user experiences this, you marginally shrink your maximum user-base, and you push your conversion rate down.

Why was I so shocked that Earth Eternal is (silently) Windows-only? (as is/was Free Realms, for that matter)

Well, largely because it reminded me of years ago, when you’d occasionally go to a website only to see:

“This site is only valid in Internet Explorer; you are not running that browser, so you are seeing this special page instead of the site. Please download IE now and then come back.” (or Netscape, or “desktop, but you are using a mobile phone”, etc)

History suggests that this is not a viable strategy when you’re fighting it out on the web…

I’ll know it when I see it

I’m waiting for one feature in a major MMO. I’ve seen it in a few “amateur” MMOs, and you get it on Facebook apps etc. It’s a fundamental expectation from the Web, and it is incredibly powerful:

Each piece of interesting content is *named* … it has a unique URL … so that I can directly tweet places, events, people, and things. I can bookmark conversations I’ve had. I can archive, I can cite, save, and return.

Bonus points for incorporating a bit.ly service in the client, so I can literally copy/paste direct into twitter

I’m hoping it’s out there already, and I just haven’t spotted it yet. When it comes, someone let me know; until then, I’ll be spending more time in flash games, and less in mainstream MMO’s. I prefer my gaming to be Web-compatible, thanks…

(NB: the fact that you still have to login MERELY TO READ THE DAMN FAQ linked from the PR statement is IMHO symptomatic of some of MP’s problems :( )

metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010

We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific. The official announcement is here, and you can read a FAQ guide here. We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.

Some of the correspondence I’ve seen on this – what went wrong? what should they have done differently? – has been interesting. Personally, I’m in two minds about it. I think there were some great things about and within MP, but from the very start I felt it had no direction and too little real purpose (and if you ask around, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of people who’ll confirm I said that at the time).

I’ll hilight a couple of things that haven’t come up so much in conversations:

Bad

1. On the face of it, MP was “the bad bits of Second Life…” (poor content tools, poor client, no direction, no purpose)
2. “… without the good bits of Second Life” (no sex, no mainstream publicity, wrong target audience to charge millions of dollars in land-rental to)
3. Poor discoverability (how do you find something cool in Metaplace? Go to site, login, download client, wait a lot, browse a weak index, wait for more downloads, wait for content to stream in … etc)

Discoverability was IMHO the killer: this is something that so many “hopeful” social sites and systems get wrong, and only a few get right. The best examples are still simple: browsing your friends’ friends on Facebook by looking at photos of their faces (hmm; who do I fancy?), or using Google to find things you’re looking for (the gold standard in tech, but also the base *expectation* of the modern web surfer).

The history of SLURLs in Second Life should probably be required reading for people interested in this – if you can find ways to experience / re-live life pre-SLURLs, and read through some of the trials and tribulations that Linden went through in getting them to work.

And even then, of course, SL still had no browsability – but it least it had “open” bookmarks and copy/paste references you could share with people, and embed in webpages. That was barely acceptable (and still “awful”) back when SL was in its prime; the equivalent “minimum acceptable” is probably Faceboook Connect with full Facebook integration (i.e. not just FC-login, but having a bona fide FB app too that acts as an alternate access-path for your virtual world).

Good

1. Well, obviously, there was a lot of great content in there. I only skimmed it, but apart from the problems above, I saw a lot of interesting stuff
2. The AJAX/CSS/HTML GUI … it was really easy for me to mess about gaining and browsing badges (both mine and other peoples).

Early on, I found the AJAX vs Flash part particularly interesting. The former showed up how weak the latter (the world-client) was: sometimes I went to the site, all happy about the badges, the popovers, etc, and as soon as I got into the Flash client, my mood would drop noticeably. Eventually, I stopped bothering visiting at all; I dreaded the slow, unwieldy, “clicking all over the place to move fractionally”, Flash experience.

One question I had was how much this was to do with the languages / platforms involved: did AJAX/CSS inspire the people working in it to make lighter-weight, faster, more abstracted core experience? Or is this just coincidence? There should be literally no reason why either of those platforms forced the designers to provide the experiences that way (Flash is capable of a much faster, snappier, fluid usability experience – it’s been excelling at this for years).

Project history (skip if you know all about Warhammer Online and Mythic already)

Huge project (cost in excess of $50 million to develop), based on a 20-year-old IP that is known and loved around the world, the game launched last year to a big marketing campaign.

Initial sales figures were excellent.

First-month renewals were dire, the company lost large amounts of money, they laid off large numbers of staff, and the CEO quit/resigned. They are now (late 2009) into the key point in such a product’s lifecycle where it has one last chance to succeed.

The parent company has recently laid off 1500 staff across different countries and products, but also just bought a small studio for $400 million.

The problem with Mythic/WAR today

Here’s what’s going on right now (based on observation, guesswork, and personal experience of similar situations at other companies):

They are spending large amounts of money to acquire new customers, while simultaneously erecting artificial barriers to turn away those new customers.

They are running loud marketing campaigns to attract those who’ve already rejected the product, while simultaneously creating powerful negative publicity for their own product.

In other words, this is a company that has a failing product AND has a non-unified product strategy, and yet is continuing to spend heavily. This strategy is known as “pure, blind, Hope”. It looks extremely similar to what happened with TR towards the end of it’s (brief, painful) lifetime:

“let’s work harder, do more, spend more! Cross your fingers, chant the secret mantra, and hope it all turns out for the best!”

Hope is not a strategy. All that can happen is that they might get lucky despite all the mistakes; there might be enough good left that they can survive this foolishness long enough to ditch the deadweight and pull themeslves out of the mire.

The inevitable PlayFish comment…

Maybe this would be a good project for the new hires from PlayFish to start work on? The essentials are there – and if the product could be made to succeed, it is a huge cash-cow. It could single-handedly pay-off a lot of the debt on that $400 million…

But they should.

So … here are the evaluations (from the audience) for our panel session at AGDC 09.

Judge for yourself whether you want to attend any future sessions featuring us again (Adam Martin, Bill Dalton, Rick Lambright, Joe Ludwig, Marty Poulin).

Head Count: 74; Evaluations: 32 (43% response rate)

• Overall rating of the presentation – 88% (AVG: 86%)
• How relevant was the topic to you? – 86% (AVG: 84%)
• How well did this class meet your expectations? – 94% (AVG: 84%)
• Would you recommend this session to a colleague? – 90% (AVG: 84%)
• Evaluate the speakers’ ability to communicate – 94% (AVG: 86%)
• If there were visual aids (slides) how were they? – 74% (AVG: 60%)

All of those are above average, and I’m glad that a particularly high number would recommend the session to their colleagues.

It seems that we did particularly well on fulfilling the remit (very high number for “met expectations”), and that our speakers had an awesome ability to communicate (almost 10% higher than average for the other speakers at the conference).

Audience Comments

1. The most entertaining session I attended, but didn’t sacrifice information value.
2. Interesting format, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, but it is time consuming
3. Good stuff
4. Slow, confused start lost valuable time for Q&A
5. Should have done middleware
6. Only 3 topics covered. Expected others

Comment 4 – yeah, something I’m unhappy about too, (it wasn’t our fault, it was the people running the conference), but there was nothing for it but to grin and carry on. Someone screwed-up the radio microphones, and we lost a lot of time at the start waiting for them to fix it. There was nothing we could do – they had connected the mics from a different room to *our* speakers. We didn’t find out until the person in the other room started talking, and it all came out through our speakers :(.

Comment 6 – we covered 4 topics (oops, audience can’t count :P). We all wanted to do more, but at GDC conferences, the organizers only give us 1-hour slots. With 4 speakers + moderator, I think that was pretty good, especially considering the time we lost at the start.

Perhaps someone will clone this format for a future conference (seems a good idea), and try to get a 2-hour slot for it?

It’s a great piece of openness to put your bug lists in the public domain. It makes it easier for your customers and partners to make decisions that save you time because they can see what’s coming and when (and save you money in reduced support requests). It saves you money in that you get free QA / testing from your users.

The downside is that it exposes to the world the places where you are especially incompetent, lazy, or just plain self-centred.

This is a recurring theme I’ve seen with corporates looking at both Open Source and also Web 2.0:

We say we’re the best, but secretly I believe we’re the worst; if we expose ourselves to the public, people will ridicule our mediocrity, and refuse to do business with us.

Also … I will probably get fired because my colleagues and my boss will finally realise what a clusterfuck I preside over on a daily basis

Eclipse, and a tale of two bugs

I was going to log two high-impact bugs that Eclipse has had for several years. Then I did a search on that area of Eclipse, and realised that the current Eclipse maintainers don’t give a **** about this whole section of the IDE – some of the core bugs we see every day were logged in 2001, and are still open:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=syntax+coloring

What you find when you do some basic research

If you go looking through the bug history for some of the more “obvious” bugs there, you often find little gems of passive-aggressiveness from maintainers. That’s an exceptionally effective way of making sure people stop helping and supporting any Open-Source project…

You’ll also find endless re-logging of the same old bugs from 10 years ago, revolving around the basic problem that Eclipse lets you set everything you could possibly imagine … EXCEPT the colours that it prints text in.

(all IDEs let you set the colours; most dont give you enough control over the other parts; Eclipse fails on the basic challenge, and succeeds on the advanced challenge)

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that its default is very bright with low-contrast – i.e. very hard to read on laptops when outside, and bad to read for long periods of time. As of about 5 years ago, you are finally “allowed” to set the colours yourself – except that the app breaks if you do, because they “didn’t bother” to allow you to change the colours on 20% or so of things.

Final thoughts

The next time someone – especially at a corporate – resists openness and transparency … in any form … ask yourself this:

What have they got to hide?

Often, once you ask yourself that question of the right person at the right time, it very quickly becomes obvious what they’re hiding (if not why). A little more digging, and you can pry open the can of worms, and see what trouble they’ve been up to…

(Incidentally (and unsurprisingly), in the face of the point-blank refusal of Eclipse developers to make basic usability concessions across the board, I didn’t bother logging either of the two bugs I’d found)

It’s been a long time since my last post on this topic. Last year, I stopped working for a big MMO publisher, and since then I’ve been having fun doing MMO Consultancy (helping other teams write their games), and iPhone development (learning how to design and write great iPhone apps).

Previously, I posed some questions and said I’d answer them later:

• how do you define the archetypes for your entities?
• how do you instantiate multiple new entities from a single archetype?
• how do you STORE in-memory entities so that they can be re-instantiated later on?

Let’s answer those first.

A quick warning…

I’m going to write this post using Relational terminology. This is deliberate, for several reasons:

• It’s the most-correct practical way of describing runtime Entities
• It’s fairly trivial to see how to implement this using static and dynamic arrays – the reverse is not so obvious
• If you’re working on MMO’s, you should be using SQL for your persistence / back-end – which means you should already be thinking in Relations.

…and a quick introduction to Relational

If you know literally nothing about Relational data, RDBMS’s, and/or SQL (which is true of most game programmers, sadly), then here’s the idiot’s guide:

1. Everything is stored either in arrays, or in 2-dimensional arrays (”arrays-of-arrays”)
2. The index into the array is explicitly given a name, some text ending in “_id”; but it’s still just an array-index: an increasing list of integers starting with 0, 1, 2, 3 … etc
3. Since you can’t have Dictionaries / HashMaps, you have to use 3 arrays-of-arrays to simulate one Dictionary. This is very very typical, and so obvious you should be able to understand it easily when you see it below. I only do it twice in this whole blog post.
4. Where I say “table, with N columns”, I mean “a variable-length array, with each element containing another array: a fixed-size array of N items”
5. Where I say “row”, I mean “one of the fixed-size arrays of N items”
6. Rather than index the fixed-size arrays by integer from 0…N, we give a unique name (”column name”) to each index. It makes writing code much much clearer. Since the arrays are fixed-size, and we know all these column names before we write the program, this is no problem.

Beyond that … well, go google “SQL Tutorial” – most of them are just 1 page long, and take no more than 5 minutes to read through.

How do you store all your data? Part 2: Runtime Entities + Components (”Objects”)

We’re doing part 2 first, because it’s the bit most of us think of first. When I go onto part 1 later, you’ll see why it’s “theoretically” the first part (and I called it “1″), even though when you write your game, you’ll probably write it second.

Table 3: all components

(yes, I’m starting at 3. You’ll see why later ;))

There are N additional tables, one for each row in the Components table. Each row has a unique value of “table-name”, telling you which table to look at for this component. This is optional: you could instead use an algorithmic name based on some criteria like the official_name, or the component_id – but if you ever change the name of a component, or delete one and re-use the id, you’ll get problems.

Table 4: all entities / entity names

(really,you should only have 1 column in this table – but the second column is really useful when debuggin your own ES implementation itself!)

…which combines with:…

Table 5: entity/component mapping

…to tell you which components are in which entity.

Technically, you could decide not to bother with Table 4; just look up the “unique values of entity_id from table 5″ whenever you want to deal with Table 4. But there are performance advantages for it – and you get to avoid some multi-threading issues (e.g. when creating a new entity, just create a blank entity in the entity table first, and that fast atomic action “reserves” an entity_id; without Table 4, you have to create ALL the components inside a Synchronized block of code, which is not good practice for MT code).

Tables 6,7,8…N+5: data for each component for each Entity

These N tables store all the live, runtime, data for all the entity/component pairs.

How do you store all your data? Part 1: Assemblages (”Classes”)

So … you want to instantiate 10 new tanks into your game.

How?

Well, you could write code that says:


int newTank()
{
int new_id = createNewEntity();

// Attach components to the entity; they will have DEFAULT values

createComponentAndAddTo( TRACKED_COMPONENT, new_id );
createComponentAndAddTo( RENDERABLE_COMPONENT, new_id );
createComponentAndAddTo( PHYSICS_COMPONENT, new_id );
createComponentAndAddTo( GUN_COMPONENT, new_id );

// Setup code that EDITS the data in each component, e.g:
float[] gunData = getComponentDataForEntity( GUN_COMPONENT, new_id );
gunData[ GUN_SIZE ] = 500;
gunData[ GUN_DAMAGE ] = 10000;
gunData[ GUN_FIRE_RATE ] = 0.001;
setComponentDataForEntity( GUN_COMPONENT, new_id, gunData );

return new_id;
}


…and this is absolutely fine, so long as you remember ONE important thing: the above code is NOT inside a method “because you wanted it in an OOP class”. It’s inside a method “because you didn’t want to type it out every time you have a place in your code where you instantiate tanks”.

i.e. IT IS NOT OOP CODE! (the use of “methods” or “functions” is an idea that predates OOP by decades – it is coincidence that OOP *also* uses methods).

Or, in other words, if you do the above:

NEVER put the above code into a Class on its own; especially NEVER NEVER split the above code into multiple methods, and use OOP inheritance to nest the calls to “createComponet” etc.

But … it means that when you decide to split one Component into 2 Components, you’ll have to go through the source code for EVERY kind of game-object in your game, and change the source, then re-compile.

A neater way to handle this is to extend the ES to not only define “the components in each entity” but also “templates for creating new entities of a given human-readable type”. I previously referred to these templates as “assemblages” to avoid using the confusing term “template” which means many things already in OOP programming…

An assemblage needs:

Table 1: all Assemblages

Table 2: assemblage/component mapping

This table is cut-down version of Table 5 (entity/component mapping). This table provides the “template” for instantiating a new Entity: you pick an assemblage_id, find out all the component_id’s that exist for it, and then create a new Entity and instantiate one of each of those components and add it to the entity.

Table 3: all components

This is the same table from earlier (hence the silly numbering, just to make sure you noticed ;)) – it MUST be the same data, for obvious reasons.

Things to note

DataForEntity( (entity-id) ) – fast lookup

If you know the entity-id, you may only need one table lookup to get the data for an entire component (Table5 is highly cacheable – it’s small, doesn’t change, and has fixed-size rows).

