Game Dev: Upgrade Games

Improvement or Upgrade Games involve the player starting on a stage, a problem, a way to solve the problem, which cannot be done first attempt, but each attempt give you some kind of currency (information, cash, whathaveyou) which allows you to improve the stage/solution to be better at each attempt. Usually within 5-15 minutes, you've played it enough rounds to win. Your Meta Goal is to play again and beat your previous score. 

The Interesting thing about such games, is that the Upgrade is a component of bigger games, but has been simplified to just that one aspect, upgrading. Usually though, upgrade games involve an actual game task, as simple as it can be, from just clicking (Must-a-mine) steering (Hedgehog Launcher) Timing (Berzerk Ball) or 

How to Monetize?

Upgrade games are time wasters, which typically means a player is very unlikely to waste money on it as well. That said...

Upfront cost would require the user really wanting to play the game (word of mouth or competitive challenge) or the game having some further reaching goals.

Theoretically, a pay to win formula might be to have some far reaching trophy goal, one that you could achieve by playing a million times, or by paying $5 worth of upgrades, which unlocks the trophy.. you get to see the content which you paid for with your $5.. or someone without the means, with their million plays (maybe they should have different endings)

Microtransactions, Potentially the game could be far more fun if you use special upgrades that don't change the game play, but add a different style for the paid gamer.. again, if they know they are paying for the different graphic content, they might be more likely to buy into it.

This line to be edited, when I post the "Pay to..." topic in the future.

Game World Religions & the Biggest Problem

Sketching on the bus to Uni, I wrote about a religion which believes in a heaven/hell concept. They world as they knew it was a coin, but since no-one (they knew of) had ever traveled to the other side and returned, it was reasoned that the other side was hell.

The Religion is known as the Coynerites. They follow the concept that in the beginning, the world was flipped like a coin, as a bet between good and evil. If the coin lands (in the distance future, or maybe tomorrow) on any given side, its because its the heavier side. that side will be crushed, all who reside will be destroyed, and good & evil will know their place in this world, i.e. part of or banished.

So, in order to be the winning side, its imperative that the good side must make as many people bad, without being bad themselves, so that the bad side becomes heavier, and thus squashed, so the good side will be the inheritor of the world.

Mixed up logic.. but logical in its process (as any religion would be) and theoretically its right.. except that as creator of the world, I know that its not.. but that never stopped any religion before, from believing that its right.

And I begun to think.. hang on.. I don't ever remember reading about a gaming religion that had it wrong.. most of them, believe in a god, and that god exists, and they know it, because occasionally he does things and can be seen & heard. Clerics ask for powers, and receive them, so they know their god exists (albeit, the reasoning for the god might not match what the followers believe)

Does a religion, based on faith alone, belong in gaming? can it exist?

I've done a little research into different worlds, different gods, for the most part, its always true (cept some planescape) each religion believes in a god/power that exists, as such there is no real faith, its all choice. 

Ill Gotten Gains

Something that my players may or may not be aware of, but most likely should be at some point, is the idea that you are watched..

maybe not always,

maybe not specifically,

but if you notice your neighbours, a new car, new paint on the house, doing up the garden, maybe some expensive looking things, coming and going.. fridges, washing machines.. you cast your mind back to before it all happened, and they were having some big party, late into the night..

could it not be likely, they just won the lottery?

So, in a medi-eval town, where no television or radio exists, and the most common entertainment would be gossip. Everyone is watching, and talking and comparing notes..

Everyone.

They watch, they talk, they whisper.. and word gets around.. who lives where, what do you think they do, what have you seen them doing, do they display means of wealth or are they poor as dirt, do they have manners, or are they drunkards (or both)


So, if you lived in a medieval city, and you acquired a few thousand gold, even without spending.. the sheer joy and fear of having that much, would surely be noticed...

World Development: Civilization 2, 3 and 4

There's one thing I seem to be very good at, figuring out how to be lazy and yet still get good results.

Civs Tech Tree, Mine Tripled it, for just the Middle Ages

So Way back in '96 I got Civilisation II, and while I played it probably non stop for a year, I got bored enough with its generic, simplification of technologies and the early years of the game.. so like many Civ players, I learn how to Mod the game.

But I had more purpose than that.

Civ created a Map for you, Major cities, borders, races and politics, within the Cities you could list the basic buildings available to its citizens, you had access to a wide variety of information, did they have access to resources, what kind of population was happy (rich) vs unhappy (poor, criminals)

You could create an entire roleplay world in a matter of hours, what would take an average writer months and months..

So I did... but it wasn't good enough,

Lord of the Rings Icons suits many a fantasy setting!

So I edited CivII, Added in more relevant techs for a historical setting, high fantasy but low magic world, I joined Civ Fanatics, I wrote about changes, I uploaded and downloaded images, shared ideas and developed a Fantasy Themed Civ game..

