urbanlegions

What do these things have to do with each other?  Urban Legions, of course!

GRAVITY:  I have adjusted many of the events that pop up randomly in the game so that the player's approval will gravitate back to zero (0).  I realized this when I was ignoring these events testing other things, like the Butter Zombies.  My character quickly turned into a super villain.  With the approval gravity well, players can now do nothing and result in a neutral character, bordering between hero and villain.

SHIRTS!:  A CafePress site is now set up with tshirts (http://www.cafepress.com/urbanlegions).  Currently, two styles are available:  the UL logo on white/light shirts, and the comic book wanted poster (as used on the website's frontpage) which is used on the darker/colored shirts.

CONVERSATIONS:  Players are now able to "talk" with various NPCs in the game.  Each has a default set of topics, and more topics open as the player learns of different sub-plots.  Each player provides their own perspective of a topic, often revealing more details and hints in the game.  There are at least five citizens in the game now, with several more on the way.  And, at least one of the NPCs is attackable (eventually, you will be able to battle any/all of them).

ARENA FIGHTING:  Speaking of battles...  The Astroland Arena is open for combat.  Players can select to fight either a hero or a villain for $100.  Conquer your opponent, and you double your money, and maybe a bit of experience on the side.  Who are these heroes and villains?  Why YOU, of course!  The game takes a snapshot of another player's character, and you do battle against a player-as-an-NPC (PlayerNPC).  Combat does not negatively affect another player's character, and does not change the course of another player's game.

[The following is written by Phillip McCartney (aka interNEKO Ltd. Co.)]

Urban Legions is not meant to be a traditional RPG in the true sense of that acronym. Instead, we aimed more at it being a simulation.  Yes, there are role playing features since you can ‘grow’ your character, and you are your character.  The city reacts to how you play.  That former feature segues into it being more of a simulation.

Simulations are easy to do, but tricky to make right.  You can always make automatons that do things based upon parameters.  These generally end up feeling robotic and lifeless.  Understanding that, we defined what the basic automatons were, and added the ability to add life into them through scripting.  This had a two part advantage and disadvantage to it.

The basic element of Urban Legions are the events. They are the actual sequences that present a story and allow you to react to them.  These come in many varieties, but are all the same at the core.  The simulation determines which events you will encounter.  Even once you are in an event, you may only see a section of it depending on certain criteria.  Everything from character stats, dates, random, and a slew of other criteria determine what happens.  This allows, for example, a player raising an evil character to see an entirely different side of the game as a hero.  More than that, it is easy to spawn events based upon doing something like wearing glasses on your character.

While that has been very powerful, the downside is the amount of content that must be made to cover all the bases.  Early players probably were able to play through what they thought was all the content, when in fact they probably only saw a fifth of it.  Doug has feverishly been adding new content, and the story has grown exponentially.  Just from experience, events are now reacting more lifelike to characters.

We have also be catering to the casual players by adding a few non-simulation items like scheduled events, and multi-player aspects, like the arena.  Recorded achievements were also a welcome feature.

For linear games, it is easy to go from start to finish in design, but with a simulation like Urban Legions, it has been a constant balance battle with story and play mechanics.

There probably isn’t much different between designing a role playing game for a web page as there is for a tradition console. 

In upcoming blog posts, I am going to start talking about my experience making an ‘enterprise’ level web application and game.

There is an inexcusable design goal that is always set in software engineering to design the perfect set of requirements and features before laying down the first line of code.  It is, however, VERY important to try to design as much as possible.  Many fail because they either do not do enough, or too much.  There are countless books and lectures on this, so I will stop there.

When making an online organic game, it must be understood that it is impossible to fully define all the requirements, or how the game will finally be.  If you can do that, it means the game is on a set budget, and will come to a closure at some time in the recent future.

What is important is to define what will make the first version.  Any new features that come to light you must flag for the next version, no matter how much it burns and stings.  Again, it is impossible to make the perfect game, so to continue to cater to new features is the worst case of feature crepe, and slide.

You must accept from the start the first version of your game will be good, but not your final vision.  Why?  Your final vision will never be had.  It will never exist. When you have the power to add new features, and improve, either through content or features, how can it exist?  Console games have this luxury in that they are burned into a final medium.  Expansions happen, but they add, not alter, existing content and play mechanics.

So it is now upon the designer to make the engine and mechanics as open ended as possible.  That is the design goal, and hearty one indeed.  In fact, designing an engine open enough to accommodate for possible new features and have the flexibility in content handling to be organic is a tough call.

It is also important that I am discussing ‘Organic’ games.  This means there are no real set scripts that direct what will happen next.  Yes, sure, there are scripts behind the scenes, but the overall flow of an organic game grows and reacts to what you do.  This is the direct opposite of most linear RPGs where no matter what you do, the relative same sequence of events happen.  Urban Legions is organic in the sense that you have two huge different play sets depending on doing good or evil, but random, timed, and season events appear, or not, depending on your stats, and what you do in the game. 

It is really difficult to make an organic game feel right.  We have done a TON of massaging to UL, and will probably always will, but we have gotten really close now.  It is six months after release, but when we did release back in December, we made sure it was at least a playable game.