Splitting Table 5 for performance or parallelization

When your SQL DB is too slow and you want to split to multiple DB servers, OR you’re not using SQL (doing it all in RAM) and want to fit inside your CPU cache, then you’ll split table 5 usually into N sub-tables, where N = number of unique component_id’s.

Why?

Because you run one System at a time, and each System needs all the components with the same component_id – but none of the components without that id.

Isolation

The entire data for any given system is fully isolated into its own table. It’s easy to print to screen (for debugging), serialize (for saving / bug reports), parallelize (different components on different physical DB servers)

Metadata for editing your Assemblages and Entities

a.k.a. “Programmer/Designers: take note…”

It can be tempting to add extra columns to the Entity and Assemblage tables. Really, you shouldn’t be doing this. If you feel tempted to do that, add the extra data as more COMPONENTS – even if the data is NOTHING to do with your game (e.g. “name_of_designer_who_wrote_this_assemblage”).

Here’s a great feature of Entity Systems: it is (literally) trivial for the game to “remove” un-needed information at startup. If, for instance, you have vast amounts of metadata on each entity (e.g. “name of author”, “time of creation”, “what I had for lunch on the day when I wrote this entity”) – then it can all be included and AUTOMATICALLY be stripped-out at runtime. It can even be included in the application, but “not loaded” at startup – so you get the benefits of keeping all the debug data hanging around, with no performance overhead.

You can’t do that with OOP: you can get some *similar* benefits by doing C-Header-File Voodoo, and writing lots of proprietary code … but … so much is dependent upon your header files that unless you really know what you’re doing you probably shouldn’t go there.

Another great example is Subversion / Git / CVS / etc metadata: you can attach to each Entity the full Subversion metadata for that Entity, by creating a “SubversionInformation” System / Component. Then at runtime, if something crashes, load up the SubversionInformation system, and include it in the crash log. Of course, the Components for the SubversionInformation system aren’t actually loader yet – because the system wasn’t used inside the main game. No problem – now you’ve started the system (in your crash-handler code), it’ll pull in its own data from disk, attach it to whatever entities are in-memory, and all works beautifully.

Wrapping up…

I wanted to cover other things – like transmitting all this stuff over the network (and maybe cover how to do so both fast and efficiently) – but I realise now that this post is going to be long enough as it is.

Next time, I hope to talk about that (binary serialization / loading), and editors (how do you make it easy to edit / design your own game?).

Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic).

PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).

I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them.

The first three are all assuming a single-character RPG, the fourth is something more like DM / Wizardry (could be 6 chars, could be 3).

Everything is clickable – small maps become full screen map, blue buttons fire spells, character portraits go to the inventory screens.

Screens with no arrow buttons require you to drag your finger forwards/backwards/left/right to move, and allow 360 degree movement. Screens with arrow buttons assume you can only turn 90 degrees at a time (like the original games), although they smoothly animate the rotations (UN-like the original games – because I have access to OpenGL to do the 3D for me).

What do you think?

This was annoying (and stupid!) 5 years ago, when sites added the “smartphones” to their content-blocking, even though smartphones could (and happily would) render full-fat webpages perfectly (tabbed browsing worked fine in Opera on Windows Mobile back in 2005 – I used it a lot).

Now, with the iPhone added to the list of clients that these sites are blocking, it’s a bit worse: Apple won’t allow you to purchase any web browser other than their version of Safari, and Safari won’t allow you to lie to the website and tell it you’re not using a cell phone (this was the standard workaround on windows mobile/opera for stupid web design teams: tell Opera to claim your cell phone was a Windows desktop). The iPhone, with a better quality web-browser than many desktops currently run? That’s just insane…

Wikipedia: mobile users, go away

Until/unless they decide to fix it, it’s now too much hassle to read WP pages unless I do it on my laptop. Since I’ve probably just followed a link from google, that would mean emailing myself the link from my iPhone, and going to WP via my desktop. More wasted time. I’ll just stop using wikipedia, thanks.

So far this morning I haven’t been able to access WP short of manually changing the URL to go to a country-specific Wikipedia mirror, switching to a “slow” (non-broadband) internet connection, reloading the page, and hitting the stop button before they redirect me to a “cut down” version, and no link to escape from it. There’s a link for you to “comment” on the new “feature”; my commentary would have been unprintable, so I declined.

Gamespot: we don’t want money, money is for wimps

The other week I noticed that Gamespot – one of the big ad-driven news + reviews/cheats/etc websites for games – is still locking-out all mobile users. That’s probably a fairly substantial load of ad revenue they are literally throwing away every day.

The web, HTTP, and HTML…

Why do people do this? I don’t know. But here’s a few points you should bear in mind:

• No website should ever block content based on the user’s device
• No website should ever have a flash-only front page
• Since the very first versions of HTTP and HTML in the mid-1990’s, the web has been designed to avoid these problems; this shouldn’t be happening

Content Blocking

Gamespot checks your web browser when you fetch any article, review, etc. If it finds you’re coming from an iPhone, then it refuses to let you view the content. Instead, it serves up a custom “news page” that is identical no matter which link you came in on. There is no way for you to see the actual content you tried to view – literally: they do an auto-redirect that wipes it from the URL.

I can see no reason for this other than the bizarre assumption that an iPhone was launched 10 years ago with a tiny black-and-white screen and an inability to scroll and render web pages. I would love to ask the Gamespot web design team: have you ever seen an iPhone? You do realise it has a better web browser than most desktop PCs, yes? So … why are you manually blocking them from your website?

Amazon has for a long time done a similar thing with any mobile device (again, sadly, the stupid bit is that they apply it to devices where it’s completely unnecessary) – except that Amazon has three essential features which Gamespot lacks.

Firstly, they do actually show you some of the content you were trying to view (not all of it. ARGH!)

Secondly, there’s always a link on the page to view the real version of the page. If you click that, it gives you a warning something like: “YOUR MOBILE PHONE MAY NOT RENDER THIS PAGE … ARE YOU SURE!!!!????!”. Of course, this is somewhat inappropritate when applied to most smartphones, especially iPhones. But hey – at least the option is there.

Finally, they have a link something along the lines of: “Do you want to permanently stop seeing the broken, cut-down version of pages on amazon.com? You can re-enable them whenever you want”.

Irritating, patronising, and foolish (the default should be “view the website normally”, not “don’t view the website”) – but at least you only have to fix it once, and you never again get problems. Gamespot et al offer no such option – they just block you, dead.

Flash-only front pages

About 50% of indie studios have decided to put a massive flash on their front page, most of them with *no* link to “skip intro” or “go to website” or any kind of navbar. About 50% of them (in my sampling over the past few weeks) have made that flash NON clickable: you cannot (you are “not allowed to” ?) view the “real” website until the flash has loaded, you have seen the self-promoting advert for the studio embedded in it, and clicked some internal link at the end. This was foolish, unnecessarily slow, and contrary to the spirit and standards that drive the web even 10 years ago when it first started happening.

Games industry companies please take note:

The 1990’s phoned – they want their web-designers back.

(real web companies don’t do this kind of thing any more)

But now, with the iphone, it’s particularly dumb: it is de-facto content blocking – because the iPhone cannot / will not run Flash. If the Flash is clickable, you can at least (if you know what the studio did – which many people won’t guess) access the site anyway. I’m amazed how many sites don’t even give you that small fillip.

If this post persuades JUST ONE web designer, somewhere, to wake up and smell the roses, and spares us yet another self-blocked website, then I shall be happy.

Of course, maybe I should be grateful that we’re even this far “ahead” … I heard from someone the other day that he still has to explain to web design teams that websites don’t need to be hardcoded for rendering at 800×600 any more (i.e. that – OMGWTFBBQ! – everyone has rather larger desktop screen resolutions than that these days; or else so much smaller that hardcoding to 800×600 isn’t going to help at all).

Well, I don’t *need* anyone; I can do this all myself. But I’d rather do it with other people, and I thought there might be some hobbyists reading this who’d like to do something similar.

EDIT: there’s now a googlegroup for people working on this. You *must* contact me first via email (see below) or your request to join will be automatically rejected. http://groups.google.com/group/dmclone

Super-short summary:

• Clone of Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder (google them if you haven’t played them)
• …except “online” (not sure how much direct multiplayer interaction to allow, but probably “a lot”)
• i.e: real-time / turn-based mixture, using simple fixed-perspective 2D-faking-3D graphics, and using the built-in pauses in gameplay to hide the network latency

I would like to do these bits myself (most important first)

• Server code
• Level design
• RPG system design

I would really like other people to do these bits (most important first)

• Graphics sets
• RPG system + balancing
• iPhone client
• Quests / scripting / level-design

I could do all that myself, easily enough. Fine. Whatever. But given my limited spare time, I’d rather focus on doing a small number of things (i.e. server code) better, with more depth, than doing the whole thing but much more shallow / weak.

For the first release, everything’s GPL licensed: code, content, everything. It’ll probably take us several releases to get something we’re happy with publishing, and at the start of each new release we might mutually decide to change the license; but we’ll start off with GPL and see how that works out.

If you’re interested, email me at adam.m.s.martin@gmail.com, tell me a bit about yourself, and what you’d like to do and why. Prior experience isn’t required – enthusiasm, personal interest, and “actually producing something” is. If I get no responses, I’ll just go ahead and do it all myself. Slowly :).

Well, no, probably not – but this is the kind of opening statement I often make at industry-conference parties. In this rare case, at LOGIN this year, I was showing something on my laptop at the time and happened to *type* my opening salvo, rather than just say it.

(partly because I was so drunk I wasn’t confident I could form the words correctly; not *that* much alcohol, but I was mid-jetlag and I’d naively skipped dinner to go to meetings)

For those of you in the industry that I run into at conferences, you know this is standard fare past a certain point in the evening (when I get bored of beating around the bush). This could also be a taster for the TRULY AWESOME conference talk I’ll be giving at AGDC this year, along with Marty Poulin, Rick Lambright, and Joe Ludwig … more on that later (once it’s been accepted), but briefly: we’re constructing a head-to-head session where we all argue the most extreme MMO tech viewpoints possible. I’m particularly looking forward to the “UDP vs TCP” Deathmatch…

The original 4

Anyway…unchanged except for the brackets added for clarity:

1. XSLT is your data(-handling) language
2. Almost everything (serverside) is written in fn programming
3. When you write your client, interface to the (functional) server cluster via Entity System
4. …and a corollary…
5. ANT is a sin against mankind if you think about the above 3 statements

Which is great, except … it misses out whole swathes of things, because of the context at the time: I was in a conversation with a bunch of other lead programmers / CTO’s / tech directors / etc, and the *obvious* stuff wasn’t even worth mentioning. And our conversation was at the time about the “technical expert” facets of MMO development. I think.

A few more

For completeness, there’s a few more I would add now:

1. 2,000 players-per-server
2. SQL
3. DTP
4. Your build system must be Perfect (mathematically)
5. Your tests are AT, running as CI and CPT (performance testing)

Oh, and of course – YOU HAVE TO COME TO OUR AGDC SESSION! ;)

1. He hasn’t “played” an MMO in decades (possibly “ever”) … because he can’t stop himself from interpreting as he uses them
2. Surprisingly many MMOs are just WoW by another name
3. He only needs to play the first few levels of a new MMO to see if it’s really new; he needn’t bother with the rest of it

He’s explained before, in abstract terms, why this is all true *to him*, and pretty much left people to stew if they don’t understand that (while always actively engaging them in conversation to try and explain further).

Now he’s blogged a concrete example of what goes through his head when playing a particular quest-chain / zone: WoW’s STV. If you’ve ever wondered, and/or been confused/horrified/dismayed/insulted by Richard’s statements online and haven’t had the chance to speak to him about it all in person, then I’d highly recommend reading it. I suspect that this concrete analysis will elucidate to a lot more people most of the meaning that the abstract explanations failed to convey. Well, we’ll see…

1. please the publishers or else be denied access to the materials they seek to review
2. please their editor or else don’t get paid; but the editor’s primary source of capital is often advertising … from the publishers
3. answer the consumer’s main question in a way that earns their trust: should they purchase this game or not?
4. stand out from the crowd of a million game players who decide to write about their hobby

Who’s your Daddy?

This has been a problem for as long as I can remember (20+ years of game playing and reading game reviews); the consumer *believes* that the reviewer is answerable to them – but it has been a very long time (10 years now?) since consumers were the paymaster of reviewers; nowadays, it’s advertisers (which usually means: game-publishers).

Of course, consumers still wield huge power. The virtuous value circle – the only circle that matters – is driven by consumers:

• A reviewer has a “readership” of consumers who are influenced in their purchasing decisions by those reviews
• Publishers therefore court the reviewer to try and curry favour with the consumers and increase sales of the publishers’ products (to those readers, and anyone they themselves influence – friends, family, colleagues, etc)
• Reviewers earn more money, and get deeper access to development teams (courtesy of the publishers), so produce more reviews

But that power is – clearly – both indirect and hard to quantify. A consumer – even many of them – threatening to “stop reading a reviewer’s reviews” is not particularly effective.

Publications like Edge helped along the indirection of consumer-power when they decided to go out of their way to obscure the identities of their individual reviewers, turning reviews into as much of a crap-shoot as buying games was in the first place. Since the web rose to prominence, it’s been eroded at the other end – there’s now so many reviewers around that, well … who has the time to remember who any individual reviewer is?

Qui custodet custodes?

But if journalists/reviewers are supposedly there as a watchdog on the publishers’ marketing depts, supposedly helping the consumer determine which are the (non-refundable) purchases they ought to be making, then who’s checking that the journalists themselves are honest?

No-one, really. And that’s where the rot begins. The storms of outraged public opinion are nothing new: examples of journalists writing reviews of games (reviews both scathing and rejoicing) they hadn’t even played go way back into the 1980’s.

A case study in lies, damn lies, and video game journalism

In case you hadn’t heard, this week a “staff writer” from Eurogamer (a games review / news site) ripped to pieces one of the most recently-released MMOs – Darkfall. At which point Aventurine, the developer of Darkfall, responded with increasing anger and dismay.

But the really interesting thing here is that Aventurine didn’t merely rant “you bastards! Our game is Teh Awesum!!!111! STFU, Beotch!” (well, they did that as well) … no, they dropped a little A-bomb in the middle of their reply:

“We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator”

Pwned. MMO developers *actually know whether your journalist played the game before reviewing it*. What’s more … they have proof…

The EG reviewer (whose “references and background are immaculate”, according to the editor – but from reading his only two EG reviews, I’m afraid it does rather sound like he knows little about MMOs), responded (via his editor) with the claim:

“the logs miss out two crucial days and understate others, … and he insists he played the game for at least nine hours”

It would seem that someone is lying (and it could be either party). Worse, someone is being particularly stupid. Because the journalist is claiming “your computers lie”, and the developer is claiming “your journalist is a lier”; either way, it’s not a subtle, small, mistake – whoever is wrong, if they get discovered, they’re going to create themself a good amount of long-term trouble (bad reputation).

Lots of MMO developers write shitty server code, and honestly don’t know what the hell is going-on inside their own game-world (but fondly imagine that they do – and proudly boast to the press (in the vaguest terms) that they do). But the rule of thumb is that devs who don’t know … don’t even know what it is they ought to be claiming that they know. The specificity of Aventurine’s claims suggests that they do have the stats, and those stats are mostly correct.

(I say “mostly” because there is a bit of vagueness about what – precisely – the reviewer was doing in-game. That reeks of holes in their metrics/logging. They clearly know when the player was logged-in, and what they did/said in chat, and how many characters were created – but apparently not what they were doing in the client, e.g. how long did they spend in character creation? Implicitly: unlogged; unknown)

Whereas it’s quite likely that a non-knowledgeable journalist, accustomed to buggy games, would assume that they could safely claim “your server is buggy, those figures are wrong”.