Then I inflicted it upon my friends and roleplay group.. Civ II only allowed 4 human players. so we had to replay the map in sections to create a decent enough history & backstory..

My group liked it well enough to want to do it again, So I decided to create some 'back story' maps too.

Tyranosaurus Rexicus Maxiumus Invades Cairo

 There was a Mod for Civ II something to do with dinosaurs, they 'ate' forests to increase their size, nested for created baby dinosaurs, some could chew up the land to create lakes & if nearby sea beds..

This was like a terraforming Mod (I went on to make this into 3 games) which worked brilliantly.. It got my players interested in making the land masses, shaping the world, choosing if a region should be forested, or chewed up by the dinosaurs to become grasslands (or when a dinosaur died, become oil fields)

My team, inflicted once again, played out 3 rounds of this.. I amalgamated the maps into one, and this determined some 'ancient structures' as well as some 'interesting landscapes'.

Around 1998-1999, Civ III came out... with a far easier editor.. but better yet 16 players! I took a year to create a Mod for this, all new graphics, all new designs, new Units, new tech tree..

Dragons, Magicians, Knights, Castles. Civ IV has enough models, I could do it all again!!

and we never played it. Real life took everyone in new paths..

But, it did give me the impetus for Fantasy Kingdoms, years later, I would discover, this idea that players are very willing to participate in world generation.. if you give them the right tools.

So, if you're looking at this great big world you're thinking of creating, and it seems like such a huge job.. why not do the same.. Start one of the many Map ownership games that exist out there, with some friends (maybe even your gaming group) and build the back story of your world together.. share the workload in a fun manner

Your play team will often surprise you and include things you could have never thought of.....

Original Stats: The Mage

When we first started looking at putting together the Mage in our system, we had 3 players who tried magic, Mattius the Thaumaturge, was an experimenter, he had no real spells, just things he picked up along the way, Reym the Elven Mage/Fighter, who had some augmentation for combat, and finally Sutekh, the sprite, who had a range of natural abilities, but not specific magics.

Remember, this was back in 2nd Edition Rules, The Amalgamation of all systems had begun, but magic was far down the list.. so in order to make a playable game, I just hobbled together the spell lists, averaged out some spells and levels to match something clean, and ended up with a hodgepodge of mismatched rules that made little to no real sense..

which is magic, when you think about it.

Magic is either science or its Not

My First big problem was that I was reading far too much Science Fiction at the time, Issac Asimovs stories of Azazel the 'Demon' using high level technology to create the effects, which seemed like magic. 

In '96 I went to a community college to get a degree on Computer Science and was learning about databases.. one thing I put together was a structure of 'cause & effect' for spells.

Then at the Same College I met some teachers, who put me onto some Professors at University, who were very keen to discuss how magic could work under the laws of Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism and Looking into Spirituality and how it could be represented in a magical system.

Now, while I have remade the rules of Combat several times, Archery several times, Stealth several times, Magic remained the same system for many many years..

Here's how it worked then, and still does for Version 3..

All spells, based on their school, had a difficulty level to study, A Study requirement, an Imperfection level to cast spells. The Caster would roll for cast spell, if passed, they had an imperfection chance %, but if failed, this value was increased by the spell difficulty x The failure result.

Back then, Magic worked on a number of d8s  x the spell level. so 1st level spells could fail up to 8 pts (if you had no score) and the highest 16th level spells, could theoretically fail by 128pts. We were experimenting with varied dice pools at the time.. my colleague was trying to make a 3d8 version of the whole system, arguing if 2 dice gave a good bell curve, 3 dice would be better.

Again though, Maybe because the magic was so broken, or so difficult to learn a spell, or the number of players I had was so limited, I needed a group to play some mages..

So the OS team were born.. 5 Mages, down on their luck, driven out of town after town for some shocking trickster attempts, vowed to return to vent their revenge, sought out some powerful magics and blew themselves to smithereens when the imperfection failed far too much. But in that time, I did manage to clean up the magic rules from v2 to v3.

v3.5 is another story for another day.. 

The Lists

In the endeavours of my system, my best friend Craig, had joined me in the idea of creating this awesome system. He introduced me to rolemaster, Wow, I thought my game was complex... I am curious how modern gamer kids view it, or if they even come across it..

But what we did back then was to grab all the systems we had access to and write out this big lists..

All the Skills, All the Spells, All The Traits, Flaws, Statistics, Modifier charts, Everything.. including all double-ups.. until we had this big BIG set of lists..

Early on, we check for things that were similar duplicates, but also, different duplicates.. wrote notes about how or why they were different.

Skills were broken into three groups.. easy medium and hard.

Spells were left in a big pile for much later.

