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Suggestions from my own sad attempt to brainstorm a game #39
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So a lot of what you're suggesting falls into the what about modding question in the FAQ. I already have plans and ideas to implement new themes while reusing most of the code. There are other browser based games that have some mechanic features similar to the ones you are suggesting: Alot of these games have either lots of different playable classes/races, terrain manipulation, magic/skills systems, and crafting/alchemy systems. Some of those games goal is exploration, survival, or combat. I've played them all and I found a lot of their features to offer some flexible and interesting gameplay possibilities. With that said, ZT will be aimed at only humans vs zombies. I have no plans to alter this anytime soon. But, a spinoff/mod that I plan on making after ZT is finished is based on a game called Space Station 13. SS13 has different game modes revolving around an antagonist attacking the station:
I really want to remake SS13 game using ZT's code. I'd try to include all the playable classes/races mentioned in the scope of the game. Some of the features you are suggesting would be implemented in a remake like this. This would be made after ZT is launched and completed. |
/removes hat Well, I guess that would be two games I would like to help you with. ZT first, then the sequel. Thanks for the tip on SS13. I've played Shartak and Shintolin before, but they just didn't grab me like Q19 did. I got the impression of games that had lost all their players with just a few diehards clinging on, even more so than Q19. Hell Rising was a bit like that too. Whatever you do, please please please implement a tutorial level. There were so many people who made characters in Q19, then couldn't climb in buildings, died on the streets and left the game. I chatted with people who played for a month without figuring out what a radio did or how to turn one on, who never figured out how to check messages or turned into a zombie and didn't know they could become human again. I sent my human around the board, messaged every new player I found, and counted 71 new accounts in two weeks. I think most of them got confused and frustrated and left. Second, please please please make all new accounts go through Facebook or Google Play or VK, some platform that requires proof of identity. Trolls get kicked off a game, spoof an IP address and get right back on. A few months later, every player who doesn't want to be called a f#$%ing c$%^ every day has left the game. I'm not thrilled with FB / Google / Amazon Big Brother stuff, but anonymous trolls ruin games. |
Just to elaborate on some of these comments.
The fog of war sounds really cool. To some extent the Terminal system (which functions like NecroNet computer network) has a large data map for positions of zombies that have been actively scanned. I thought about doing something like this for the zombie side to track humans, but considered it too powerful. Instead one of the zombie classes (Hunter) has skills devoted towards tracking.
To keep the Terminal system useful, humans must scan zombies frequently, as any action the zombie performs removes the scan.
Another feature I am toying with is CCTV's for humans to setup inside/outside buildings. This will be a feature added at a much later time, (not in the
I really like these both, although it would be tricky to implement due to balance reasons. This type of feature would be a must have for the SS13 spinoff because there are lots of traps in the game that can be made.
Someone on the discord mentioned something similar to this. The ability to use a workbench in a building to repair items. It would need two items of the same type, but result in a better quality item by salvaging the parts of the worse quality item. It makes sense, and would be trivial to implement. I would like this feature to be apart of the
One thing that I thought was unique to Shartak was environmental manipulation. The terrain jungle would grow and it could tangle a player inside it. It could even be set on fire! I haven't seen something like this setup in a grid/browser based game before. Although this would not be a system that would do ZT any good, it'd be a cool feature to have in a different spinoff.
A tutorial level indeed sounds necessary. I wouldn't want new players rage quitting and leaving with a bad impression of the game. A quick how to play guide should be simple and easy to add.