Unfortunately for any such journalist, server logs are generally either correct, or absent entirely – there’s rarely any middle-ground. If he knew a bit more about MMO tech he might know this; very few journos (any of them?) know that much about the games they review, though.

So … based on nothing but casual observation and intimate knowledge of the tech issues (and several decades of reading game reviews…), I’m leaning in favour of Adventurine and against Ed Zelton. My guess (pure *guess*) is that he’s been caught out being either incompetent or perhaps a bit lazy as a reviewer, and he’s thought he could get away with blaming it on buggy code. From reading the review, I get the impression he wishes he were Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (from Zero Punctuation) – although he clearly isn’t funny enough – but he seems to like saying “it’s shit; you’re shit; you’re all shit; STFU” instead of reviewing the game, and seems to think that’s good enough. As an MMO player, my feeling was that the review was, well … useless – without even playing the game, there is so much more I would want to hear in a review, and so much of his wanky whining that I couldn’t care less about. As an MMO developer, it felt downright insulting, as if he’d made no effort at all to play the game as a game. Actually, it felt like he’d hardly played MMOs in his life, and didn’t really know what they were.

(NB, from the review: his apparent ignorance of some of the most important *and best-selling* RPG + MMORPG games of all time – the Ultima series – suggests that he really isn’t much good as a game reviewer. YMMV.)

Reviewing the reviewers

Up-front I’m going to point out that I don’t believe all MMO developers are currently capable of doing this – many people would be amazed to discover the true state of metrics collection in this industry – although *all* modern MMO developers ought to, and it’s not too hard to add-on later (add it to the list of “things MMO developers ought to do as standard practice, but many of them don’t do”). But it’s a general thing that I think we should move towards.

MMO developers (well, actually, the Operators, but that’s getting pedantic) are in an excellent position to help guard journalistic honesty, in a way that traditional game developers have never been able to. I would like to start seeing the following published by *every* MMO developer each time their game is reviewed:

1. What level the account(s) started at
2. What level the account(s) peaked at
3. How many hours the reviewer spent at the lowest levels, levelling-up manually
4. How many hours the reviewer spent at the highest levels
5. What percentage of time was spent on each of the different primary character classes and factions
6. Which areas of the game / aspects the reviewer actually engaged in (hours of combat, hours of crafting, hours of chat, etc)

…but, honestly, this isn’t so much about “journalistic honesty” (I used that phrase tongue-in-cheek above) as it is about starting a virtuous cycle of developers being more cognizant of what, actually, players “do” in their games – preferably *before* gold launch. In particular, if publishers (developers) started supplementing reviews with this info (as a matter of course), I think we’d see a sea-change in industry staff appreciating three key things about metrics:

1. How little metrics they’re actually collecting compared to how much they think they’re collecting
2. What metrics actually matter, and/or are useful?
3. How players actually play the game; by extension: how fun is the game, really, and which parts suck horribly?

Does this work / matter?

At NCsoft, I got into the habit of asking prospective partners, hires/employees, and external studios which MMO’s they played (fair enough) … and how many characters they’d got to the level-cap with / what level their characters had reached. It started as an innocent question, but I quickly noticed how often it gave early warning of failures of honesty among individuals, and how much it presaged the problems they would have in the future.

The two worst problems were “complete ignorance of the MMO industry (either of pre-existing design practices, or tech practices)” and “personal self-deceit about what the person knows, and what they don’t know”. The latter tended to be a far worse problem: when someone is deceiving *themself*, it’s doubly hard to re-educate them, because first you have to get them to accept their own deception.

Of course, it turned out to lead to a lot of defensive responses and a spew of self-justification, which made us both uncomfortable. In those situations, it can easily lead to making assumptions that certain people’s opinions are “worth less” because, say, you know for a fact they’ve never really played an MMO – at least, not in the way that most of that MMO’s players would/will/do play it. I hate that tendency, since it’s part of a snobbishness that lies at the root of a lot of oyster-like, head-in-sand behaviour in our industry. On the other hand, it’s important and useful to know when someone’s ideas are random conjecture and when they’re based on fact (and very few people in a design meeting or publisher/developer meeting will honestly tell you their ideas are conjecture :)).

On the whole, though, it turned out to be a really useful line of questioning – even bearing in mind the additional (smaller) problems it created. There are obvious problems that come from the statistical supplementing of free-form prose game-reviews – but I’m confident that these will be outweighed by the advantages (and the problems that will be shrunk).

PS:

Despite the TLC of good friends, I’m still weak and sapped of all energy from my month of illness. I’m triaging like mad to deal with urgent issues, but there’s plenty of highly important stuff that’s been pending on me for a while that I still haven’t had the time + energy to deal with. So, if you’re still waiting … I’m sorry.

EDIT: Richard Leadbetter at Eurogamer has an article with some great “side by side compare” video to show theoretical quality you can achieve with off the shelf compressors right now. He comes to a similar conclusion on the issue of latency, although having seen the video I disagree on the quality (he feels it’s unacceptable) – it’s clearly inferior, but it still provides a very nice experience, especially if you’re sitting 6-12 feet away from the screen.

Problems

Latency. You need >25 FPS rendering and you want 60 FPS rendering, especially on an HDTV. But … that’s just for the rendering of frames. The responsiveness of the game, the cycle “see something, make decision, press button, wait for game to process inputs, game changes, see new screen” runs at a rather different rate.

Humans can typically easily detect FPS differences up to around 50 FPS. Up to around 75 FPS seems to be the limit for most people to see any difference at all – even a very subtle “can’t quite consciously see the difference”. Without looking at the research (based purely on experience), if you provide a video that alternates between white and black each frame, we can detect frame rate differences up to perhaps 200 FPS.

(there will probably be some maths mistakes in this post, of course. There always are :))

Data

So, you need to be delivering at 1080p. That’s 2,073,600 pixels, each of which carries 4 bytes of colour information, i.e. about 8MB per frame.

Remember: internet connection / broadband speeds are measured in bits, not bytes, so an “8Mbps” connection (the fast connection available ubiquitously today) is only capable of 1 MB a second.

The fastest European and US home broadband connections I’ve yet seen peak at 24 Mbps, i.e. less than 1 % of the speed required to deliver full-screen HD video uncompressed.

If you look at the specs for those special HDMI cables you use to connect up your HDTV, you’ll see they are measured not in Mbps (like internet) but in Gbps – i.e. one thousand times as fast.

Fast Video Data

But … in practice, some videogames tend to exhibit extremely high frame to frame coherency, with the most extreme examples being slow-moving strategy and platform games, and racing games.

I noted that the screenshots for OnLive seem to have quite a few racing games in there. Hmm.

The question now becomes: how many pixels can change in the gap of time from one frame to the next?

Assuming you can go into a spin in your car where the whole car rotates 360 degrees in 3 seconds, revolving around the camera’s centre, and you had a viewing angle of 120 degrees (most racing games tend to be wide-angle), you’d be shifting your 1920 columns of pixels out every second.

i.e. 1 FPS. In bandwidth terms, you need to send a mere 64 Mbits in one frame. Your fastest home internet connection outside Asia would “only” be too slow by a factor of 2. In the best connected cities in the Asian countries with the very best internet infrastructures, you’d be able to manage this OK. Just.

Custom Compression

The above assumes two things:

1. a “perfect” scenario to make compression as easy as possible: as few pixels change as is theoretically possible
2. the only ways you have of setting pixels are copying from an adjacent pixel or downloading it from the server

In practice, of course, neither is true. OnLive’s super sekrit proprietary video compression clearly is setup to provide a lot more alternative ways to set pixels, which reduces the data requirements, but on the other hand in practice even in a racing game it tend’s to be much much harder to retain pixels for copying.

In a platformer, you’re typically fine, but in any kind of moving-camera game, you’re generally screwed.

Custom compression will get you a long way, but don’t expect to see it help much in FPS’s, for instance.

Ping times

For input processing to precisely match rendering speed of 60 FPS, you’d need a ping time of 16 ms or less. Unlike bandwidth, there’s no way to make up for occasional drops in connection quality by rendering lower quality video for a few frames without having a fat client (this is what fat clients are great for, and is one reason why many people think OnLive is a stupid idea). You’d have to *guarantee* that 16 ms latency worst-case, and so you’d probably be looking at more like 10 ms latency as your requirement (have to handle all sorts of other random internet traffic on your system – AND this assumes you don’t share your internet connection with any home PC’s that do any web browsing).

Much has been made of the claim that OnLive is impossible because the best ping times anyone gets to the internet are measured in tens of milliseconds, and the averages are measured in hundreds of milliseconds.

The ping time from London to New York, limited by the speed of light, is physically incapable of ever getting much less than about 20 ms.

Ah. But … your ping time to your ISP is measured in single-digit milliseconds. The sensible thing for OnLive to do would be to partner with ISP’s, and pay them substantial amounts of money to host OnLive servers in each of their POP’s around the country, so that the ISP’s consumers get sub 10 ms ping times to OnLive. This works.

Surprisingly few people in the online games industry today seem to have ever realised this was a viable solution to ping time issues. People who were around in the early 1990’s remember doing exactly this kind of thing back when ping times were much much higher – it used to be that every ISP ran it’s own game servers – but most people who’ve not lived through that don’t seem to ever think of it.

Over the years, I’ve thought of using it, but the only business plan I saw that *demanded* it was the MMOFPS with hundreds or thousands of players per single deathmatch level. Now OnLive comes along and I’d say that OL needs it too. I’m waiting to see an announcement of equity ownership from some major multinational ISP any day now…

Summary

The MM guys are funny as ever, although Alex’s “I made it myself on the way here” presentation tool would perhaps have been more usefully replaced with something like Presi (or whatever it’s called – the “interactive” presentation tool that is like Alex’s thing, but on steroids. Ask Jussi, he’s a fan of it).

The overall impression I got is: here’s another studio that has “by trial and error and cunning and talent” independently discovered something very similar to Scrum. They don’t do Scrum, and I’m sure a lot of people will scream at me for even saying it, but … I went through similar “find a process that worked for game development” (not carried so far, and on much smaller projects), and I recognize a lot of the lessons they learnt and things they incorporated in their processes and approaches. And from my experience, I think they’d find it relatively easy to switch over to Scrum, and that they’d get a lot of benefit from having a more polished version of their processes. Not to say that Scrum is universally better – there’d be losses too – but for people considering their own processes to use – or trying to “understand” Scrum – you’d do well to read this liveblog and try to internalize some of the lessons and attitudes. And then consider this and scrum as alternative to each other, but both near-relatives. And … if you are *not* MM, and don’t have all the details of precisely how they work, you’d probably find it much easier and more effective to adopt the well-documented Scrum instead.

All errors and misattributions my fault. There were two speakers, they chopped and changed arbitrarily, so I’ve not recorded “who said what”. Sorry. My comments [in square brackets].

Fun

What was fun about LBP was that we failed a lot, and failed quickly.

Thanks to Alex’s hate of powerpoint we have an app he wrote on the plane on the way here, so I’m incredibly nervous.

[its a shared whiteboard app with their mac's linked together]

This is the spiritual successor of a talk we gave at 2007 GDC ten minutes after announcing the game … in a tiny room to a small audience. We showed the game, and people said brilliant, it looks done, but it took another 2 years, and it very much wasn’t done.

People think we’re a bunch of hippies, but our first hire from ex LH people was a highly organizational very experienced producer. So we had a miletone every month, and we never missed a milestone. We conveniently only set them one month in advance, so we could invent what we were actually going to capable of just in time.

When we were at LH, we were put into a little room and allowed to do whatever we wanted. We had no milestones, no schedules. We did that for a long time at LH and got used to it. Mixing that in with our producer, who was very organized, was very interesting. Big culture clash.

Milestones

Our milestones were: run round the office with a handycam, film people, and show what we’d done that month.

[milestone 5 video: snips of LBP as it was back then. MS4 we had first pass at a level, art sound, basic mechanics, etc [then he skipped the video 3 minutes to a gameplay video. Had the cloth style, and cloth badges as nav structure already. Very low poly renders.Pricne from KD as one of the characters. Four players doing synchronized actions on screen, dancing, then the skateboard example. Here's a 3 month blind alley: elements of the gameplay of the final first few levles are visible here. Came out of a piece of art by our art director that looked like this howl's moving castle meets beanstalk, and we loved it so much we spent 3 months intensively on trying to make it work with vertical gaemply/level orientation. Because it was vertical you were spending all your time jumping back and forth fighting gravity, and we didn't spot the wood for the trees for a long time, didn't accept / recognize the obvious fact it just wasn't fun and wasn't going to be. Ths skill is knowing when to say this is not working, it's shit.]

Q: was there an average time you spent on exploring different ideas before killing them?

Typically around a week to two weeks.

Alex: Personally, I added a cool 3d ribbon that wound through the level, but the desigenrs never used it. And I was really unhappy to accept for sevral months that it needed to be removed because it made the code too complex, added a seocndary parallel co-ordinate system. But when I did finally go in and delete it from the codebase, and factor it out, I found I was fixing bugs and simplifying code all over the place, and by the time I finished I was happy, and convinced it was absolutely right to remove it.

LBP had to be an eidtor that was powerful, but … was also fun to use. This was our key thing we wanted to achieve. So for a long time we were convinced we’d have no distinction beteen play mode and edit mode.

Here’s the inventory: you had to go into a physical spae and walk around and explore the physical space to look at the inventory.

[ADAM: Home]

We were really keen to keep this in the engine. All the tools were built as gameplay items [ADAM: as opposed to vice versa]. e.g. colouring the background, your avatar had to manually slowly paint the background with a paint roller. Evetually we realised this was insane and we needed to make the eidtor tools much more like an editor. We had to leave behind that physicality.

We spent a long time on that one, having views and talking in words, but then the crunch point came when we actually tried to implement it. In our team, if someone is passionate and voncineced of an idea and no-one else is, often what ahppesns is they quietly go off and make it anyway to try and prove it.

[vidoe: exampel of someone showing makign something non-[hysical in the world]

[menu-based system Create/Change/Share/Quit that pops up on screen projected out of the avatar's body]

I think a big factor in helping us recognize when we were going down a blind alley was that we had a very good QA team, they were totally unafraid of telling us when something was shit.

For GDC07 video we had a kind of mini x-media bar. But we’re professional video game developers, we’ve spent our lives sitting in Maya etc, with everything broken down in a very technological matter. But we found that’s just not fun, the user experience doesn’t make sense, it didn’t feel like a console experience.

[ADAM: basically: Maya et al still suck donkey from the GUI aspect, but can't really change the patterns that x million artists have all got memorized and internalized in their heads by now]

We identified that we had a problem of it took too many button clicks to change from “move” tool to “scale” tool. Over and overa gain we were attacking the wonrg problem, tryign to find a “perfect” button mapping. But there was one small piece of the editor that was fun, and that was the stickers, and stamping stuff on things.

It was pleasant and fun to press a button and get a reaction in the world. So we said “everything should be as simple as placing a sticker”.

This of course made everything much harder on the tech side, because now we had to make a really good CSG system. This was a late stage in the project, this was post greenlight, post GDC reveal, we were now in full production. We were ripping out our tools and putting in a core feature that we knew for a fact was technically going to be very hard, and doing this late in the project.

Then we tried pie-menus.

Community and Sharing features

An area we backtracked a lot in particular was the Share part of it. All the reference points are web-based, browser-based, AJAX, form-based, assumes a mouse and a high res monitor, etc. It’s amazing how much is assumed, and we ended up trying to make things lots of text but throw in more and more images. we were using tiny fponts that were fine on our HD TV sitting on our desks, but sucked when we took it home and played at home on low-def TV from the other side of the room. In the end we probably launched with an oversimplified slight overreaction to that, and we certainly haven’t got it completely right yet.

