DataSmugglers

How to balance a MMORTS?

This Extra Credits episode starts a conversation…

Source… http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-mmorts

From it, we learn:

• MMO needs permanence and growth over time.
• RTS needs strategic combat.
• Instanced battles.
• Bring fixed worth of units to a battle.
• Small battles effect larger world politics (yawn)

The fantastic thing about being an Indie developer is not having to do things the ‘conventional’ way. I don’t mind if Ironfell is unbalanced, and I don’t mind if it’s unfair.  

Imagine, if you will, two players competing for a common goal. One starts earlier, entering into a world rich in natural resources. Woodcutters and Miners are promptly dispatched to gather wood and iron and when player two joins, there’s precious little left. Precious little, sure, but not nothing. Player two’s journey will certainly be more challenging, he’ll have to be craftier and cleverer, and he’ll undoubtedly have to invest more time and effort. But should he succeed in achieving his goal, he’ll value it far more. As long as that difficulty variance isn’t too extreme, this can improve the experience.

The design decisions that keep MMORTS fair involve too much compromise. Instanced battles that restrict the size of your army are fair, sure, but not exactly ‘MASSIVE’. If I have 18 million tanks, but I’m only allowed to take 200 into a battle, what’s the point in having 18 million tanks?

Unfairness is much more fun. A few days ago, my army of 10 knights and 100 archers made camp just outside of another player’s base. The player mentioned in passing that he was out of wood and had to stop building. Of course no wood for buildings means no wood for archers or swordsmen, so I attacked immediately and wiped his base of the face of Ironfell. Incredibly satisfying and fun! What about the other player? The victim of this unfairness? He vowed revenge and is currently amassing a ridiculous stockpile of resources with with to launch a counter-attack.

When I destroyed his base, there were no refunds and no rollbacks – that base is gone. When they built it in a PVP area, they knew that might happen. He chose to build there.

Players who have been in Ironfell for longer naturally have more resources and units. And yes, this gives them an unfair advantage. They can, if they choose, throw everything they have at a battle. A solution I mentioned yesterday, is to simply let players pay real money for resources.

Although, one player this week figured out a more cost-effective solution, guerrilla warfare! They snuck a single Archer and Miner behind another player’s defences and captured 8 of their iron mines, without being noticing. Is someone going to invent guerrilla warfare in a game with instanced battles?

One thing that does concern me is advanced players griefing newbies. The first and second realm new players encounter are safe. This gives them time to learn how Ironfell works. And safe areas are found throughout the game so players can always just explore. When they feel more confident, PVP areas are just a tunnel away. There is nothing gained by an advanced player by hurting new players. Some people, however, were born to troll and in extreme cases I suspect a GM will step in and stomp on the offender.

What about balancing the end game? Eventually, players reach a point where they’ve amassed so much resource that resources simply stop mattering. They can build anything they like, where ever they like (the Donald Trump Plateau). A this point, game becomes pure battle strategy. How do you trap your enemies? How do you break a blockade? Can you wait them out? Can you trick them?

If players want to spend real money and ‘Donald Trump’ themselves immediately, they can. They won’t have the same experience, they won’t be nearly as smart, and they may, as a result, be wiped out by other players in two seconds flat.  Or can cashed up brute force outweigh experience and strategy?

A permanent world means that players are hugely vulnerable while offline. This makes Safe and Unsafe realms  strategically important. Building a base in an unsafe area? Good luck – expect it to be gone by morning. Unless, of course, it’s well hidden, well defended, or your friends are there to keep watch.  That is so much more interesting than a 75% rebate on units lost while you are offline.

I don’t want to make a game wrapped in cotton wool with all pointy things removed. If you leave troops in a stupid place, you’re gonna have a bad time. And no, you don’t get a refund if they’re killed while you’re not watching. You should have been watching.

The thing about being Indie is that I can turn these ideas into a real game, and see if they work. I don’t know if Ironfell will work, but it’ll be fun finding out.

http://test.ironfell.com

Free to pay?

I hate “Free to play”, it’s dishonest and stupid.

I liked Farmville, right up until I found the pink flamingos… and saw that I HAD to pay money for them.  Zynga still has my pink flamingo hostage, I refuse to pay its ransom.  Although if they had phrased it like that, I might have payed.

Notch sums it up nicely:
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/11856491580/i-hate-free-to-play

But… I’ve made a game… people like playing it…  you can play it here… for free…  but how am I going to pay my rent?

Here’s a clip from futurama where that image came from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHUpWuqNHY

Tim Schafer / Double Fine have made a lot of money from this business model with Kickstarters help.  Props to them and the other people doing this.  But…  what happens in a years time, when a large percentage of those Kickstarter games aren’t finished, or worse, they suck.  If you are one of the 11,530 people who donated $100 each to double fine for a special edition of a game that doesn’t exist yet… how pissed off will you be if you receive nothing?