I already have plans to let Facebook do the authentication so I don't have to mess with setting up an account/password system for players. It should save me a decent amount of development time. Lastly, thank you for all the ideas, concerns, and suggestions. :) |
The other thing I had spent some time considering was a money model. The game needs to be at least self-supporting, and I had read some articles about how the supply of game ad revenue was drying up, or at least, not as profitable as it used to be. I came up with an alternative that met with a universal and probably well-deserved "Meh. I don't see that happening," but there were a few elements within that bear a second look. From an email I had sent to Sv7, hoping to talk him out of abandoning the game and giving him a reason to improve it: *__I had an idea for in-game micropayments that I haven't seen elsewhere, and thought I'd share it on the off chance that it would make developing a sequel to Q19 into a profitable venture. Have you checked out the Amazon Mechanical Turk? Amazon.com pays human beings small amounts of money to do small tasks that algorithms can't manage-- tagging images or typing text found in images, for example, or removing false positives from their "Customers Also Bought . . . " recommendations so customers don't get suggestions like this:_ * *I'm not sure if that means lots of eighty-year-olds are playing CoD:MW, or if college kids can't be bothered to get up to pee. Either way, these days someone gets paid about $.04 to edit those dumb suggestions out. Let's assume that Amazon would allow the game to make a corporate account. Earnings from all work performed would be paid to the account, and players would have agree to that in the terms of service. Suppose that part of the MMORPG is for each player to have a "job." Before the player's action points start to accrue, each player must perform ten small actions per day on the Mechanical Turk, earning ten job points. Job points could be banked indefinitely. If each player performs ten tasks daily averaging $.05 each, the game would earn $15 per player each month. (A player could choose not to perform the job by paying a small subscription fee, say, $3.00 a month.) I would further suggest that each round, groups should be required to pay group dues, either as cash or as job points donated by group members. If a group has not achieved its dues goal by the end of the round, the members will not automatically be allowed to play together next round. The group may be split apart to balance the number of players on each side. Developing a game is a job, and a game developer deserves to be paid. I hope this would provide a bit of inspiration to improve and continue a project that quite a few people enjoyed. Let me know what you think. (It's okay if the answer is that you are burned out on the whole project and want to move on. I wouldn't ask the question if I weren't ready to hear a real answer.)_* Okay, so forget most of that. Getting real money involved is a terrible idea bound to get people feeling used and angry. But it is still a good idea to encourage people who want in-game goodies like group membership instead of playing as a feral to pony up something for the privilege. Hence; idea #2. Some games make users watch ads or take surveys or download apps or upvote the game itself on game sites. Did you know that there are a whole bunch of citizen science websites (and yes, even games!) that rely on volunteer labor to help scientists analyze data? Do you think they might possibly shoot a bit of cash your way if you asked players to spend a little time on their sites? NASA has one, for example: https://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/welcome , as explained by this article in the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8364865.stm. Most projects, like the ones on Zooniverse, are much smaller and have microscopic budgets, but who knows? Maybe they'd have ten bucks a year to be included in your list of places to earn in-game points. If you ask players to post a few pictures of clouds or identify some sea stars in a picture for a few minutes a week in exchange for a personalized weapon, or the ability to edit your avatar, or even the ability to get a building in which you will not be attacked for a week (great for vacations!), maybe they'd do it. Plus, there's that feel-good vibe from doing something positive in the world that you don't get from clicking through the same ad for Final Fantasy XXXXVIII every three minutes. Before bringing this up with you, I emailed Chandra Clark of the Citizen Science Center to ask if this is an idea worth pursuing. She suggested getting in touch with individual projects at Zooniverse to see if such a thing would be feasible, as some projects do have issues with recruitment and turnover. I'll forward you the email exchange if you are interested. Anyway, if the ads don't turn out to be quite as profitable as you hoped, there's at least one alternative that hasn't been tried before. |
This is something that I already realized and was transitioning to. Communicating all the game data to graphics is a much more efficient way to communicate, and appeals to lots of players. (not everyone likes text descriptions, lol)
Wow. This is a really good idea and solves a few problems for my UI. Definitely going to implement this.
While I am going to be using more higher resolution sprites, I would try to communicate barricade/power information in the sprite color somehow.
This is pretty smart. I'll look into doing this.