Anything within 2 clicks of hte front page will get an order of magnitude more play counts than stuff that is 3 clicks from the front page. Then Feedback loops can make life go horribly wrong: if you use popularity to decide what goes ont he 2-clicks then you’ve set upa feedback loop that will enver let that page change.

Design Docs

Maybe this is something peolpe bleieve before they come to the industry, that you can write a design doc in advance. Maybe you can, in advane, for some games, but mostly not. It makes it much harder for you to throw stuff away.

Bu we did kind of. I was passionaee about “collating” all the time, showing “this is what we currently think we’re making / aiming for”, it was a periodic re-summarising of what was going on. It was particularly useful for when new people joined the company.

[ADAM: that classic problem of wikis that so many games industry companies conveniently ignore: you MUST spend a LARGE amount of time DEVOTED to "re-precis'ing" regularly. Again, this is a common "best practice" at a lot of places, but sounds like something that the MM guys independently figured out on their own was a good thing to do, and experimneted with how best to do it]

We had boss battles at one point.

Aside: we had a scripting system that I had coded up, built around LUA. And then we thought: actually we’re going to create our own scripting system that doesn’t use Lua, that’s proprietary, and we’re goign to re-invent the wheel. And it flies in the face of best practice, BUT … in our case it was about serialization and saving levels. And we needed to save the entire level state. I want to be able to take a snapshot of the running game and patch the running virtual machine onto the serialized savegame format: i.e. we would guarantee ourselves instantaneous backwards compatibility at hte scripting level, so we could iterate effeectively all the time. So … it was actually worth going into the nightmare of making our own VM from scratch.

We had this idea there would be a whole family of characters, and each artist had different iews of what we wanted, so each artist madr their own custom family. We did agree up front (our art director lead this) that the silhouettes would be essential: if the avatars can dress up in many differnet ways, we needed to still have instant visual recognition when you saw something in a screenshot, and the silhouette would buy us that.

Although we argued and had different things, when we finally found the one we wanted, we collapsed the oligarchy down to having just one person own it as his baby. From then until ship, we had just one person do all the animations, everything, and that gave us a great consistency that we think really shows through.

scripting

We used to have lots of complicated levers and physics based stuff, and you would hope you got the weight correct to activate it etc. It was frustrating, so the level designers got “switches” added in that would simply work. Once we got that in, overnight everything got much easier less painful in the level design.

We want to make LBP something that enables people to make games. The super cool thing about switches that came from the creative side of the office that had a big effect on the play side of the office because the quality and fun of the game went through the roof.

[Showed game of life level]. That is amazing, we thought it wasn’t practically possible – done purely user-created.
[showed the calculator level. If you haven't seen these, what have you been doing the past year? :P . Anway, c.f. YouTube, where huge levels are just physical creations of logic gates that make up a single computer]

Q: did you anticipate that people would do shit this crazy?

We saw the power of switched but never expected something like that. We secretly hoped that people would embrace it, but seeing this made us think wow ther’s some seriously fucked-up people out there, that’s real OCD right there. We were happy when we saw it was possible to make Tetris within the game, techincally speaking.

We gave it to friends and family, and Sony staff, all professional game devleopers, and the levels were terrible. Shockingly poor. I had a crisis of confidence then and there, and ever after our expectations weren’t huge. It was only when we went to public beta that we saw high-quality levels, and that happened within 24 hours. So, we didn’t expect this level of amazingly complex creativity, not this much.

summary

writers / game designers block. But once you start to try and implement stuff against it, you find that by the act of exploring it, it starts to unblock, and you find new ways, and if you’re not afraid of throwing away and starting again, then you can unblock and it works.

Q: I asked this in 2007: do you think this is goign to change now that the world knows about you? More pressure? Your asnwer then was that “thigns probably won’t change much”. Did the pressure come?

Announcing at GDC 07 did add a little bit of pressure, but it had a huge beneficial efefct in independent validation of the team; we were never entirely sure that people would “get it”, would like it the way we hoped they would, but we did after GDC. It also helped the hiring hugely.

But it didn’t really change the way we worked. We kind of forget that the outside world is even there.

Q: how many people do you have now?

32. That’s a nice team size that I like.

Q: what was the design process for the community parts and the share parts?

That’s the least finsihed, least complete part of the game. The process was very diffifcult because you cannot find an example audience to test it on until very late. Even with thosuands of beta testers, it was very different from how things felt when you finally got 2 million people out there in the community.

Q: Youve been supporting the product a lot after release. How do you manage that from a creative standpoint, within the team?

We’ve got ltos more that we want to put in, to do with it. Many many more ideas for LBP, so no problem there.

The codebase is tiny, very small, so it’s still easy for us to add new stuff, complete new features. A recent not-yet-released one took just 2 days to make the initial working version, direct inside the real game. Looked ugly as hell, but it was incredibly playable and fun as well, straight away.

We think we’re only about halfway through LBP even now.

Q: if you’re making wild ccode-breaking changes to the physics etc with all these branches?

We worked especially hard to always have backwards compatiblity. We did sometimes break peoples levels internally. The physics wasnt finalized until last few months before ship.

The game is deterministic, so one thing we’re investing in right now is a lot more automated testing. e.g. automated playthgouths of community created levels and alerting us if the outputs have changed with a new version. Then we can run against a thousand community levels and see straight off if we’ve added a regression bug accidentally.

[ADAM: yay for AT done *properly*! I got seriously fed up a couple of years ago with how many studios, large and small, whose senior tech people - right up to the CTO's - didn't understand the core of great AT for games. It's great to see MM going ahead with it; hopefully that will inspire / educate more people to follow suit]

Q: Is that going to become an albatross?

Yes, but I think it’s one that very much we need to have.

Summary

The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it.

(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)

All errors / omissions my fault, as ever, and my comments in [square brackets].

Not-a-post-mortem

This is not a post-mortem, it’s mid-mortem – we’re still actively doing the changes I’m talking about here.

126 million registered accounts, 11.5 m monthly logins. Seen 40% growth in last year of signups. 2008 was a good year for us. Financials arent’e public yet, so I cant say, but there’s probably good news coming up.

We’re trying to add more game to Habbo.

What’s Habbo? A Social MMO.

[description of Habbo]. We did web based first, it’s nice to see the industry validating our decision from 2001 and also moving to web-based.
[showed screenshots of Hogwarts room where people are RPing HP inside HH]
[showed American Idol RP]; there’s no tools, no logic, no control – it’s all voluntary shared play.

We’re now selling windows, so you can stick them on the walls and get pieces of views out to outside [couple of examples where people made floor to ceiling glass walls by plastering the wall].

[showed McD role-play], with people pretending to be servers, buying food, eating, etc. All emotes. Children are interested to know what it’s really like (real world) to flip burgers, theyr’e too young to really do it themselves, so this play is a way of exploring the ideas.

[ADAM: this is a big under-explored area. Looking at the real-life themeparks designed for children to play at being differet adult professions for a day (now live in 7 different countries, IIRC!), it would be good to do more of this stuff, I think]

Social MMO: we’re UGC, open-ended [self-defined by the users], not a game.

With industry people lookign at games as VWs, theres strong polarization, and people see them as mutaully excusive. I think that’s complete bull, and they are mutually supportive, and should be combined.

In general, though, the exampels of integrations you think of, like WoW, the built-in systems are really ONLY supporting games, and never social.

We’ve been trying to boost the game mechanics without killing the social experience. We’re tryignt to balance ourseves a bit better [showed Schubert triangle], be less extreme.

[becoming unfocussed?]

Problem: our socila interaction is really very hardcore. we see a 95/5 split (top 5% of users spend as much time in habbo as the rest of the world put together). Thankfully the spending doesnt follow the same distribution, its much more even.

Social value erodes quickly – if you leave for jutst a short while, when you come back you need to spend a lot of time/money re-building your reptuation, your set of currently cool items, etc.

[interesting graph of excitement vs time since joining: shoots up, then suddenly drops 60%, then bounces back up to 99% where it wavers around forever more]. My job as a designer is to get people to surive the Valley of Death after their initial enthusiasm, while they’re becomign overwhelmed and lost and fristrated, and before they get subsumed into the community and feel comfortable wihtin the expeirence.

Users can tell how old a players account is simply from glacning at their avatar clothing because its so hardcore in terms of knowing what dress culture is current, older, etc. It makes it very very hard for new users to break in to the social structure.

[ADAM: reminds me of Eve]

new users reactions: expected to be able to “earn” something (levels, etc) by playing; expected a lot more “game”-ness to it.

So … we’ve been adding mechanics. Sticking to ones that ?dont? have direct social meanings, or that support social value. Even if your’e not paritcupating actively in the social circles, you have some game stuff to do and enjoy.

1st thing: achievements. An additional in-game currency (earned)

Looking at other eperinces, people dont tie together all their features. So we set out to tie all our new suff together from the start.

Added “goals for noobs” to help people through the start.

Feedback: lots of unhappiness, but habbo users alwasy reactionary against new stuff unless it benefits them. Looked into the people who ran the anti-achievement group, foudn they were some of the top achievements-eaners in the entire game. But also some very positive repsonses, people loved it, provided context for what they do.

2nd thing: buying pixels, andother in-game currency (paid)

We’re using the earned currency as a scaracity model. It used to be that you could use money to buy anything/everyting in world. Now we can sell stuff with high earned-cost thing that forces people to earn as well as pay, supporting people who want to do goal-oriented play and have meaning

[ADAM interesting how reactionary USA companies were over doing any pay-for-advancement, and some still do, whereas Habbo is pay-only, and just seeing "some" benefit from "allowing" GOP, rather than obsessnig and assuming "people ONLY ever want GOP"]

[ADAM thought: does Habbo have a powerful enough search system for finding all these interesting rooms that Sulka is showing?]

33% of users said that it was difficult to show others the are cool or have done somethign well.

42% said it was difficult to know if others THINNk they are cool have done something well

Perhaps this is a teenager thing, that peopel are more uncertain about how they are perceived than by how they are.

3rd thing: Respect, antoher currency (earned, but giftedby other people, not self-earned)

“respect is worhtless because everyoen cna get respect” (quote from player)

It take peoepl a while to work out “what to do” with any new social tools. When you put it out, they arent’ sure what the socially-acceptable uses are going to be. So, 3 months (long time in this world) after laucnh they asked what people were using it for:

- weclomg new players, making them feel happy
- renaming it “love” and gifting it to GF/BF

Now, 76% of users say they are trying to earn the level-cap achievement for Respect (big change from launch, with the strong negative feedback, and the claims that it was fundamentally useless and terrible and would ruin the world).

23% of users have been paid to give Respect. It’s now a signficant driver of the economy.

Social mechanics change slowly, it takes a long time for people to decide what to do with them, to find ways of using them, to adpt it.

In the words of Raph: Chat is not enough. This is true, it carries you a long way, but you can go / need to go a lot futher.

Questions

how do you gather the feedback that you get from users, and how do you process it?

lst year we did 9 big releases, after each we did a huge poll of the users. Mix of feebback on concrete aspects of the change, and forward-looking statements so that we can later re-ask those post-release and see how good the predictions were / how much opinion has changed over time.

We follow fansistes too, but the forums are dominated by the loudest voices. Distribuiton of percentage of people that like/dislike a given thing is radically different between forums and questionnaires.

what %ge of time are people devoting to these new game-like mechanics?
why didnt you implement more of those mechanics yet?

Wev designed achievements as a dise product of regular actvitiy more than something you have to change your behaviour to achieve – you would get there eventually anyway for a lot of them, just be being an active, normal, good member of the social community.

how much detail are players asking for in the logic of mechanics?

we get asked for eveyrthing that exists in any game in the world, and thousnads of responses contunuosly

[ADAM: they have so many users that they're inundated with any requires you can think of; I think the questioner (worked for a company making game-creation suites, wanted to know if there was ]

have you woven in any narrative to the world?

tried some, mostly just to help new users understand the mechanics of the site and what your’e trying toa chieve.

but the world changes so fast that everytiem we put in some narraitve, it becomes out-of-date within a few weeks (the UGC fads move on too fast).

also teenagers seem to hate being given an on-rails narrative path of how they “should” be relating to the expeirence, instead of just explorng for themselves

but we do run a lot of social events where we soft-seed ideas and peices of narrative, and leave it to the players to volunartily role-play stores and ideas based on that.

Summary

Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”.

I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time taking a very “Don’t worry, be crappy” approach to core game design: lots of classic mistakes made, obvious stuff. Is this a case of being brave enough to deliberately make the mistakes they understand (because they’re easy to fix later when you’re more successful – and it leaves you more spare time to focus on fixing/avoiding the mistakes you don’t understand yet) – or just naivety?

Interesting to hear the philosophy that fed into the creation of the game, the speaker’s personal journey and how it informed the design. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed how little actual content there was in this talk. It was perhaps 50% or more made up of a few long video clips. They were long and very little was pulled-out / emphasised from them. Most had very little information content per minute. Worst example was a mildly entertaining video of one of their players giving an intro to the product – but, frankly, so what? This was “new” and “interesting” 4 or 5 years ago, but by now it’s happened thousands of times over, and we’ve all seen it for many games. I didn’t understand why we were watching it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that – given he’s a VC – the speaker was pitching that video stuff to show “look, we have players who love our game”. That’s interesting and exciting to investors who have little or no immersion in the online world, but IMHO for game developers that’s just par for the course these days. No?

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Background

I started off doing startups in the cryptography, privacy space. We wanted to protect civil liberties. Dot com crash happened, things went back, and then my younger brother was diagnosed with cancer. Left the industry to spend time with him while I could.

After the funeral, I knew I didn’t want to go back to security industry etc. Went to TED, saw things on the Science of Happiness etc. In particular, a talk by Robert Wright (author of NonZero). Cited a “death spiral of negativity” in the world today.

[video of Robert speaking at TED]

Robert: “all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interest in a disciplined way”

My partner met with Jeff Skoll, who’s using movies for social change. At the time, he was making GTA4, a stark contrast.

[video: As real as your life - michael highland [featured in dave perry's own TED talk]]

[video talks about games as powerful form of brainwashing, but suggests that brainwashing can be used for good, not just bad]

How would we get leverage, get to scale easily and to a very large audience of people?

How could we harness the crowd of the entire internet to make the world a better place.

Looked at social media. Youtube videos, facebook microgames/use as a social metagame. These things show that massive self-organizing collective action is possible. If we could just get a large enough group of people together we were sure it would work.

Then we looked at open source too. Wikipedia as a Knowledge-War game, and the artificial danger of wiki-wars motivates good actors to work harder and make better shared free knowledge, that they wouldnt do without the griefers.

Aiming to use erotic commerce: eros (emotional / gift economies) as opposed to logos (direct exchange/barter of goods as a contract). Reputation in logos economies is based on accumulation … in eros economies, based instead on emotional connections.

Core principles we picked

1. Witnessing – public displays
2. Reciprocity – your status is related to how much you give back
3. Social Reputation
4. Organic and authentic

Design goals we picked

1. positive social game
   • no PK

   • no “negative modes of play”
   • based on gift economy
2. players are affected “positively” while they play the game
3. commercially successful so that I could fund social projects and philanthroy afterwards

[ADAM: "no PK"? Everyone has to be nice? Interesting. Default expectation would be: that's not going to work. This game, of course, is architected to change human behaviour - so they might manage to make this work through a recursive "fix ourselves by being successful" success - but I'd imagine it's going to make their jobs much harder, doubling-up on their problems. Given he name-checked Bartle types etc, I'm surprised there was no explicit recognition of this problem during the talk]

We felt that MMORPG wasnt wide enough in its appeal, and they take too long to play, so we went for “something casual” as our target.

Didn’t want to do “virtual world as a space” because e.g. ClubPenguin players “grow up” and then stop being interested in that product.

Aimed to hit a wide audience – 0-75+ years, male, female, different communities, etc.