While things changed, we always came back to these lists to check if we missed something.. sometimes it was a tweak of an idea, where we had the concept wrong from the start.. other times it needed to be scratched out.. too many skills based on the same thing, just because English language has two words for it, doesn't make it separate skills (but often it does)

Original Stats: Ranger

After Reading the Players Hand book on Rangers, AD&D, I thought that making a Hunter Profession was too specific.. By about now, I'd figured that while I liked the concept of Professions, like Warhammer, I also liked to group classes, like D&D.

Warrior was Obvious, Rogues too, One was the straight up fighter, in your face, strength, brawn, maybe leadership for the common good.. and Rogues were more about Self, sneaky, back handed, back stabbing, maybe stealing or conning, or just not giving two shits about another person..

D&D Rangers are/were warriors.. but there were so many aspects, hunters, travellers, herbalists, that didn't fit this concept.. so we though about the loner..

Warriors are about leading groups, and direct confrontation, and rogues, no confrontation, but maybe rangers were in between distanced.. ranged confrontation.. so anything archery based, scouting at a distance,. travelling distances.. became the rangers style.. Rogues were about people, rangers about places.. so Three (of my eventual eight) classes were forming.. but they were more than classes.. they were underlying themes.. lifestyles if you will.

Soon Enough we identified that while a Warrior was about power in combat, Mages were about Power in Magic.. or just power without punching.. maybe they should be rangers counter part, now that I think about it, Clerics and Priests are about people, but either by using them (for their god) or benefitting them (for the people).. is more the Rogues Priest vs the Warrior Priest.. Hmm, seems we're onto something here.. The Idea of Psionic was definately in my notes.. but it seemed that D&D had sewn up that in legal rights at the time, so I wanted to be clear of such things.. and we had Thaumaturge listed from the extended professions list that we created..

Oh the lists.. you should have seen them,,..

So, After some time we had 6 nice clean Classes, Warrior, Ranger, Rogue, Mage, Priest and Thaumaturge. something wasn't quite right.. and still today has been under the ringer... 

The Original Stats: Warrior

For the Longest Time, The DW stats were just the same as Dragon Warrior Stats, with the addition of Ranged Attack...

But we had some problems..

Dragon Warriors Stats are: Attack, defence, Evasion, Stealth, Perception, Magical Attack, Magical Defence.

But how do you compare a Monks attack skill to a knights defence? Monks use Hand fighting.. so.. a knight has a defence modifier? or Monk has attack modifier?

Again I was kitting this wall of 'modifiers' Sure sure, it makes your charactersheet look cleaner to have one stat, then your GM has a table of modifiers to play with.. but either I was too lazy or my players wanted to have more information, we decided that this wasn't good enough..

So we had to have Melee Attack, Melee Defence, Weapon Attack and Weapon Defence.. which was sorta cool..

Then there were some great skills in Warhammer.. Strike Mighty blow, Strike to Stun, Strike to Injure. Some of the other game system had more skills of combat.. always there was a modifier.. -7, -5, -6.. when looking at what they did.. it seemed that they were just the same values, just different to what they actually did.. so why have 3 skills.. 5 skills.. 100 skills.. so we spoke to some Combat Simulations Experts, and for the most part what we got was, a strike, no matter what type.. was a kind of moment when you felt that your opponent had left themselves open, and you took advantage of that to get in a decent blow.. be it harder, faster, or to incapacitate.

So, this Damaging strike.. it was really a kind of regular skill, which in many systems were just Statistics..

Thats really what a Stat is.. its a skill thats used so regularly, by so many classes that you need its value on the front page. So thats where we put it..

Of course, the names needed a change.. Melee, Weapon Skill, Damage Strike, Block, Parry .. but sometimes you just need to get out of the way.. so.. Dodge.

Warrior Stats Down.. what next  Archer..

Health, Bruises, Bleeding and Tracking

Ever forgot to rub out the arrow box when you shoot off arrows? or had arguments with your GM about provisions or potions that you had or had not drunk?

I'm sure its staple roleplay, there are many small aspects of the game that you might forget.. If its in your favour, you turn a blind eye, but against you, well I've seen entire tables rage against the DM about whether a potion was drunk or not..

So Imagine a system, where you tick off XP bonuses for each and every stat.. I tried tick boxes, rising numbered boxes.. mathematical equations, all sorts of things.. the biggest problem was tracking.. and worse still for health..

We had introduced a kind of non-lethal damage, called Body Ready.. not sure where I got the name now.. but you had a set of boxes.. and to nominate if the physical damage you just took was light, you ticked the box.. you could 'take a breather' in combat and get back d4+ con bonus BR.. if you didn't each tick cost you a -1 to all skills & stats (out of breath) and if it was medium, you crossed the tick, you needed a full round of breathing to stop that one.. but was still only a -1  and the final heavy, circle that crossed tick.. this one need a nights rest (or at least an hour per circle)

Health was another matter, When you got cut, you got health damage and bleed damage (per 5 pts of health = 1 bleed), you needed to stauch the wound to stop it.. else you'd lose that much bleed as health per round.