Haha, I'm sure I can slip this into the game discreetly. -____- I have examined different possibilities for funding regarding monetization. The options I have come up with are: In-App Ads (measured in eCPM, Cost-Per-Mile) [ie. 1,000 views]
In-Add Purchases
There would be virtual tokens that a player could earn by surviving |
I definitely approve of the ads, especially for a few more AP. There were times that I stayed up late to get into a building and not die on the street. Not only would I have sat through a graphic ad for a protologist to get into that damn building, I would have seriously wavered about sitting through a proctologist's exam. My only concern comes from the stuff I had been reading about the amount of money ads generate, stuff like this. Naming rights to tiles would be useful, but there's going to be a finite number within the city, especially if not all the map gets used until the population expands. I'm more enthusiastic about costume purchases, maybe even the right to edit your own sprite and upload the result? The harmless weapons for humans served a purpose in Q19. Before injecting a zombie for resurrection, they had to be below 10 hp, and not every zombie put their most recent hp in their character description. Hitting with a harmless weapon gave a message like "You hit Grayface McGee with your Yo-Yo for 0 points of damage. Grayface McGee has 14 hp," or something like that. It would tell you the hit points without killing them and making them blow ap to stand up again. If that would be useful within your game's mechanics, it would be unfair to ask players to pay for it. If it bears no relevance to the game mechanics, I'm not sure it would be a popular purchase. There's something that doesn't quite sit right about charging to rename your character or make an alt. Because games in the past have given that away for free, there's an impression of nickel-and-diming players to access enough of the game to be worth playing. Paying for unlimited server hits might go over better, especially for players who like to hunt by refreshing the screen every minute or two. Speaking personally, when I buy something from a game, I like it to be permanent, at least through the end of the round. There may be people out there who don't mind buying a gun for $.99 and watch it get used up in a day or two, but that would piss me off to no small extent. The game needs to be playable (and winnable) without purchases, but if players want added benefits or convenience, that should be payed for. One problem Q19 had with its payment system was that longstanding players paid once, then kept using the services. The Undeadites group, for instance, paid to form once and just kept adding members. There was no point to making a new group when a kick-ass one already existed that would add you for free. There's got to be a way of getting money from the same people month after month (or at least round after round) without annoying them. My suggestions along those lines:
Small sample (with a little shout-out to fans of Resident Evil 2): As you walk into the abandoned police station, you absentmindedly pick a tourist pamphlet out of a wall rack in the foyer. It is an informational brochure about the history of the building in which you stand. You open the pamphlet and glance at a random paragraph inside. " . . . rejection of the concept of the open office in favor of the puzzle-based work space. The architecture of the Townnameville Police Station is reminiscent of his earlier work in Raccoon City, especially his award-winning design for the Raccoon City Police Department. Every trip to the Townnameville Police Station evidence locker required moving fourteen separate blocks shaped like chess pieces, while a trip to the bathroom without inserting twelve jeweled keys in a specific order triggered an avalanche of venomous snakes." Snakes?!? You look around, scan the ceiling for trapdoors, then continue reading. "The Townnameville Police Station was completely gutted and renovated within six weeks of its original opening after an unfortunate incident involving mirrors, lasers, a flamethrower and a temp who tried to find more typewriter ribbons in the supply cabinet. Recent attempts to restore the structure to the architect's original vision have been met with resistance from the staff." You crumple the pamphlet into a ball and throw it to the floor.
|
Sorry about the length. Really. (Hangs head in shame). Cannibalize or ignore at will.
I had posted some ideas about a replacement game on the Q19 forum, but Sv7 seems to have wiped a bunch of threads. Let's see what I can reconstruct from pitch emails:
We reached peak zombie a few years ago. The cultural time we live in isn't the same one as the time that zombies became popular. If anything, today's threats are more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers-- is that person who lives next door or works in the next cubicle or drives that truck really just like us or is there something inside their heads that makes them a threat?
I had suggested a new game with a series of rotating monsters trying to take over the same town. The winner of the round becomes the home team and faces a new invader in the next round. For example, humans and zombies fight in round one. Zombies win, so they fight people controlled by alien plants in the next round. Maybe the plants win the next round and fight cultists possessed by a Cthulu-type evil god or people controlled by Illuminati brain chips or something. Humanity just becomes one more set of monsters to cycle through.
Who's to say that the different species can only infect or inject the other? Maybe there's a species of changling that can take the shape of some other player, or a clan of gnomes that can kidnap you and drop you in random spots on the board, etc. Let your imagination run.
Imagine that both sides playing, no matter what species they are, have a goal to reach that does not involve ruining the entire city. Both sides need to build something or accomplish a goal, both sides barricade or tear down barricades, both sides destroy the other side's work. You can play a more complicated strategy game (like the humans) or just destroy stuff (like the zombies) for either team. For example: the humans want to knock out the zombified / infiltrated humans, sample their brains and find a cure. The plant people want to inject spores into enemies to control them and ultimately build a giant greenhouse for the Triffid Queen. The brain chip people want to spread more brain chips around and build a quantum computer to take over the world. The cultists want to possess enough humans to fill the city with enough evil altars to summon the god.
Both sides need to build artifacts within buildings and keep them secure, both sides need to destroy the other's artifacts, both sides can barricade and must destroy the other team's barricades to pass. Humans nail up plywood and pour concrete; plants can grow Sleeping Beauty- type brambles around a house; cultists create a wall of psychic energy or hang up some really unnerving tapestries, etc.
By giving each side a positive goal (find a cure, build an altar, etc. like what the Q19 humans did) and a negative goal (ruin stuff and attack the enemy like Q19 zombies), players can play for either side while keeping their preferred play style. Changing the species around would also encourage people to try something new and keep the game from growing stale. Also, if one species turns out to be no fun to play, it can be dropped or replaced, or fixed behind the scenes while the game goes on for the players.