Ultimately: how do you get on Oprah’s couch, and get her audience interested in games, because that’s hitting “mass market”?

[ADAM: I love that as your measure of mainstream success. I'd like to see "are you on Oprah's Couch yet?" get picked up as the measure for games. It's a lot better than some of the ones people currently use :)]

Looked at Webkinz as a great example of a success simultaneously on the commercial and motivational side.

Looked at Jane McGonigal, and at ARG’s in general (e.g. The Beast). Beast players were still looking at movie posters with suspicion many years after the game ended – this really (permanently) impacted the way they see the world around them.

Collision of online/offline worlds

Focus on the collision of online/offline worlds. Examples:

• geocaching [he gave a brief explanation of geocaching here]
• couchsurfing [ditto]
• bookcrossing [ditto]
• SFZero
• Where’s George?
• GoGame

…so we concluded that we wanted to do a “Social Reality Game” [as opposed to ARG?]

[CNN clips of people "giving-forward"]

[cited the starbucks in seattle where no-one pays for their own coffee, but ... theres a huge difference there: in that situation, you never pay for your own coffee, but you (implicitly: must) pay for someone else's instead. It would have been interesting to explore how that affects it, that it's seemingly a very literal zero-sum situation, but in fact turns out to be more than that. Akoha, as far as I know, isn't even zero-sum on the surface; there's no trade, it's all one-way gifting instead?]

[showed example Akoha cards. No PXC namecheck? :)]

[video: another long video, this time a fan video from youtube of an enthusiastic guy explaining it, and doing some missions. ADAM: By this point, I'm really not sure what the point of the video was]

Mission cards are tracked on a googlemaps interface, etc [look this up online if you haven't seen it already, this part was just a brief/fast explanation, running out of time in the session]

How we get to leverage/scale is what’s most interesting. What we’re going to do is decks for different audiences. We won’t do most of them. We want to get hte community to deign their own cards, design games for their own communities, on top fo the Akoha platform.

[ADAM: spot the VC :). Gets excited about the concept of owning a new Platform]

Partners

• online
• retailers (e.g. walmart)
• partners (e.g. starbucks)
• print-on-demand
• social networks

People will be able to link their custom decks to a charity of their choice.

We’ve had around 3,000 missions in 37 countries during our beta test so far. Starting to hit problems:

• loss of agency (act of faith that players who are passed-on the card actually carry on; 60% of all cards are disappearing from the system; you are totally dependent upon other people to move YOUR avatar forwards, because you give away all their cards as part of the game. Then you get bored because you have nothign lef tto do until/unless the recipients carry on the game for you and keep your cards moving)
• feedback systems
• scoring of community missions (gaming the system)
• moderation of community designed missions

[ADAM: well, some very classic obvious problems there, all easy to predict when writing the business plan, way before development started. No surprise. The scoring one has, I know, stopped people from trying similar games before because they couldnt see a way around it. This is going to be interesting to watch and see how they deal with them]

http://gizmodo.com/5172615/iphone-os-30-will-turn-your-phone-into-a-revolutionary-sex-toy?skyline=true&s=x

…with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features.

I had a quick look at the API’s – they’ve got the right idea technically (use REST, provide PHP versions, etc), although the set of queryable data is pretty mneh (they could easily have done a *lot* more interesting stuff too). I’m impressed that they’ve got that right, and they appear to have done a great job of presenting it nice and clearly. Most importantly, because the selection of data is lame, the challenge is there – in your face – to be very creative with how you’re going to use it. Go for it.

I had a look at some of the demo apps that had already been done, and they show great variety. If you’re trying to break into the games industry as an online designer, you should try your hand at using their content (and this is *legal*) to design something cool. You (probably; I haven’t checked the legals) won’t own exploitation rights – but it could make a great portfolio piece.

So I was rather saddened that it’s taken until now, and a random glance at a newsfeed item, for me to be aware of this. Which isn’t so bad, except … I was one of the first wave of purchasers of Spore, and I played it heavily, and checked out the Sporepedia for the few months after launch.

But they launched with most of the Sporepedia either “broken completely” or “not implemented yet”. Having paid $50+ for a full price game, to discover that even after several months the Sporepedia was “mostly not implemented yet, watch this space”, my reaction was : “I have better things to do with my life than wait for you to pull your finger out and do your job properly and give me what *I’ve already paid for*”.

And because of the mind-numbingly stupid DRM decisions by EA, I’ve point blank refused to install their viruses – without which, the system isn’t going to let me upload any of my own creatures / UGC. Which takes away a lot of the other cause of interest that would have rapidly lured me in.

Finally if it had been a “real” online game (why wasn’t it? No-one really seems to know. My theory is “fear and shame over The Sims Online catastrophe”) of course … my friends relationships in-game would have meant I’d have been pulled-in to this new cool stuff as soon as it went live.

So … it would seem that when it comes to boundary-pushing game design Maxis is managing to go 2 steps forwards and 3 steps back. That’s a real pity, because I suspect a lot of people who would love what Sporepedia was *described* as being (rather than the massive short-sell it actually was) have already given up, gone home, and don’t care any more. Only the people who don’t know about the good games out there (the non-gamers who happened to pick up a copy – of whic there are many many of course, thanks to the Sims juggernaut) are still around to enjoy it.

Am I being too pessimistic here? Certainly, not a single professional I know has shown any remaining awareness or interest in what Spore’s doing for the last 6 months. That’s pretty damning, in my eyes, for a game with such big sales and the Sims driving marketing and sales for it.

(PS: in case it’s not clear – as far as I’m aware, there’s still literally zero socialising in Spore. That’s the irony of the title here. The only socialising is 1995-era “the players are doing it anyway despite the developer+publisher going out of their way to stop them”)

“It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.”

(also … If that article is accurate, sad but unsurprising to hear that (apparently) the underpowered server tech for TR yet again managed to make a misery of gameplay, even at the very end. If that article is accurate, then well done to the ops for managing to get some instancing sorted out, but note to self: never let this happen with future twitch-based / FPS MMOs)

But the interesting thing is quite how much benefit the airport gets.

Modern airports, as entities, get a huge amount of their revenue from the shops inside them. I’m from the UK, where Heathrow (and to a lesser extent Gatwick) have taken this to extremes for decades, but it’s spread over most of Europe and much of the USA by now too.

Advising passengers that they must arrive 3 hours before a flight leaves is one way to make them spend lots of money. Cancelling their flights is another (the branch of the WHSmith’s newsagent inside Heathrow airport made vastly more profit than any other branch in 2007 thanks to the plane cancellations that year). Making the airport experience a pleasant one, so that people *don’t mind* coming early is yet another. Facilitating people “working” at the airport too.

And free wifi supports not one but two of those. Making it hassle-free and ubiquitous is the difference between me wiliingly turning up more than an hour before my flight, and what I would normally do (aim to arrive 30-45 minutes before an international flight, and waste as little time as possible).

This is a model of “free” that I feel is still under-explored in the game space: Free as driver of larger secondary monetized activity.

“You know the only analogue I can come up for this is to imagine a WWII FPS where the opening cinematic tells you that the Nazis have destroyed Great Britain with a giant laser and you’re one of the few English to escape via a magic portal to Russia at Stone Henge which was planted by ancient mystics from China. However the rest of the game takes place in relatively normal WWII FPS style while the Nazis throw paltry attacks into the steppes, and yet most of the people you meet are also British and no one seems to care that Jolly Ol’ England is smouldering black glass. Occasionally you stumble across more ancient Stone Henges to learn Mandarin to gain super powers. The Nazi country-destorying laser is never brought up.”

ROFLMAO. And … excellent plot-summary there.

(remembering that I did actually *like* TR. But the OP has a point)

“No, these games failed because their developers let it happen.”

• Funcom *should have* learned enough lessons with Anarchy Online not to make the mistakes they did with AoC; not the precise same mistakes, but the same “class” of mistakes were made, suggesting that they tried to fix only the symptoms and failed to understand the causes
• Destination Games knew a long long time before TR went to beta that it wasn’t (going to be) ready even for beta, let alone launch. IMHO NCsoft collectively knew very well that TR wasn’t ready for launch, but went ahead and launched it anyway
• Bill Roper went on record to say that no-one understood their sales/revenue model, from the start. As I’ve mentioned before, that pretty much guarantees failure, and it’s not rocket-science to understand why!
• Pirates … I have no idea, actually. It’s the one that I have never played (although I really wanted to) nor even *seen* (which is unusual). I’m not going to talk about PotBS any more, since I really know nothing about it

NB: I don’t happen to agree with anything else in that post. I’ve got nothing against it, I just didn’t find anything interesting or new about the games themselves in the post, and IMHO the list of “why this happened” is too shallow and derivative to be worth saying in 2009 – the same has been said many times over the last ten years by many people, and ain’t particularly insightful in the first place. Sorry, dude.

How do you “let” an MMO fail, pre-launch?

Anyway, back to the interesting bit. This is why I find the statement particularly interesting: the choice of phrasing, that the developers “let it” fail.

The implication being that they didn’t do anything wrong, perhaps, but that they stood by and watched the train rolling slowly towards the brick wall and didn’t try (hard enough) to stop the collision.

TR was in development for 7 years (give or take a bit, and arguably just half that depending on whether you count the bit before there was an official “resetting” of the project (and re-shuffling of staff)).

When did they first ship a playable that people found fun?

Ah. Hmm. Um. Well. Now, *I* certainly wasn’t around during all this, so I can’t authoritatively answer that. However, I well remember the large number of people remarking that the beta – just before launch – was starting to be “actually a lot of fun to play”. 6+ years to get to the first fun version, eh? Hmm. Traditionally, you start with something fun, then you build a game around it, not the other way around.

Rating Tabula Rasa, in Alpha

While people are busily shooting me down in flames for such disloyalty :), I’m going to make a confession: I played TR in the alpha, and (to the great amusement – and in many cases total disbelief – of my colleagues) I actually enjoyed it. It certainly wasn’t a lot of fun to play, but there were nice elements that I could really see how they would develop (could be developed) into a great game, if we started development of the game at that point. I was accustomed at the time to making forward-looking evaluations of games, and reading between the lines and guess at how the final product would look.

i.e. it was a good pre-production prototype, and if I’d been asked “this studio wants us to fund them to turn this into a full game, should we do it?” I’d have said “well, modulo some small but fundamental changes that are needed, and the fact we need to explain to them a small number of basic mistakes they’re making with misunderstanding the MMO market, and they obviously will want a *lot* more money to build it up, flesh it out, and implement what they’ve barely sketched out in outline at this point … definitely YES. This will make a great game, probably”.

(IIRC … I was asked this question at the end of my second playsession and gave pretty much that answer. At which point he said something like “Yes. We’ve been telling them that for a while. They’re not going to do any of it”)

Which maybe sounds very negative? To me it wasn’t. At that time I was (one of many people) doing due-diligence reviews and milestone reviews for games being published by NCsoft. IMHO no game (and no studio) is perfect in pre-production. Every studio worth their salt pushes the boundaries, and – critically important – their own personal comfort zones. That guarantees that they’re not experts at producing the new game-type when they start. There are always warts; that’s partly why they make the prototype – to show to many other people, get second opinions, find out the flaws other people see, and then go “ah! yes! and actually … now you’ve said that, we’ve just thought of a much better way of doing this!”.

(incidentally, I found Valve’s post-mortem discussions of Team Fortress 2 fascinating, revealing that even for a studio with a perfect record of successes making new IPs they still screwed-up the pre-production work on TF2, and only late into the project did they really turn it around into the shining piece of awesomeness that they finally shipped. I can’t find a google link to the frank interviews Valve did on the subject, but here’s an interesting one on how much they still had left to do post launch – 53 updates (!) – even AFTER rescuing the project halfway through by fundamentally rethinking it)

Time-out: who are you, again?

I…:

1. …was the European CTO at the time
2. …was not on the TR dev team (wasn’t even in the same office)
3. …started playing TR as soon as I joined the company, and played Alpha, Beta, and some of Live
4. …unlike many outside the TR team (I suspect: “the vast majority”) I voluntarily played TR during my free time
5. …got locked-out when the game launched, and it took many months for my official corporate free account to get allowed back in, thanks to some stupid bugs in NCsoft North America’s account management systems
6. …was on a lot of the internal development mailing lists. Particularly interesting ones were the bugs list, the internal playsessions list (both for the dev teams and for other internal players), and the producers list (especially the scrum-masters list when the team eventually switched to Scrum).

I want to be clear about this: I had nothing to do with the development of TR. But, like many people who can say that, I was heavily exposed to it – both the project, and the game, and the politics. TR had a massive effect on the company at the time, everyone was touched by it. Anyone in development – anywhere – got affected a lot more than most; it affected budgets, management structures, technology investments, publishing strategy, investment strategy, etc. I’m not claiming to know what was going on in there for certain, but given my position I had the luxury of a lot of insights that other people wouldn’t have had.

So … although I know a lot about what happened, please view this post (it was going to be about the 4 games generally, but it appears to have warped into a TR-centric story) as an outsider’s view. And don’t read it as all true, I may accidentally report some rumours (and, you know, I don’t want to get sued if someone takes this as 100% literal truth) though I’ll try hard not to. TR team members may well find some big mistakes in what’s here – and I’d welcome their corrections and counter-arguments.

(I know my name appears in at least one set of the credits due to an NCsoft policy of “crediting all staff who were employed on the launch day of the product”, especially ironic since I think I’ve ended up being “officially” credited only on the game I did *not* work on :).)

Back to the topic:

The difficulty of …. Timing

It wasn’t ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so. How privately they said it, in many cases I don’t know. However, I am aware of plenty of people that said it pretty loudly internally at NCsoft (I saw the emails, or sat in the meetings).

NB: I said “wasn’t ready for beta“. We’re not even discussing “launch” yet.

But it was never going to be as easy as simply saying “hey, I’m not that busy for the next fortnight; howabout we launch TR next week? Or do you want to wait another year or two?”. On a project that had already burnt through tens of millions of dollars with almost nothing concrete to show for it (not necessarily a “fair” judgement; but if you were *literal* about it, which by that point many people were, then technically there was “nothing” to show), and had on the order of 100 people employed full time working on it every day, there was a lot of money at stake even just delaying launch by a single week.

(do the math; you’re already counting in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” each time you prolong development by a single week there)

And then there were the political issues, for instance the fact that NCsoft North America had never developed a game internally in their long years of existence (all the internal games were developed by studios that NCsoft acquired during development). That means that the core business for the USA wasn’t making any revenue *at all* (publishing and development are usually seen as different divisions). Again, I’m not defending this perspective, or claiming it’s fair – but it was technically true, and was mentioned a lot.

Such things tend to scare stakeholders, especially shareholders. Especially directors of a public company who are trying to keep shareholders happy. Especially directors in a foreign country who may or may not even speak the same language as you. (I’m not trying to make veiled accusations against individuals here, nor against the different national divisions within NCsoft – I’m simply pointing out basic facts of life when it comes to large multinational companies, and observing that there was *inevitable* pressure along those lines, independently of whether or not anyone deliberately applied it).

And there were other issues. With that many people working on one project? Some of them for more than 5 years? Well. There’s plenty of dirty laundry on a project that size. But I don’t feel that anyone except the people directly involved get to decide whether its fair and reasonable to air it (because, frankly, no-one else is going to have much insight into what really happened).

So. It was hard, surely, to make any decision on launch dates.

There are no easy decisions in such situations, no “obviously, the best solution is X” (although to many different people such obvious answers seem to exist, the “easy” answers tend to screw-over several other teams). Making any decision was hard, but the decisions that were taken were considered inarguably “wrong” by many people, immediately that they were made.

They may not have known what the “best” solution was, but they certainly recognized (or felt they did) one of the “worst” ones.

And they were vocal about it. A survey was taken, internally, asking what people thought. The results were never published – so no-one (apart from the survey takers) knows exactly what the results were, but we were told that the *company* knew.

