Escaping the Tar Pit Called “Game Content”
Posted in Game Design, Tips on December 8th, 2008 by Rafael
How can a small developer produce enough content to keep a massively multiplayer game interesting?
Fun is not a full time job
More and more browser games want to be World of Warcraft, which, in practice, usually means that they try to suck you into spending your whole day grinding. Our game is designed to be played for about fifteen minutes per day. Why? Mostly because we expect that our players will have lives outside the game, and we don’t want to ruin them. The side benefit is that we don’t need to produce content as quickly, since players can’t burn through everything in a single insomniac sitting.
Rough Sea needs you
The MMOG content problem arises because there are more players than developers. So why not allow players to make their own content? Everyone wins: creator players get in-game rewards and the pleasure of seeing their work in the game world; consumer players get more copious and varied content. Of course, vetting submissions is a lot of work, but we may be able to use voting, etc., to get the players partially to supervise themselves! Many web sites (eBay, flickr, facebook) and computer games (Sims, Spore, Little Big Planet) are either founded on or enriched by “user created content”, but browser games haven’t twigged yet.
Use your words
The convential wisdom is that people hate having to read while playing a computer game — it’s a visual medium, like film — and that “reading” on the web consists of skipping as much text as possible. Our game, while primarily graphical, uses text to describe special events that occur in the course of play. Are we crazy? Possibly — and if playtesting shows that reading sucks, we’ll scrap it and redesign. But since players will only see a couple of text-based events per day (and since we hope to attract literate players, not twitch monsters), we hope that these will be seen as welcome variety, not as a chore.
And what are the advantages of text?
- it’s faster to write an atmospheric text than to create the same mood with art or sound. That means we can deliver more content.
- writing requires no special software or equipment, which makes it especially suited to user created content as described above.
Left to Chance
Computer games discovered early that a computer, given the right formulae, can create a huge, complex world much faster than a human can. The procedurally generated approach isn’t suited to text, nor to our style of graphics, but it is excellent for creating spaces for people to explore.
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