Then we also had a problem, If I smacked you over the head.. how could I knock you out? most systems had a rule about, if you're at 0 HP, you're unconcious... but as often as not, you were also bleeding to death too.. we had to lower death down to -15 to be able to counter that.. but what if you were poisoned, ok so now poisons had to have more damage to match the sword + bleed numbers.. ok so what about if you fall off a cliff? slam into the ground, maybe you break your legs.. do you pass out? walk away?

Health has always had a problem in Roleplay Games, its dumbed down to make it a game.. there we are again, referring to it as a game.. well I'm sorry, but by this stage this was no longer a game, this was a way of representing reality within a game system.. its called gamification..

Yes, some of my players riled against this attitude that I had (I've changed a bit since.. but I used to be very sheldon about it)

I was slowly developing something that was no longer a roleplay game, I was trying to understand how we represent ourselves as a set of statistics... why? because that has to be the basis to things.. a solid foundation, before making things playable.. and I think its become one of the reasons why alot of players actually like my game, because they can see themselves doing things, rather than a list of actions in a choice menu.

But I digress (I'll write more about this later) At this stage of development, we had Health, Body Ready, Knockout and Death.. you could get values of up to 100 Health as a moderate 7th level character.. but to get to 120, took an extraordinary ammount of bonuses, skills and game events.. 20th level characters might get 125... but We forgot healing..

The first iteration of the game, was WHFRP, health was out of 10, starting around 3... Dragon Warriors has something similar.. starting around 8 and sometimes getting to 25.. both systems had a fairly even idea that you'd wait a few days to get back 1 point, then 1 point per day after that.. seemed ok..

.. but after we added in bleeding, we needed to multiple everyones health by 5, (so that 1-3 points of bleeding per round, was less problematic), which meant all weapons x5, ok, so that made healing easier.. you started healing 1 point on day 1, and rose by 1 per day.. by 10 days, if you were still damaged, you healed by 10 that night..

Damage dice for weapons was now broken, poisons and spells broken.. everything was broken from this bleeding rule. So we scrapped it. I had to think of something new, something that worked.. infact the whole Body ready system was flawed, but for the longest time, I had no other solution..

But we did add all the Rolemaster Criticals in.. that made things fun. 

Initiative and All the Other Numbers

So Characteristics and Statistics were in.. but we still had a lot of little left over numbers. Days until starvation? ABR bonuses? Initiative? For the bulk of it, it was values that got listed on the back of your character. Your "background".

Height, weight, hair colour, all part n parcel of your character..

well that changes quickly as we needed Initiative & ABR on the front page, for combat.

So what was needed? Initiative was a value that has gone up and down over time, most games have some value of Initiative, Actions from Warhammer, Armour Bypass Rolls (ABR) from Dragon Warriors, Punch Damage was needed, Study & Crafting base abilities were added, as players would need a quick reference for 'deciphering manuscripts' or 'researching information' or just plain old 'make rope bridge'

Later, Some of these become core Statistics, or even reverted back to Skills. What is Crafting? at its core, its some level of mechanical reasoning and dexterity to perform the task, well thats just a WIS + DEX roll if you don't have any associated skills.

ABR was and still is, a nice clever way to increase damage, based on your characters strength (to puncture armour) and dexterity ( to aim for the weak spots) with a dash of wisdom (plain ole smarts) plus players could improve this value over time with skills, spells and attributes.

But Initiative.. well this was one of my crowning joys

Initiative

In the beginning, Initiative was based on Speed, and that meant reflexes. But also wisdom, because you had to be able to think quickly. But what was Initiative?

So, with a lot of research..  Initiative is: your ability to swing a weapon fast (strength & dexterity) your ability to act quickly under stress (courage) your ability to take a blow (constitution) and recover from the pain (willpower), Your speed of though and wit (Intelligence and Wisdom) your attunement to the external forces (psychic), how quickly you can word your speech (charisma) and any distraction bonuses from your (Looks) and of course if your (Luck)y, Oh did I forget.. Reflexes? Speed? the Initiative starter.. lets include that twice for good measure.

Actually the inclusion of all the numbers didn't happen until later in '97, according to older charactersheets, it'd have been a set of bonuses from the above stats, to make a number to match a dice, then you rolled that dice. But for some insane reason, we abandoned that, in favour for something that was far more like D&D.. until years later when I was compiling version #3 and thought long and hard and said.. you know what? this makes more sense.. and put it back in.

But back in 97-00, it was something along the lines of Initiative of around 150. which divided by 10 into a combat Initiative of 15, which was your turn order & told you how many times you could swing a sword. and still works, mostly, like that today (except + a dice like as above)