TR: The stage is set

To summarise so far (I know, I know – this is a long post, sorry)

1. TR went off the rails on some meandering journeys into research & development for many years burning through lots of cash (this is not necessarily something to castigate them for – many hit games did exactly the same; if you can afford the cash + the chance of failure (and NCsoft is a billion-dollar company, so let’s face it: they could), then it’s perfectly reasonable to decide on this course of action / allow it to continue)
2. Very late, they eventually hit upon a good formula, a good core game
3. Before they could actually make that game, a difficult decision was taken to push the team to the wall and force an early beta test
4. …and then the even more difficult decision taken to push them even harder to do an insanely early live launch. Certain alignments of astrological constellations in the Marketing department (also known as “tenth anniversary of the launch date of the last MMO that the core members of this team shipped”) may or may not have had something to do with this
5. The choice made was widely (if not universally) regarded as “very bad”
6. The company was made aware of the volume of people holding opinions along those lines

…and as they say on the Quiz shows: What Happened Next?

And this is where we come back to the point that interests me: did we, collectively as an organization, “allow it to happen”?

Personally, I believe the answer is an unqualified: “Yes”. Because many people worked *really hard* from that point on to make the game a success; many who had been working very hard already pushed themselves to work harder. And yet, in parallel, while working their asses off to make sure the train was big and beautiful, no-one stopped the train-wreck from happening.

There are excellent mitigating excuses for why individuals allowed this, many of them related to “not wanting to lose my job”. Many others relate to “life is too short to kill myself (with stress) over continuing to bash my head against this particular brick wall” (many people had complained long and hard about TR in the months and years running up to that point). Some people had just given up hope, and decided it was less painful simply to stop caring. Others were relishing the impending catastrophe, and I can think of some individuals who I personally believe were deliberately planning to get maximum political advantage for themselves out of the death of TR.

Re-reading this as I go, I remember there was another big excuse that I never gave credence to: “I’ll bury my head in real work and make *my* parts as good as I possibly can, and hope if everyone else does the same, it will All Come Together In The End”. This one wasn’t voiced so much, but is simply what people did, in some cases.

Hope is not a strategy. Whenever your attempt to avoid disaster revolves around the H-word instead of a concrete averting action, you are doomed.

But since I’m not trying to blame anyone here, it doesn’t matter whether or not we had good reasons for allowing it. What I’m really interested in is “how to make games better”, so the important point is that – collectively – we did allow it.

What would Jesus do?

What should we have done, not as an organization, but as individuals? How often does anyone talk about this?

% of player forums posts that blame developers for launching early
% of player forums posts that explain what an individual employee should do about it

It’s very easy to “work harder” when doom is impending, but as I’ve mentioned above this achieves nothing.

There are plenty of cases in the games industry where disasters are forseen, and the people involved charge into them with gusto, screaming “YOU’RE ALL WRONG! DON’T BE A HATER!”, and deserve what they get. But in those situations where people know it’s wrong, what can they do?

One colleague attempted various things and ultimately ended up trying to deal with the “root” of the problems by bringing about wholesale organizational change. Not in terms of who was employed, who was in charge, etc, but in terms of the basic attitudes and beliefs of the people turning up to work each day. He tried to remove the cultures of secrecy and fear (*) and replace them with cultures of actively seeking constructive criticism and actively supporting naysayers, so long as they adhered to rules of “decency” when it came to how criticism was provided.

(*) – (tens of millions of dollars spent and the game doesnt work but is going to beta/live? Fear was ever-present. Maybe (I heard rumours, and saw some … strange … stuff, but I don’t know for sure) for other reasons too. c.f. my comments about dirty laundry above)

In the end, I suspect if he’d started his campaign a year earlier, it *might* have worked. It certainly seemed to be having some surprisingly impressive results towards the end.

Among other things, the team itself tried adopting Scrum, with some tremendous results IMHO. Incidentally, I’m hoping one of the talks at GDC this year will be someone from the TR team (perhaps Andy Bruncke or April Burba?) on their experiences adopting Scrum with a team of 50-100 people at the end of development of a > $50million failed AAA title.

(If that talk does happen, I’ll be the one at the back of the room during the Q&A session at the end sticking my hand up to ask: In your opinion, if the team had adopted Scrum 12 months earlier, might it have saved TR? I would be very interested to hear the team’s thoughts on that)

Of course, both of those paths – and some of the other things people tried – were probably too little too late. TR didn’t have the luxury of time – the (contested) decisions being made were by definition time-critical.

So … what should we have done? Both as individuals, and as members of an organization that we each believed in?

What would you do?

Not long after, for unrelated reasons, my manager resigned. And shortly after that, so did several other people, myself included. TR didn’t (I believe) cause any of us to leave – none of them were on the TR team itself – but some of the problems it exposed within the company did come up often in people’s informal (down the pub) complaints about leaving.

When the organization disempowers you, and nothing you do seems able to make a diference, but – in your opinion – the impending event is an “extinction-level” disaster, is resignation the only valid response? Surely not?

Final Note

To my knowledge, NCsoft never admitted that TR was a failure, internally.

In June 2008, when I left the company, the CEO had gone, the lead designer had gone, and the rest of the directors were about to get axed in the pending re-shuffle (which hadn’t been announced even internally yet) – but still no admission in sight.

I used to gently point out that until we admitted the failure, we would fail to fully respond to it, and to fully adjust and improve – so that we were almost certainly doomed to repeat it. As far as I know, the painful admission has still never been made, even internally. The subject was danced around many times, but no-one would come out and say it publically (internally); it was always oblique references, and statements such as “Tabula Rasa is doing very well, although not as well as we hoped” – eliciting mirth, disbelief, looks of remembered pain, or simply blank looks of “wanting to forget it ever happened” etc among the various people in the company.

Personally, for each of the senior management at the company at the time, I shall never forget that you guys did not make that happen. To me, this one thing was symptomatic of, and encapsulates, the institutional failure to respond to the failings of the project.

Privately, reasons were cited to me varying from “it doesn’t matter any more, everyone knows its over” to “I don’t want to hurt anyone more than they’ve already been hurt” to “just basic tact” to “let’s not rock the boat” to “we should look on the bright side and get on with the other games we’re making as a company, and not get mired in history / water under the bridge”.

But as one of my friends said at the time: what’s it got to do with hurting people? we just want to use the experience to learn to make better games. And how the hell are we going to do that when you people won’t even admit we were wrong?

The world is full of games companies that blow stupid amounts of money on making online games (typically “massively multiplayer online games” (MMO)). It’s time to put a stop to this madness; honestly, I thought everyone learnt their lesson about 5 years ago when we had the last wave of “everyone’s making an MMO … oh god, these things are TEN TIMES as expensive and ONE HUNDRED TIMES as difficult as we thought … Run away!”. Apparently not.

I think there’s two ways you can learn for yourself how to make a profit from developing online games:

Option 1: Does It Lose Money When You Do That? Well Don’t Do That Then

(this is also known as the “Mike Myers / Love Guru” approach to becoming a successful Executive at an MMO developer or publisher)

The rest of this post will be about this.

Option 2: To invest $50m profitably, you just need to know how to invest $5m profitably, and then do it ten times in a row

(this is also known as the “portfolio of successes” approach)

The *NEXT* post on this subject will be about that…

How to lose money when making an MMO

I’m going to use two simple case-studies here, both 2008 (there are good examples from 2003/2004/2005 too – like The Sims Online, for instance – but I’ve got more than enough to go on just from *this* year’s disasters. Tabula Rasa, anyone?)

If you want more detail, or more games, and less sensationalism, I’m available for some MMO consultancy at the moment ;) (email address is on the About page) …

Here’s one way to publish online games for a loss:

1. Target business and use-practices of people at the top end of the generational curve (ignore microtransactions, enforce creditcards, expect people to expect to have a credit card, etc)

2. Struggle along spending more and more money chasing lower and lower profit margins out of the market you still have available, using Expensive IP Licenses to shore-up the increasingly unpopular Core Gameplay

3. …Wait. Give it 3 years and your investments will be worthless, the “current” market will detest your products, and you won’t have any staff left who even know where to begin when it comes to making and selling product for the new today’s (the future today) customers.

It can’t fail.

Look at Hellgate: London / Flagship:

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Less. It’s actually a pretty easy answer. I would have done less.

Hellgate: London / Flagship

(quotes from the post-mortem interview with one of the directors, Bill Roper – http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=3&cId=3169356)

These guys securitized bank loans – for something as ultra-high-risk as MMO development – on the total IP of the game. This really surprises me, they decided to make their success all/nothing, this deal implements a strategy of: “if we don’t succeed massively, we are deliberately forcing ourselves to fail”, since it was taking out of their hands the ONLY thing they could have leveraged for new revenue sources and for obtaining new investment.

GFW: So Comerica’s control is the IP…

BR: IP, code, tech, and tools. So to be honest, if I personally had the money, I’d buy it back out. The technology and the toolset that we built is a really powerful platform for creating titles. That was really the goal of what we were going to be doing at Flagship. We were going to be using the tech and tools — using the platform — [and] creating games based off of that as our core moving forward. –

“It was a decision that we made because we needed to get more money into the company”

On why Hellgate failed:

“Hellgate came out, and it wasn’t as good as it should have been. There’s a myriad of reasons for that. Some of them were just bad timing in the PC market. The PC market was lousy last year. Some of it was the fact that we were an independent studio. We didn’t have unlimited money, and we had to ship when we had to ship. Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all…”

Interesting, because that’s clearly not a good explanation – those things are none of them reason enough to explain the failure – but then later he says something else that DOES sound like a sufficient explanation. He talks about something that would actively prevent people from purchasing product, which ultimately is usually why you “fail” as a games company:

“BR: Free- and subscription-based. I think we should have picked one or the other. We should have said, “Hey, you buy the box, and then it’s free online play, and we’re going to [disappear] for a year, except for bug fixes, and crank out a new expansion.” Or we should have said: “You know what? There’s no single-player version. It’s subscription only. That’s how we’ve geared the game. That’s how it’s gonna work,” and done that from the beginning. We wanted to get people who’d never subscribed to a game before to play it by themselves, then go online and play it with their friends, and then they see all this new content and want to subscribe. But I think that was a model that caused a lot of confusion and caused a lot of division amongst our community, too.”

It would seem that game developers – even ex-Blizzard ones of some fame – still don’t really understand the business side of their business. One of the fundamental lessons of mass-market consumer business is that “the consumer must understand why they want to buy your product”. This is what Marketing *is all about*. Without it, they won’t buy. If they don’t buy, you don’t make money. Simple as that.

With businesses that sell to a small number of clients (e.g. middleware), this isn’t an issue – in many cases you actually WANT an excuse to sit down and explain your product / offering to the potential customer. You have enough time, and each purchase is expensive enough, that you can afford to fly to the office of *every potential customer on the planet*. And that explanation process usually enables you to find extra things to sell to them, and give you a chance to put-down your competitors. Doesn’t work with mass-market consumers, though.

“Everything from the development side to the business side was set to this model that we’d put together. We hoped that it was going to actually work, and we told ourselves that maybe it’ll work better than we think it’s going to work, right? But there was just a lot of confusion.

People were saying there’s going to be the haves and the have-nots. There was a lot of backlash against the model. It’s always tough to gauge percentages, though, because the people who post online are the people who are angry regardless of whatever, so then you’d assume that everybody hates the game, or everybody doesn’t like your magazine, or whatever it is.”

I understand this fear, this trepidation – it’s an inescapable part of trying to make a new market, something you’re always doing when you do a high risk venture aiming to achieve hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. We had the same fear at Mind Candy when we were developing Perplex City; we knew that if we got it wrong, it might well kill us as a company. But here’s the difference: we went to market with a shipped product on less than a million dollars, AND FOUND OUT … before blowing tens of millions of dollars in pre-loaded risk.

(for the record: I found it pretty scary, that first time. Props to Michael for pushing it through. Now, though, I wouldn’t do it any other way. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I stopped working for a big publisher – that they kept wriggling-out of “try it and see” in favour of “spend, spend, and spend even more, then gamble on the outcome, and fire lots of people if we guess wrong”. Bugger that for a game of soldiers…)

“We never really much left crunch mode, for the core Hellgate guys.”

“it kind of became this negative perfect storm of us trying to chase making the game better and really digging ourselves into a bigger and bigger hole. That’s why we did things like take out loans against our IP and pouring our own money into it, so we could turn the corner. And we ran out of gas before we got around the corner. ”

Damion Schubert gave this a name years ago: “Anarchy Online”-Purgatory. It’s the idea that you’re providing a service that has a high support cost day-to-day, but you naively failed to budget resource for that. So, you’re cutting so many corners trying to find enough resource to support the existing service that you have nowhere near enough resource left to do ongoing development.

Worse, if your product shipped at sufficiently low quality, your support costs are vastly inflated supporting bugs that you could have fixed for much less than the cost of supporting consumers who encounter them. But, given the above problem, you end up spending as much each month on support for a bug as it would to fix the bug – and you know it! – but you don’t have the cashflow to allow you to fix it. You are doomed, but you can carry on surviving and suffering for a very long, slow, death.

“Once marketing starts happening, if you change the date, you’ve flushed that support. We said we’ve got to ship. As we started down that path, working on the bugs and things, there was so much more there, and it was so much more complex than we’d ever imagined”

Here is what I think of as the Fallacy of MMO Marketing. I’ll be going into this in more detail in the next blog post.

Traditional game-marketing is a waste of time and money for an MMO. The MMO will always be there.

If you cannot come up with a marketing plan that works around the sales model (which, for an MMO, is “continuous”), then you need a new marketing dept. Using an old dept, who will hold you to extremely difficult ways of working (like, “big bang event” marketing), ways of working which *no longer make any senses or serve any purpose for an MMO*, is stupid. From a technology perspective, from an operations perspective, from a design perspective, from a sales perspective: from all these, you do NOT want a big-bang event. It’s only the marketing dept that wants it, and then only because “that’s all we know how to do”.

Age of Conan / Funcom

Speaking of AO-Purgatory … what about Funcom, makers of that game, who in 2008 released their next major MMORPG – Age of Conan?

It looked great. But why did Age of Conan (AoC) make massive sales, while Blizzard had a dead period in the run-up to WotLK, but then fare poorly? Why didn’t they manage to steal the WoW players permanently?

Plenty of reasons. But one set is this: here’s another way to publish online games for a loss:

1. Make a game which costs a vast amount of money up-front before you’re allowed access to the “magic garden”, so everyone has to rely on word-of-mouth for purchasing decisions

2. Make it difficult to start playing, to actually PAY that money, so that many buyers “don’t get around to buying it” for a while – perhaps not until their friends have been playing for a few weeks or a couple of months.

3. Make the game beautiful and wonderful for the first 2-3 weeks, and make it suddenly really, really bad by comparison in the third/fourth/fifth weeks.

4. Ask people to pay / renew their monthly credit-card subscription just after they’ve encountered the bad bits, and they’ve had a richly bathetic (sic) experience.

It can’t fail. Your early adopters will be asked for more money just at the point that they feel most ripped-off and are looking for an excuse to “punish you”. Their friends will “get around to” purchasing your product just about the time that all the early adopters are saying “this game sucks, I hate it, it’s really crap” – because they haven’t had time to “get over” their disappointment yet.

Confession: I’ve never actually played AoC. I’m sorry; I’m going to analyse a game I’ve not played (I make a point of trying to seriously play each and every game for a while before making a judgement. It’s a hard life, working in the games industry ;) ). But, you see, even working at an MMO Publisher (as I was at the time), I couldn’t start playing it with my friends at work. I had to pay $100 for the priviledge of trying it out. I couldn’t start playing even then, even if I had money to burn and burnt it – I had to find a shop selling a box. I didn’t need the box to play, it didn’t contain anything, it was just a magic token that someone wanted me to win in a quest before I would have proved myself worthy.