I think crowdsourced funding is fantastic, and people will get rich from it,  but I think even more people will be burned by it.

So what am I going to do with Ironfell?

I’m funding it myself.  By freelancing, spending my savings, and keeping the costs as low as possible.  No investors, no partners, no crowd sourced funding.  Keeping everything lean and under my control.

A huge cost saving could be to open source the servers.  And let people host their own servers, like Minecraft does.  The drawback to this is that people would be playing in separate universes, or if the servers are connected, one person could spawn unlimited resources on their server, and take them to battle on someone elses server.  There’s ways to design around these things, but it’s all compromises.

Advertising in the game, on loading screens, menus and on the website will help a little bit.  T-shirts and stickers, definitely, buy merchandise needs a certain level of scale before it becomes profitable.  Those might buy me a beer or two, but won’t pay for the servers.

An iPhone/iPad version would be soo coooool,  and also crazy expensive to build.  I can’t afford to pay for it until the game is popular.  I could find a partner to build it, but they’ll be stupid to do that unless the game was already proven and popular.

My original plan was to let people buy custom realms.  Let users customize the terrain and give them Trees and Iron Deposits in their newly purchased realm.  For example a 64×64 size realm, 4096 cells, could cost $6.  A 256×256, 65,536 cell realm $50.  New realms are what use the most server resources, so paying for new realms nicely supports the server hosting costs.

And then there is directly paying for resources…  Would you pay a dollar for 10,000 Iron?

At first I was totally against this, thinking that it would cause a few rich people to unbalance the game.  But in the end game, resources don’t really matter, and its about your strategy, and how much time you can spend clicking on your army which counts.

Several people have asked to buy resources already.  Usually they’re in the middle of an epic raid, and they run out of Wood. They could wait a day to get gather some more,  but they want to keep fighting.  So dropping a dollar in my tip jar in exchange for a huge pile of wood is something people already want to do.

The biggest issue I have with it is that people might be victimized by other players for paying for resources. But people who pay are directly supporting Ironfell and paying my rent.  I’m not EA and I drive a beaten up Toyota.  People who pay need to be respected, rewarded and looked up to. They’re the reason I can make this game.

One idea I’m toying with, is for every dollar you spend, you get a vote on what my next priority is with developing the game.  Something like the sliders on the humblebundles,  so you can choose to vote for Guilds,  Resource Trading,  GM and Griefing tools or more units and terrain.

I totally understand that some people don’t want to pay, that’s okay.  Everyone adds to the game world, the more people play, the more everyones experience improves.  I promise to make every game item and resource available in the game without a payment.  I might go one step further and make it so you can buy each resource… except Uranium, which will be uber-rare, and ONLY found in the game.

I want to make a fun game, played by nice people.
But it needs to pay my rent, or I won’t be able to make it.

What do you think?

Ironfell – Ponies

Just put another little update live.  New tunnels are the biggest thing.  But also PONIES!

Check out twitter for the full update details.

Ironfell – Where are the space ships?

Someone got upset at me today because they were promised space ships in Ironfell.  :|

Yes! there will be space ships!   eventually  … <grin>

Here’s a bit more of a storyline…

“You travel back in time to plunder resources from the past.  Something goes wrong, you are lost in the past. You must rebuild your empire and create a time-gate to travel back to the future. Realms start of as mountain valleys, then continents, and islands, space stations, asteroids, and eventually other worlds. Tech tree stretches from medieval swordsman to intergalactic space ships.  Spacesuits visiting medieval mountain valleys.”

Ironfell, What’s next?

We’ve reached a huge milestone with yesterdays update.  Ironfell is now properly in beta.  So what’s next?

I’ve done my best with the game design and balancing,  but everything can change once real people start playing and breaking a game.  So first priority is to get more people through the game, gather their opinions and feedback.

Will people grief in the Safe Public realms?

Will people forget to build Farmlets and run out of food?

Is the pacing too slow?

And then I start thinking about all the possibilities… pirate ships,  stone henge,  whirlpools,  space ships,  alien worlds.   Eventually, hopefully,  if this game one day pays my rent,  I want to add thousands of units and hundreds of different terrain types.   An iOS version… Ironfell would be beautiful on an iPad.    Tools for users to design units, terrain and create new realms themselves!  An free API so you can code your own game clients and robots.

What you can play now is just the tip of the iceberg,  the 29 units in the game are pretty much just a tutorial.

So stop reading this, and go play  :)   test.ironfell.com

Ironfell Update

Hello!  I’ve just dropped a pretty big update on to the test server…

http://test.ironfell.com

• improved server performance
• improved new user experience
• lots of new unit artwork
• and balanced resources.

Choose what to build wisely… iron is rare, and you will run out :)

Ironfell Progress

I know nobody reads this blog, but it’s good for me to keep updating it, just for my own sake.

I’ve updated the test server today with proper artwork for two units and a new logo! :)  (thankyou Damon!)