Players can choose to make a character (or two) on either side (or both) upon entering the game. If there's an option for choosing "Surprise me!," the game could assign the new player to the side with fewer players to keep things fair, or perhaps tell a new player that X humans and Y plant people are playing. People playing on teams could enter a side together. The win conditions the teams need to reach should be flexible and reflect the number of active players on the board. In case of one side outnumbering the others, the game will adjust the goals so the outnumbered side doesn't need to grind through a stomp and hope for a better round in a few months.
Suppose the next game round is Plant People versus Evil Cultists. You are playing for the first time and decide to be a Plant Person. The round has started several weeks ago, so there are characters in the game who are already much better than you and the barricades are already up. Now what?
Tutorial Level: You start with a small set of practice buildings in which to find items, download your "radio app" (in-game chat), find a weapon, practice defeating a cultist, tear down their altar, flag the map and whatever else is important to know how to do. Perhaps the cultists barricade by casting evil spells, so you need to remove the spell and raise your own barricade of prickly thorns. The tutorial will also explain that the goal of your side is to build greenhouses to grow enough plants to take over the area, so you loot a building for supplies and build a greenhouse. The goal of the other side is to build evil altars all over town to raise the Death God, and you must destroy their altars.
You finish the tutorial level and move to the main game. Because some of the buildings are not useful to either side in this round, and the goal is not to repair or destroy the whole town, there are buildings that are not worth barricading. Now you don't have to spend your energy climbing repeatedly into a building, failing, and dying on the street (and getting annoyed and rage quitting the game immediately, like the 71 new accounts I found at the end of last round.) There are places to hide besides the street while you build your skills.
Because you have unlocked a radio app in the tutorial, you can contact other members of your side and tell them you have joined the game. (Perhaps the higher level players have a recruitment skill that tells them when new players join the game.) Also, the information on the metamap is available to all players of the same species.
I imagine a fog-of-war system in which your side only knows what is going on if some other member of your side has visited the square recently. Maybe the large map for the entire species gets updated only if the person uploads the building status to the metamap, but the information fades after six hours or when an enemy goes in. To keep the information current, the side must set up an alarm (flags the metamap when set off) or a camera system (records the actions performed within the building in the last eight hours, or records the last 100 actions) or leaves a trap (metamap flagged when set off, enemy character is harmed in some way). These would function like generators, and make the building's stuff (greenhouses, altars, etc.) harder to ruin.
I also imagine a crafting system which will make looting more important. You know all that stuff lying on the floor when you spend 35 ep looking for a vial or a medkit in Q19? What if you could consolidate the items into a better item? Zombie Pandemic also did this. A crowbar at 15% strength plus a crowbar at 25% strength equals a crowbar at 30% strength, (then 35%, then 40% as your repair skill goes up.) There would be a point to finding all that stuff, and you wouldn't need so much inventory space for spare weapons.
Quarantine 2019 players have been complaining about the brain/ ruin ratio for years, as far as I can tell by reading older forum posts. What if the goal changed depending on the number of active players in the game? Urban Dead does something similar by making revivification syringes easier to find when there are more zombies in the game. Fewer plant people means fewer greenhouses needed. More evil cultists means more altars needed. No more stomps.
Triggering the win should automatically announce the new invading enemy and reset the game for the next day, just enough time for players to decide which side to play and line up teams for the next round.
The city remains the same in each round. Create all the artwork only once. However, different resource buildings would be more or less important depending on which monsters are playing. Humans would need hospitals and labs for the cure; plant people might need the window glass factory and hardware stores and lumber yards for their greenhouses, etc. No one would need the abattoir or the Candle Shoppe until the cultists show up and need to build altars, etc. Since ruining the entire city isn't the goal, there would always be some open buildings for new players to hide in, so they won't die on the street after not finding an unbarricaded building and rage quit immediately.
How about using the players' time away from the game as game content? Perhaps the characters can set traps for each other instead of just walking up and killing them. Maybe a cultist character might expend action points to set a trap in a building to possess a human character who chooses to sleep there (log out for an hour). Triggering a low level trap would cause the human to climb outside the safety of a house where she could be eaten. A high level trap that takes, say, 25 action points to set might give the trapper control of the possessed character for 50 ap and force the possessed character to find the nearest teammate and attack him or break his own team's artifacts or de-barricade some doors, etc. Possessing the character in real time would be a blast too.
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