Publishers who do this are Foolish. They are clever people who’ve seen that there is money to be made in boxed retail, but they’ve sold their own intelligence short by not thinking about WHAT money there is, WHY it is there, the SIDE-EFFECTS of that money, the MARKET that is being reached, and how to INTEGRATE that market with their other markets. My example above is an example of one of those “other markets” which is being destroyed because they failed to think about product / market fit as a whole rather than as a set of discrete silos. That kind of thinking is “old style” marketing, before the internet, when companies could ruthlessly control their products. That kind of Marketing Executive generally finds it hard to get a job these days, as their approaches work poorly in the world in which we now live. And the customer doesn’t know or understand these things, but they innately perceive them – and they say the publisher is “Stupid!”. And they vote with their wallets.

But also, from the oppositive point of view, … they *learned* from Anarchy Online (AO), they *learned* that improving the new-user experience radically improved attraction and retention. I cannot over-emphasize this point: it was one of the biggest changes ever made to AO content, and it’s proven time and again to be a distinguishing feature in the commercial success of MMOs.

So, you get stuff like this (Scott Jennings, aka LumTheMad, talking about AoC’s failure):

“SJ: Well, the budget wasn’t big enough to make a Tortage-style experience from 1 to 80. Would $15 million have bought Tortage-style polish for 60 levels? Probably not. Would any amount of money have? Probably not. But … that’s what players expected.

When they got past Tortage and got to the “kill 40 snakes and bring me the skin because it is yummy in my tummy,” players got angsty about it. They felt bait-and-switched because here was this very polished experience which then … stopped.

Even more than that, though … the cutoff at that point was just so drastic, I feel like it was a decision point for subscribers. As in, “Hmm, I don’t think I want to play any more” decision point. But, zooming out from AoC for a bit to the larger view.”

…but you see, Funcom only learned ONE thing from AO – they didn’t have a holistic enough view to realise that what they were doing was creating an EASY “cancel subscription” decision-point for players, as Scott says. Successful MMO companies create EASY “prolong subscription” decision-points for players.

The tragic thing is that this concept is considered basic knowledge that every business person in most companies is expected to know. Apparently, Funcom didn’t have anyone who knew. (I’m sure they did, but what they shipped makes it look as though they didn’t have anyone. I can think of many practical reasons why the people who had the knowledge were divorced from the people who made the shipping decisions, most of them innocent but unfortunate).

I don’t think Funcom are stupid. I think they have excellent game design skills, but they are consistently let down by poor production / technology / operations / management.

Basically: Great Ideas, Shame about the Execution (not “implementation”).

Anarchy Online was a gem of a game, if you look at the content, the world, the ideas, the gameplay. Shame about the execution of AO *as a complete product*.

Age of Conan is a lovely rendition of a bloodthirsty IP. Shame about the execution.

Which means, I suspect, that Funcom will never be allowed to make an MMO again. In the games industry, it is only execution – the ability to deliver – that counts, and Funcom has now failed not just once but twice. In a row. Only a fool would give them money now.

Conclusion

Well, that leaves a lot of openings for stuff to talk about in Option 2 (learn to make MMOs profitable at one tenth the cost)…

This is tortuous, painful, and mostly undocumented on the official site. Sigh. After some experimentation, here’s how to make it work (IMHO you shouldn’t need to do this – although the Eclipse project allows plugin developers to package their plugins in really stupid ways, and doesn’t make it easy for anyone (users, developers, etc) – it’s still the fault of the plugin developer if they ALSO do not make it easy for the users to install).

First problem: get Eclipse

IME, most programmers who would use Eclipse already have it. The PHP plugin website won’t really help you, mostly taking the attitude of “install an extra copy of eclipse, just for doing PHP development; if you already have eclipse … work it out yourself”. I kind of understand why, but still feel that the first duty of every developer is to make their stuff easy to install!

If you don’t have Eclipse, I highly recommend you do NOT follow the PHP instructions (by downloading their pre-made “PHP + Eclipse all in one”) because then you are doomed to having multiple parallel installs if you ever need to use any other programming language; learn how to do it properly instead.

Download eclipse here (you want the latest stable version, currently called “Ganymede” (no, I don’t know why they stopped using Version numbers either – yes, it does make life more difficult for all normal users who haven’t memorized the funny names. Sigh)). You can get “Eclipse with Java” or “Eclipse with C/C++” or whatever you want – they are all identical, some just have extra plugins pre-installed.

NB: the people that run the Eclipse website have some pretty icon-artists, but a cruel sense of humour (or just suck at website design, maybe? I shouldn’t complain – it used to be a LOT worse than this) and don’t provide bookmarkable links to the OS X version (that I could find, at least); you’ll just have to go to that page and scroll till you find it. Right now, the current “standard” Eclipse version is at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN (c.f. my previous comment re: sense of humour), and at the right hand edge of that box is a tiny link saying “Mac OS X”)

If you’re new to Eclipse, you will probably find that downloading eclipse is one of the most confusing downloads you’ve ever done; if so, this is part of that same problem mentioned above where the Eclipse project makes plugin installs ridiculously difficult: all those many confusing different Eclipse versions that you cannot tell the difference between are actually the same, but differ only in which plugins are pre-installed.

Yes, this is stupid. Yes, it’s badly documented. Sorry. You’ll learn to live with it – they’ve been doing this for almost ten years now so don’t expect it to be fixed any time soon.

I suggest you run Eclipse once, now, before going on to the next step – if Eclipse doesn’t start at this point, don’t waste time confusing yourself with the PHP plugins until you can get Eclipse working on its own!

Second problem: get PHP IDE (now renamed to “PDT”)

You can try to do the automated-install; Eclipse is bad at handling automated installs, has very poor error-handling if anything goes wrong (it just crashes and doesn’t explain), and plugin developers usually screw-up the auto-install API in ways that can actully render your copy of Eclipse unusable (this happens *a lot*). I would advise never using it if you can avoid it.

This one’s pretty messed-up. According to the website and the list of requirements, if you want to use the latest version (vesion 2.0, not yet “packaged”), then you have to download approx 6 massive files.

I found that if you download the “Eclipse for Java” pacakge then it has some of those built-in already, and even if you don’t, several of those have EACH OTHER built-in (WTF?). I suggest you don’t take any risks, and that you do this the long way (download EVERYTHING).

First, go to this download page.

Decide which version you want; right now you want “2.0.0 Stable Builds”, but soon that will be what you get from “Latest Releases”, so check there too.

Then download ALL the zip files listed under “PDT” AND everything listed under “Build Dependencies”. Right now, there are 3 files for “PDT” (SDK, Runtime, and Tests), and 5 files under “Build Dependencies” (Eclipse gtk, EMF, DTP, GEF, and WTP).

Third problem: OS X can’t unzip the files

If, like most OS X users, you’re using Stuffit Expander to unzip the files, by default it won’t do it, because they all overwrite the same directory name (and StuffIt is designed to “protect” you from that, which is nice).

That’s only slightly annoying to get around, but you are still screwed, because OS X itself is (apparently – I couldn’t find a way around this using Finder) hard-coded to prevent you from copying the contents of the directories into the Eclipse directory. When you try to it says “delete the target directory first, or cancel?” (unlike windows, which says “only overwrite files which are the same, otherwise copy all the missing files … or cancel?” which is 99% of the time what you wanted. I have no idea why Apple uses a “destructive” copy – and gives you no alternative!)

Here’s how to get around both problems: The solution – Manual install via Terminal

Fortunately, if you switch to using the Terminal, and run “unzip” by typing it in manually, by default it’s setup as a unix variant that acts in the same way that Windows works by default.

First, make sure you are in the directory where you saved the ZIP files, e.g. by typing:

cd ~/Downloads

(assuming you saved them to your personal Downloads folder)

Then you just type:

unzip [name of zipfile1]
unzip [name of zipfile2]
…
unzip [name of zipfileN]

…which resolves the incompatibilities in the distro files, and then to install the plugin you type:

cp -Ri eclipse [location of your eclipse folder - usually: /Applications/eclipse]

Note that the “-R” is *required*, and that there is NO trailing slash after “eclipse”. The “i” after the “-R” is optional, it might be good to know if you have problems, but it allows you to get confirmation before overwriting any files. Thankfully, you can just hold down the enter key and it will do the defautl (do not overwrite) as it goes through each file; there are many hundreds of files to copy, and you may already have hundreds of them, so this is handy.

Installation complete

Now start Eclipse – this took 5 minutes for me, where normally it takes 30 seconds, don’t ask me why) – but eventually it worked.

Test it works – go “File -> New Project” and scroll down to the PHP folder, and select “PHP Project”. If there is no PHP folder in the list, then the install has failed. Start again. Good luck.

Otherwise, it should let you create a project, in which case: You now have PDT / PHP-IDE for Eclipse installed and working.

Writing a PHP file

I’m assuming you know how to do this, or can find a tutorial (any PDT tutorials should be fine – it works the same way as the mainstream language plugins for Eclipse, so *any* tutorial on creating a source file and building it ought to work).

Fourth problem: Running your PHP

Oh crap. If you go ahead and create a project, give it a name, and hit OK, you’ll find that the PHP IDE seems designed to not allow you to develop or test PHP on a server; it only supports developing and testing on a local (inside Eclipse) private PHP interpreter. If you’re new to programming, this is fine to get started and learn some basic PHP.

If you’re an experienced programmer, you’ll probably hat that: unless you enjoy tracking down unreproducable bugs and tearing your hair out, you need to develop on the same software + version that runs your production server (in most cases, this will be an Apache2 server running the PHP5 module). Since OS X comes with Apache2 *and* PHP5 built-in, you *already* have a server on your machine that is probably 98% the same as the live server you would use (so far Apache2 + PHP5 on OS X seems to act almost identically to the same versions on Linux, FreeBSD, etc – as you would expect).

(98% is annoyingly short of 100%, but it’s a lot closer than using the bulit-in interpreter)

I can’t find any options in the Run Dialogs to control how it invokes the running of the code from a remote server (or even a local one!) – if you go digging through all the config options, they’re just missing.

NB: there IS something that looks like it might do the trick, where it has a list of “Server” and lets you choose a “PHP Server” – but THIS IS A LIE (there is no cake), do not believe it, this is for something else entirely; it’s just that someone made a poor choice of name for those labels).

Instead, what you have to do is be a lot more careful when creating new projects. Do this:

• File -> New… -> PHP Project
• Fill in project name as per normal with Eclipse
• UNcheck the “default” option for “Project Contents”
• Click the Browse button under “Project Contents” and navigate to wherever you keep your source DIRECTORIES for all your projects (see more on this below – and you may end up crying when you see what has to be done)
• Click Finish
• …NB: BE CAREFUL: it asks you a sneaky extra question, and your answer depends on how you manage source control (see below)

Special Note: where do you keep your PHP?

If:

• you are just developing locally for now on OS X

• AND you want to use the Sites directory to save your PHP files in
• AND you want to use your Apache2/PHP server instead of the “fake” one that comes with eclipse

Then:

• select your personal Sites folder as the Project Contents above
• AND answer “Create project in /Users/[your name]/Sites/[project name]” when you press Finish above

This will:

• automatically create a new sub-directory in Sites with the same name as your project
• mean that the address of your project is “http://localhost/[projectname]/”
• mean that if you delete the project in Eclipse, and select “delete from disk as well” when you do, Eclipse will delete ONLY the “[projectname]” subdirectory from your Sites folder, and leave everything else intact

…ALTERNATIVELY…

If:

• you use proper source control which has a unique root directory for each source project

Then:
EITHER:

• select the folder for that project as the Project Contents above

• AND answer “Create project in [source root folder]. (Deleting the project will delete the entire [source root folder])

OR:

• select the PARENT folder that contains the project-specific source folder as the Project Contents above
• AND answer “Create project in [PARENT folder of source root folder]” when you press Finish above

I actually strongly recommend the first option, since this will ensure that Eclipse doesn’t mess with your source control’s PARENT folder (which in most source control systems will either screwup the system (happens with crappy source control like CVS) or just be ignored because you won’t have write-access (happens with the more high quality source control) – but this can upset Eclipse if you do some other things wrong in the future.

FINALLY!

After all that, I finally had a working PHP IDE on OS X. Yes!

I haven’t tried debugging yet, but I found the following links that look pretty sound for setting it up. Bear in mind that the first one tells you to setup your Project Contents differently – just adapt what it tells you depending upon what you did above – the author doesn’t seem to fully understand Eclipse’s arcane approach to projects (given the name he uses for his Project!), which is fine, but IMHO not recommended.

http://robsnotebook.com/php_debugger_pdt_xdebug

So it’s time to call-out some of the interesting things to be found in the blogging world of MMO people.

By the way … you can tell who’s working on uber-secret or personally exciting projects these days because they’ve suspiciously stopped blogging for months at a time. Lazy slackers, the lot of them. The more you do, the more you should blog! :P

There are some that should be on the blogroll but aren’t (yet), and some other bloggers I should mention (but I’m sticking to the blogroll only for this post – I’ll go through others next time). Feel free to add your own recommended reading in the comments.

Blogs to read:
Brinking (Nabeel Hyatt)
* Who? serial entrepreneur, raised funding and sold companies
* What? currently running a funk-tastic social / music / games company with a bunch of Harmonix guys
* Why? big commentator on the games/apps/making money/predictions parts of All Things Facebook

Broken Toys (Scott Jennings / LTM)
* Who? became infamous in the early days of MMOs as a player of Ultima Online who ranted publically, amusingly, and sometimes even insightfully
* What? ex-NCsoft, now doing intriguing web games at John Galt Games
* Why? In his heart Scott’s still a player, and more than anyone else I’ve seen he interprets the world of MMO design, development, and playing through the players’ eyes. Interesting point: he’s mostly concerned with life-after-launch. Funny that. Players kind of find that bit the most interesting. Also keeps a close eye on community-management screw-ups, and WoW generally

Bruce Everiss
* Who? ex-head of marketing for Codemasters
* What? um, I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, apart from becoming a “professional blogger”
* Why? he aims to comment on every single interesting piece of news in the mainstream games industry. That’s a lot of commentary. Always something to read! IMHO he is often completely wrong about anything online-games, and a lot of business and “future of industry” stuff – Bruce is from an older age of the industry. But … he says a lot of interesting things and sparks a lot of interesting debates in the process. Worth reading. Just remember he is extremely (deliberately, I’m sure) provocative, and don’t take it too seriously.

Coke and Code (Kevin Glass)
* Who? A programmer working in mainstream IT
* What? An insanely prolific author of casual games “in his free time, as a hobby”
* Why? Because he’s better at making games than many professionals I’ve met, and he is very very prolific, making new libraries, toolsets, editors, games, game engines – and commenting on it all as he goes, and throwing up new games for you to play all the time

Erik Bethke
* Who? ex-Producer for Interplay
* What? CEO of GoPets, an online casual virtual world that’s especially big in Asia (and based in South Korea)
* Why? A hardcore WoW player who analyses the game-design as he goes, and relates very honestly a stream of both emotional experiences and seminal events in the game that should give you lots of things to be thinking about, especially if you’re a designer, business person, or product manager.

