Reevaluation
I have finally begun work once more on Project WOTAN. I am currently slogging away through the Administrative interfaces to the Item module, and I am almost "done." Of course, with the quotes ... when I say done, I am not factoring in the design work and requisite code debt. And then there is all the non-admin stuff -- the actual game.
I plan on beginning the Character module soon, therefore. But there is still a mountain of work to be done, and I am at least a week behind where I wanted to be. These sad truths have led me to reevaluate how I want to release WOTAN to world, further distilling my plans as WOTAN unfolds with the future.
First, I have to admit I feel a little down. I feel like I move really slowly, as if I should be much farther ahead than I am. WOTAN is, however, an educational enterprise for me. As I have mentioned before, little more than a year ago, my knowledge of SQL was non-existent and I could produce a http header redirect in PHP but not really know why. So WOTAN can be looked at as an almost-purely educational enterprise.
At any right, what I am driving at, is that while I still plan on reaching my first mile stone with WOTAN by August, I will be shifting gears somewhat and I will not be releasing "THE WIZARD'S TOWER" at that time.
As part of the whole learning process (I suppose) I realized that I have been doing and focusing on is more in lines with game development rather than game design. I suppose that might mean something substantive, but if not, what I am getting at is that rather than splitting my energy coming up with both a game engine and a game I would be better served investing all my time into the actual engine, and leave the game for farther down the road.
I plan instead, as I have mentioned in a previous post, to offer WOTAN to the public from a website dedicated solely to the engine. I still haven't decided on open-source versus proprietary licensing yet. I am leaning very strongly toward open sourcing WOTAN, however.
Looking beyond the Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf or Tunnels and Trolls aspects of the sort of game I would like to play on a WOTAN site, I realized that what I am creating is really only a very specialized type of content management system.
I am also trimming down a few of the planned features for the WOTAN engine. Movement-restriction will be left to the back-burner for a while. Game tokens, a.k.a. site RMT, have also been downgraded as a priority. Opponent NPCs are definitely still in, but if I have to make another cut, it will probably be Vendor NPCs. And this is not that these features won't make their way in eventually -- just not in August, or perhaps even before Christmas.
The first planned non-core module planned will be a Character Race module, which will be generic enough to double as a "class" module, or any other way the game master can think to express the concept. I want to do this one first because it will be relatively easy, and I plan to use its creation to document a "module how-to" guide. And for post-launch modules I plan on creating the aforementioned Site Token and Movement modules.
I think first, however, I will be exploring two modules to facilitate dynamic gameplay: a procedural "dungeon generator" and something I am still trying to wrap my mind around, but is based on the Mythic Game Master Emulator. The "dungeon generator" is not likely to be anything like what would be described if you were to google that term, and so while I am working on the other parts of the site I have been making a little side-project of conceptualizing. Like the latter mentioned GM emulator, I don't really have anything to say; expect to start hearing more in a month or two.
I believe I have found a great resource for artwork at DriveThruRPG. This eases my mind quite a bit, as the artwork is all really inexpensive and most of it has no licensing issues. So I plan on exploiting that resource a fair bit for illustration work.
That about covers where I am with all that. I having a raging hard-on for getting this project finished, however. Though the perpetual torpor of my malaise is like a constant weight around my neck. Oh well.
Player Auctions As Money Sinks
Recently, Brian "Psychochild" Green, of Meridian 59 fame, wrote two posts on the basics of an MMORPG in-game economy for the blog Game Design Aspect of the Month. I don't know if it was my green tea or my attempt to multi-task (and therefore my distracted state) whilst reading the posts that gave me a brilliant flash for a potential money sink.
During the of reading part two, I was struck by the sentence:
Except for taxes such as a fee for posting and/or selling goods, buying an item from an auction isn't a drain in terms of the game economy.
Taken at it's face value, anyone who has played World of Warcraft for more than a couple weeks understands this concept. However, I was struck with an idea for a "new" sort of money sink based on those awful bid-to-auction sites that have sprung up somewhat recently.
If you aren't already familiar, these sites (which I will neither name nor link to as they I find them morally reprehensible) entice people with promises of $20 Ipods and Xboxes. The catch is you must pay a fee for each bid you make. And each bid pushes the auction clock back X seconds. And you still gotta pay the closing price plus applicable shipping. Do you see where I am going with this?
I find the actual penny auction or pay-to-bid reprehensible because of their manipulative business plans that essentially disguise the fact they are gambling sites - if they identified themselves as such I would merely think the phenomenon foolish -- not potentially criminal. But if we were to apply this model to an MMORPG, it may produce some rather interesting results that could provide fun for the players and a large gold-sink for the game masters.
Upon quick reflection, I would structure them as special events that give the players the ability to win special items created solely for those events. Whether the items are merely cosmetic or uber phat lewtz is beside the point, excepting in their ability to generate player interest.
The players would buy bids to our special-event auction in lots, as an example say 500 gold for 49 bids. Now each bid will have a set price that cannot be deviated from; for our example we'll say 10 silver. (In our example we assume 100 silver = 1 gold.) Each time a person bids, they do not actually pay the 10 silver, but actually the 10.2 gold. To the player, they are paying "nothing," however, since they already paid for the bid previously when they bought the allotment. Keep in mind that, if strictly following the real-world penny auction model, the player will still also need to pay the final closing fee.