Extenuating Circumstances (Dan Hon)
* Who? ex-MindCandy, current CEO of SixToStart
* What? one of the first Bloggers (on the whole of the internet!) in the UK, and an awe-inspiring assimilator of “everything happening on the internet, with technology, with media, with entertainment and the future of the world” for all of the ten years I’ve known him.
* Why? He’s still an excellent tracker of all those things, and finds memes very quickly. Nowadays he just auto-posts links (lots of them, every day) with a few words of commentary scattered here and there (del.icio.us descriptions) – making his blog a ready-made news filter for you :)

Fishpool (Osma Ahvenlampi)
* Who? CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel)
* What? a very technical commentator, often in great detail, on the issues of running a 100-million user virtual world, with observations about Habbo’s community, business, and culture thrown in
* Why? He posts very rarely, but when he does, they’re usually full of yummy detail

Futuristic Play (Andrew Chen)
* Who? ex-VC (Mohr-Davidow Ventures)
* What? entrepreneur with a web-background who’s come into the games industry and bringing lots of useful stuff with him
* Why? blogs a LOT on advertising (and how to make money out of it in games and web and casual), and on metrics, and how you can use them to run you games or web business better. Also has a long fascination with what are the best parts of the games industry, and the best of the web industry, and how we can each put those best bits together to be even better

Off the Record – Scott Hartsman
* Who? ex-Everquest, ex-Simutronics
* What? Senior Producer for MMOs – but previously an MMO lead developer, and once (apparently) a Game Designer.
* Why? he’s funny, he knows his stuff, and he’s worked on some of the most important MMO projects outside Asia, so he’s got an interesting perspective going there.

Orbus Gameworks (Darius Kazemi)
* Who? ex-Turbine, now CEO of Orbus (a games-metrics middleware company)
* What? Likes the colour orange *a lot*, infamous for networking his ass off at games conferences (*everyone* knows Darius), very friendly, generous – and mildly obssessed with the use of metrics and stats to improve the creativity and success of game design (in a good way)
* Why? If you liked the Halo heatmaps when they came out, you’ll love some of the stuff they post on the Orbus company blog. A year ago they were posting heatmaps-on-steroids. If you thought “metrics” equalled “spreadsheets of data” then prepare to have your view changed pretty thoroughly.

Prospect Magazine/First Drafts (Tom Chatfield)
* Who? section-editor of the highly respected socio-political print magaine Prospect
* What? a highly-accomplished English Literature post-grad (bear with me here) … who also happens to have been a lifelong hardcore game player, I think the only person I know who got a hardcore character to level 99 on Diablo2, and now plays WoW a lot.
* Why? although Prospect only very rarely (like, only a few times ever) covers games, it’s very interesting to see what the rest of the world – especially the highly educated and highly intelligent but non-technical, older generations – thinks of us. And a bit of culture in your blog reading is probably good for you, too.

Psychochild (Brian Green)
* Who? ex-3DO/M-59, now the owner and designer of the revamped, relaunched, more modern Meridian-59
* What? an MMO game designer who disingenuously describes himself as an indie MMO designer but like most of the others has probably spent too long doing this and knows too much (compared to many of the modern “mainstream” MMO designers) for that to be true any more
* Why? lots and lots of great design ideas and commentary here for anyone wanting to do MMO design

Scott Bilas
* Who? programmer on Duneon Siege
* What? …in particular, responsible for the Entity System (one of my main areas of interest)
* Why? Scott’s phased in and out of blogging, but when he does blog he tends to do good meaty programming posts that contain lots of source code and some useful lesson or algorithm.

Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro)
* Who? lead designer for Sulake (Habbo Hotel)
* What? more of a Creative Director than game designer, more of a web background than games, but above all a community/product/creative person who knows his stuff. Also a big player of MMORPGs
* Why? are you cloning Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel and want some pointers about revenue models, community management, and how to be successful with virtual-item sales? You might want to read his posts ;)

The Creation Engine No.2 (Jim Purbrick)
* Who? ex-Codemasters, ex-Climax (both times working on MMO projects)
* What? originally a network / MMO academic researcher, then a network coder, and now the person who runs Linden Lab (Second Life) in the UK. Very big proponent of all things open-source, always doing interesting and innovative things with technology
* Why? Keep an eye on the more innovative technology things that are done with Second Life (stuff you don’t tend to read about in the news but – to a tech or games person – is a heck of a lot more interesting by a long long way), and get some insight into the life of serious open-source programmers who succeed in living and breathing this stuff inside commercial environments

The Forge (Matt Mihaly)
* Who? developer of one of the earliest commercially successful text MUDs, now CEO of Sparkplay Media
* What? spent many years running Achaea, a text-only MUD that made a healthy profit from pioneering the use of itemsales (virtual goods) – and the things weren’t even graphical – and has now finally (finally!) moved into graphical games with the MMO he’s developing
* Why? one of the few MMO professionals who talks a lot about his experiences playing on consoles (especially Xbox), which makes for a refreshing alternate view – especially from the perspective of an MMO person talking about social and community issues in those games. Just like Brian Green, claims to be an indie MMO designer, but probably knows far far too much for that to be even vaguely justifiable

Vex Appeal (Guy Parsons)
* Who? ex-MindCandy
* What? Guy is an extremely creative … guy … who had a small job title but a big part in inventing and rolling out a lot of the viral marketing stuff we did for Perplex City (online game / ARG from a couple of years ago)
* Why? Awesome place to go for ideas and info on the cutting edge of doing games stuff with social networks. Usually. Also … just makes for a fun blog to read

We Can Fix That with Data (Sara Jensen Schubert)
* Who? ex-Spacetime, currently SOE
* What? MMO designer, but like Lum / Scott Jennings, comes from a long background as player and commentator, and shorter background as actually in the industry. Like Darius Kazemi, spent a lot of time in doing metrics / data-mining for MMOs
* Why? Take Darius’s insight into metrics for MMOs, and Scott’s knowledge of what players like, don’t like, and ARE like, and you get a whole bunch of interesting posts wandering around the world of metrics-supported-game-design-and-community-management. Good stuff.

Zen of Design (Damion Schubert)
* Who? ex-EA (Ultima Online), currently at Bioware (MMO)
* What? MMO designer who’s been around for a long time (c.f. UO)
* Why? Damion writes long detailed posts about MMO design, what works, what doesn’t, practicalities of geting MMO development teams to work together, how the playerbase will react to things, etc. He also rather likes raiding in MMORPGs – which is fascinating to see (given his heavy background as a pro MMO *designer*)

[NC] Anson (Matthew Wiegel)
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? Dungeon Runners team
* Why? was doing lots of interesting and exciting things with data-mining/metrics in the free-to-play low-budget NCsoft casual MMO. Watch this space…

People with nothing to do with games, but you might want to watch just because they’re interesting:
Bard’s World (Joshua Slack)
* ex-NCsoft
* Josh is one of the key people behind Java’s free, hardware-accelearted, game engine (JME)
Janus Anderson
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? um, he’s been taking a lot of photos recently
* Why? watch this space
Mark Grant
* Who? non-Games industry
* What? an entrepreneur, web-developer, and Cambridge Engineer
* Why? very smart guy, and interesting posts on web development (no games tie-in)

Richard Bartle concludes that, in the great scheme of things (and much as it might nice to think otherwise), it’s not actually that important.

So standing back and looking at it, the answer as to why there is not a lot of fuss over this 30th anniversary is that in the great scheme of things, it isn’t actually important. The mainstream isn’t interested because virtual worlds haven’t had much impact; developers aren’t interested because the paradigm is obvious; players aren’t interested because knowing doesn’t add anything to their play experience; academics might be interested in the historical facts, but anniversaries don’t figure in their analyses.

I disagree :). And not just because it’s a chance to celebrate some UK-based breakthrough in computer games (what else do we have – GTA? When you google for “history of uk games industry” the first hit you get is “Japanese games industry | Technology | guardian.co.uk”. Sigh; thanks, Guardian). I think it doesn’t get much fuss simply because it doesn’t have a community that is enmeshed in modern culture in the ways that would get a fuss caused; its community isn’t highly sought-after by advertisers and journalists, for example. Its community isn’t a major user of the web-games-newssites. Etc.

On the flip side, I think it should have some fuss, certainly in the games press. It’s particularly important to understand how many years of history exists here, just as a number. Because that implies certain things about how much prior art probably exists, and the level of detail you should expect to have been researched and/or tried out and improved upon – all of which is very helpful when designing, building, or operating new games.

For the same reason, I think it’s particularly important for people to know the game design of MUD1 in detail, either to read a detailed review, or to have played it for themselves. Because that tells you what the starting point was for those 30 years of prior art. It gives you even more info on what you can expect. For instance, looking at MUD1 and looking at a typical modern MMORPG, you can see certain things haven’t changed that much, which suggests there is a lot of (old) documentation on side-effects of those aspects. Likewise, certain things have changed a heck of a lot, which suggests strongly that there’s a lot of (old and new) documentation on what else has been tried in those areas and why it didn’t work. In particular, it suggests that there’s possibly as much as THIRTY YEARS of “weird shit” that people tried in those areas – and your new wacky idea has probably been tried before. So you can go look up what happened; can use someone else’s (possibly “failed”) game as a prototype for your “new” ideas without even having to wait for your team to build the prototype.

If you don’t know that MUD1 is 30 years old, if you think perhaps that it’s 15 years old, or that it looked more like tunnels-n-trolls, then those things all lack the same implicit value to you – and you might not bother to go look them up. So, yes, IMHO it does matter how old it is.

Which reminds me; when was the last time someone did a major review of MUD2 (how modern was it?), seeing as so many people rely on reviews these days to understand games they don’t have time to play themselves…

What’s wrong with TDH’s list:

“Make sure the game is stable” – the games that launch “prematurely” (TDH’s description) ARE stable. Perhaps he meant something about “works on the majority of machines of your target market” or “has no economy-breaking bugs” or “all the quests work out of the box”, or … or … or etc. Depending on what he meant, my response would go in different ways.

If I were him, I’d have said “make sure the game is READY”, but whilst I know what that means, and most people in NCsoft seemingly had mostly congruent opinions, that’s not something I’m sure I can quantify off the top of my head. Hey, it’s part of what good publishers do as their value add, it’s not supposed to be obvious! More on this later, maybe.

Include significant content for all levels – you cannot possibly afford to do this, and it’s NOT ENOUGH even if you could. Rather, you need to provide masses of highly polished content for two particular levels: level 1, and level 20. Levels 10 through 19 need increasingly polished levels of content. Here I’m assuming that level 10 is the end of the newbie experience, and level 20 is the highest level 95% of the playerbase will reach within 1 month of starting play EVEN USING THOTTBOT et al to cheat their way through content faster.

Why? Because you lose subscribers at two points:
1. When they start playing.
2. when their first month subscription comes up for renewal.

All players should have completed the newbie experience (level 10) before their first subscrption renewal. From the moment they complete that, you want them to be more and more surprised, in a positive way, by how much “better” the game gets the longer they play. You also want to offset the decreased sense of wonder they have as individuals as they get to know the game and the world, so that they perceive a linear, constant, level of content quality (when in fact the content quality + volume is increasing, but their expectations are also increasing).

“Add new content on a regular basis” – like the outcome of a negotiated sales price (which can never go further in the vendors favour on future re-negotiations), whatever rate of content release you provide, you can NEVER reduce that rate in future, your players won’t let you. So DEFINITELY do not go around adding the “frequent” chunks at first that TDH recommends. That may well be suicidal.

“Make it easy for players to network, form guilds” – don’t bother. They will do it anyway. No MMO in existence has bothered to make this easy, and so the players have become adept at doing it themelves. This feature is therefore a complete waste of money – UNLESS you decide to make it a major competitive feature/advantage which becomes part of your sales strategy. Given how few MMOs do it even at a mediocre level or above, you could easily get great sales out of doing it well.

“Let players move characters between servers” – except that this destroys server-level community – something that all the big MMOs make heavy use of today. IMHO, the benefits to character-transfer outweigh the losses, ASSUMING you know what you’re doing and make use of those benefits, but TDH’s explanation (by omitting these) is probably going to lead many into weakening their game instead of strengthening it.

“Keep an open dialogue with the players” – Yes! This I agree with. Good recommendation.

So, just one of TDH’s points actually works without large amounts of hedging. Hmm. What about the “don’ts”?

What’s wrong with TDH’s list part 2: “Donts”

A general observation here: these have almost nothing to do with the realities of launching or post-launching an MMO; rather, they read like TDH’s personal bugbears of what he wishes that his MMO of choice did differently. I would humbly suggest that GigaOM is not the place to be airing a random selection of your personal criticisms of minor elements of someone else’s game-design (my personal blog, on the other hand, is an AWESOME place for me to be ranting about the quality of articles on other people’s sites. HA!). I’m only going to go through them for the sake of completeness, but mostly I’m not going to bother analysing them, they’re too trivial.

“Don’t promise features that are months away” – what TDH should have said was “in the management of online communities, Expectation Management is one of your core activities. This is also try of all mainstream AAA game development, just do what you would normally (not) do with a mainstream game”.

“Avoid having portals to future places” – this is just the same as the previous point. Nevermind.

“Don’t rebalance the game too much, too fast” – Hmm. Apart from directly contravening one of TDH’s “Do” points (”frequent updates and changes”) – what does TDH think updates are? Every update rebalances the game, de facto – “breaking [players] characters” is probably a good thing rather than a bad thing, as it extends the content for them (rebalancings can be the impetus for players to create an alt (second character) for the first time ever, and thereby increase attachment / stickiness for mass-market (non hardcore) players). Just don’t do an SWG NWE (if you don’t know what that is, google it – it was an extinction-level event in the Star Wars MMO that has masses and masses of commentary and post mortems all over the web).

“Publicly acknowledging problems” – Yes! Again, TDH’s final point actually has merit. Do it. It helps. But then again, this is nothing surprising – this is, in fact, part of that basic community management I referenced above.

Fine. “So, Adam”, I hear you ask, “if you’re so damn clever, what ARE the do’s and don’ts of launching an MMO, especially with respect to the post-launch period?”

Since I am currently technically unemployed – doing a Super Sekrit Stealthy Startup – I should really just put a PayPal donation link >HERE< and/or my cell number and an offer to answer your question (and any others you may have) at a discounted $100 an hour.

Launch Period: What Really Counts

For a subscription-based MMO (the target that GigaOM chose), two things count above all else:

1. Absolute number of registered active accounts

2. Conversion rate of registered accounts to subscribers who make one monthly payment IN ARREARS (i.e. one payment at end of month, or two payments at starts of months)

There’s some extra things that matter, because you NEVER launch an MMO in isolation – there has always been months or years of development leading up to this, and at least an alpha, if not two or even three betas, before launch:

1. Retention of final beta (usually “free”) accounts that convert to paid subscriptions

I’ll come back to all three of these in a later post – I’ve been meaning to write something up about this stuff for ages now, but I don’t have the time this instant to do it justice.

As a parting shot, though…

Big Background Question Number 1

Ask yourself (and your team) this:

Do you even know what an MMO launch is? A pre-launch? A post-launch? A live team?

…and think about it; a lot of people these days don’t stop to think about the knock-on effects of that question, and there’s really no excuse now – there’s so much evidence staring you in the face, in the form of many many MMO launches that have happened. If you can’t answer those questions – and understand the menaning behind them – go do some research ASAP before you get even close to launching.

It’s easy to gloss over the launch, think it’s a one-off special event you plan for, just like alpha, or beta. It’s easy to forget some of the complexity that is peculiar to launch. We had people at NCsoft (both external developers and internal staff) who failed to include the live team as part of the budget for their games. Live team is going to be anywhere from 50% to 150% of the size of the develoment team. Since dev team staff are the majority of the project cost, failing to budget for live team is a MASSIVE hole in your budget. There are games that have launched with live teams as low as 30% (I think there’s some that were even like 10% but I can’t remember any off the top of my head) of the dev team; they failed.

Damion Schubert came up with the term “AO Purgatory” (AO = Anarchy Online) to describe live teams with just enough income to pay for upkeep, bug fixing, etc, and a few bits of content upgrade – but not quite enough to add enough content, fix enough bugs, to cause the overall subscriber base to grow significantly month-on-month. Rule of thumb: I would never launch a game without a live team that was the same size as the dev team if I could avoid it. If I had someone else’s cash to burn, I’d budget for live being 125% size of dev.