Continuing our example, let's say I oversee the game Planet of Pewcraft and I hold a special event auction where I auction off 50 Mounts of Worthlessness; I create the interest in the event largely by the fact these items are only available from this auction. Therefore there will only ever be 50 of them on a given server (until I start selling them for $25 in my graft item shop -- MWUHAHAHAH!!! /pinky finger), creating a high level of exclusivity. We can start the bid timer at a 72-hour countdown.
You can imagine that a good number of players will pour their hard-earned gold into buying bids. And buy bids they will, because it will then become a competition among the players to keep outbidding each other. And each bid costs 10 gold (though to the player it is 10 silver) and sets the clock back 10 minutes. This results in a self-perpetuating bidding war that could go on for weeks, driving the amount of gold sunk into bid-buying into potentially fantastic amounts. And the final bid price, should we choose to go with that aspect of the model, itself would be the icing on the gold-sink cake, even if closing at "only" several-thousand gold.
This is a rough sketch of an idea, as there are a lot of things to consider about how an auction would work both from a technical (what happens if because of the time extensions your auction never runs out?) and customer service (hopefully you don't have big gold-farmer population) standpoint. However, if carefully designed and executed in terms of knowing your players, I think an event like this could even work to "reset" a server's game economy by removing huge amounts of currency from the system.
Anyway, just a thought that allowed me to procrastinate an hour away.
Another Crippled Sorcerer-King
Hi, it's me. Just checking in with what I have been up to.
So, I have accomplished almost literally nothing in the past week, whether that involves working on my PBBG project WOTAN or even merely playing a game. I have been watching my four year-old son alone this whole time, and he does make it literally impossible to get anything done.
He has a special talent for picking up on when I am trying to do something other than mindlessly reading reddit. Like right now: I don't know if he is psychic, but he was just happily keeping to himself and playing with his toys and now that I have started this post he is magically pulling at my leg demanding my full attention.
Elric, last king of the Dragon Isle
I have also chosen this past week to "dry out" as I believe the saying is. Of course by that I mean I have ceased my famously-prodigous reefer consumption for a while. It is a necessary thing every now and then, like taking a vacation. Sadly, I am also the opposite of the typical pot-head stereotype in at least one regard: I utterly lack motivation to do anything when "sober." I suppose that is why I have loved marijuana from the first time I tried it, to me it is like Ritalin and Prozac all rolled into one. Sadly, like those drugs, it also has its downfalls but I chose it because it least it isn't as dangerous (or potentially addictive) as them.
So my ennui is very high, and my motivation is very low even without the distraction of a young child. Fortunately, I have a solid roadmap for WOTAN and I will be getting a short break from parenthood tomorrow so I hope to finish the basic Item module. It is true, I have relied on MJ a bit too much to keep me going, so a pet project of mine is to attempt to motivate myself and stay focused without the use of this crutch.
Is it any wonder my favorite non-Tolkien fantasy character is Elric of Melniboné? Unfortunately for Elric, he proves he is utterly unable to sustain himself without his drugs or his famous sword. But I think I'll be able to manage. I'm just more of a dick and a bit less patient without my Stormbringer.
Now, I do not plan on quitting outright. I find "quitting" most habits to be an utterly asinine concept. I used to smoke cigarettes quite a lot, and now I almost never smoke them. However, I keep a pack in the cupboard and when the mood strikes I will have one. I find it much more beneficial to merely "stop" than to add all the self-defeating stress and pressure of the feckless absolutist concept of "quitting." I am also very much not a fan of 12-step programs; I find all they are really good for is teaching you how to be a submissive cretin, not give you the strength, willpower and discipline needed to actually face your chemical demons. People who are 12-step acolytes may be "sober," but at the cost of thousands of little deaths each day. If I ever needed a program for an addiction, I would hope it would teach me to take control of myself, not surrender it to an outside idealogy.
And then again, even when smoking two packs every day, I didn't identify myself as a "smoker." I merely was a person who happened to enjoy smoking. And I still do, though it is an activity (albeit a disgustingly smelly one) I engage in perhaps once a week at best, perhaps a half-dozen times every few months.
And so it will likely go with the MJ. Then again, cigarettes never produced the beneficial effects on my brain chemistry that MJ does, so the analogy doesn't exactly fit. And if I find I, like the doomed hero Elric, am absolutely unable to function without some sort of chemical intervention I will always choose MJ over what I consider to be (if not actual) dangerous prescription drugs. So I may choose not to "stop," either. If so, I wonder if I will find myself impaled upon a stalk of hemp after witnessing the birth of a new world which I helped create after destroying my world? Not to give away the ending to the Elric saga or anything. See I can be evil too! Mwuhahaha!
Anyway, my work has been set back a week, but so what? I have been having doubts I will make my August deadline anyway, despite its looseness (notice I have never made a specific date, such as August 1st or August 12th or the like?). But if my release of WOTAN ends up being in September, I won't be terribly upset with myself.
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Combat Archaeology
- Elder Game
- Hardcore Casual
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- LOTRO Combo Blog
- Open Bracket
- OSG1 – Online Strategy Games
- Pumping Irony
- Ralph Koster
- Stylish Corpse
- The Core Mechanic
- Tish Tosh Tesh
- Troll in the Corner
Browser Games I Play
Fortuente Pages
Game Sites I Like
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