The Rise of Magus on yoyogames

The Rise of Magus can be played on the Game Maker site now at:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/81474

There are several nice things about this. For one, it means the game is available even when my site is down (which it apparently was an hour ago). It also means that it's possible for users to play the game without having to download the .exe file (if they install the yoyogames plugin, they can play it off the site), which will hopefully make people less scared of trying it (and I wonder if that works on macs - I should test at some point).

Also, the site keeps track of how many people are playing it and what score they gave it, so that makes it a useful source of feedback for me.

-Silent Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus

Alright, it's time for a post that's both exciting and a little anxious. The exciting part first: I have officially put up version 1.0 of a game that I've been working on for 10 months in my free time. It's called the Rise of Magus, and is a platformer based on the character Magus from Chrono Trigger, a classic Japanese RPG.

The official site for the game is here: www.silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus

If you go to silentellipsis.com, you'll also find a nifty link to this blog (henceforth the official blog of silentellipsis.com). Now, a necessary awesome looking title screen:



Now if the page on the other side of that link looks suspiciously like this one, it's possibly because I just ripped off the style sheet for this blogger page and made a couple changes.

The game was a lot of fun to make - I created it in Game Maker 7 using, among other resources, sprites from Chrono Trigger. That's where we get to the anxious part...

One of the sites on which I found some useful resources was the Chrono Compendium, and I decided that after I finished, I would submit the game to the webmaster and see if they wanted to put up a link to my game.

Today, having just finished my game the night before, I visited the Chrono Compendium to see an announcement that they'd received a cease and desist order from Square Enix over the weekend in reference to some of the other fan projects on the site. Obviously, this did not sound like it boded well for me.

However, when I looked at the cease and desist order more closely, I realized I might be ok afterall. The document (which they link to on their front page) is specifically concered with ROM-hacking, and a quick look through other projects that had previously been linked to showed that the ones to receive cdo's were either:

1) ROM-hacks

or

2) Recreations of the original game

While I'm sympathetic to the webmasters on the Compendium when they say that they disagree with Square's argument, Square has much more justification for ordering stops on these kinds of projects than they would have with one like mine. ROM-hacking, as a practice, enables game piracy, and recreations of the game compete with their own product (and at an advantage, since they're free). Whether or not these projects will actually result in a loss of revenue for Square Enix (I seriously doubt they actually would), the practices have the potential to hinder Square's business.

My game, on the other hand, is not a ROM-hack, mod, or remake of Chrono Trigger. It's an independent game that uses sprites from Chrono Trigger. The fact that the game is a different genre from the game that inspired it does a lot to support the argument that it doesn't directly compete with the original game, and since I didn't do anything with Square's software, I haven't violated any user agreement or tried to circumvent their copy protection.

That's enough for me to go through with putting the game up and posting about it on a couple sites. The folks at Square Enix aren't stupid, and they have no reason to pursue litigation against people who aren't actually threatening their business. What's more, the cdo against the Chrono Compendium shows that they looked into the situation in decent detail, so I doubt they'll be sending me an email just because they're in a litigate-y mood. Of course, they can prove me wrong at any time.

So I don't think I have anything to worry about, and for now will just enjoy the fact that I actually completed this project (of course, if I get enough positive feedback, I'll probably come back and add a little more to it). Seriously, check it out, I think it turned out pretty well.

Names as Identities

A few months back, a friend pointed out to me that in every Bioware game he'd played, there was a common element: the main character had a past to be discovered. He speculated that this was used as a way of simultaneously giving the player freedom in creating their character (that is, their character in the present), while holding onto the sense the character being played is more than just an avatar for the player. This is likely true, but I think it's also an indication of just how powerful the theme of uncovering an identity is.

Now let us consider Chrono Trigger, and the realization that led to this blog post (warning: minor spoilers ahead). Chrono Trigger has 7 playable characters, and while you can choose to name them whatever you want, they each have a default name. Here's the interesting part - only 3 of those characters use their "real" name as their default character names: Crono, Lucca, and Ayla. The other 4 characters are all using aliases. What's more, they're using aliases that obscure their identity. In fact, 3 of those names aren't really names at all - they're descriptions.

Frog is called so because he's a frog, Robo is a robot, and Magus just refers to the fact that he's a wizard (and yes, the fact that Magus joins your party is spoiler I warned of). In each case, the process of learning their true name is inextricable from the process of learning the character's true identity. At the same time, each character has undergone a change, such that their new name is a new identity.

The fact that the uncoverable past is used so many times in Chrono Trigger shows how ubiquitous the idea is in the minds of the creators (in addition to playable characters, you uncover the identities of the 3 gurus, Yakra, the ghost of Cyrus, and even Lavos). The fact that each character with a hidden past also has two names is perhaps more interesting. I know I for one felt that the "true names", once revealed, had some kind of inherent power to them; the mere fact of knowing a character's true name made me at once feel like I had some new level of control over them and made me empathize with them. The fact that it's a secret makes it a personal feature, and any entity with a personal feature feels richer for it (end of spoilers).

Ursula K. LeGuin, of course, takes the power of names a step further by literally giving not just every person, but every single object in the world of Earthsea a true name. Merely speaking the true name of creature of Earthsea gives you power over it. This seems to me a manifestation of something we feel the force of every day - that names carry identity, and that knowing the identity of another grants you power over them (hence, it would be completely inappropriate for me to address the president as "Barack" to his face).

That's as far as this will go for now. It was simply on my mind. As to why Chrono Trigger is on my mind, it's probably because I've been working on a fan project. It's what I was referring to in my last blog post, and it's an original platformer game about Magus, made using Game Maker 7. I'm hoping to have the first finished draft of it ready this weekend, so stay tuned, I will most certainly post about it if I do.

-Silent Ellipsis

User Generated Quests

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while (over a month), but I've been fairly busy with things, including a game I've been working on (codenamed "SquareEnix Please Don't Sue Me"), which I'll likely be posting about in the near future.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about user generated content, and in particular quests. User generated quests are one of those ideas that people love to throw around*, but that's hard to actually implement for the very simple reason that users suck at making quests. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, and I'm sure that many people who have been game masters for tabletop RPGs could manage it, but most players don't have a very clear sense of balance (especially where there own characters might be involved), and there's a big difference between the mindset that focuses on "this sounds cool" and the one that focuses on "this would produce a good user experience."

But user generated quests are a cool idea, so how would you add them to a game (I'll assume we're talking about an MMORPG, here). The way to get good user-generated quests is to actually give them as little control as possible over the method of completing the quest. A user generated quest could work like this:

1) Wiz132, a Level 10 Wizard, needs to gather components for an alchemy experiment that he needs to do in order to gain access to the Alchemist prestige class (no, I’m not advocating prestige classes a la 3.5, it’s just an example).

2) At least some of the components are hard for him to personally acquire (perhaps one is found on a magic-resistant monster)

3) Wiz132 creates a quest: Bring me the eye of the Magic-Resistant Jabberwocky. He decides what the player needs to do (bring him the eye), and what the reward is.

4) The meat of the quest, that is, the part where another player will have to explore a dungeon/hunt a creature through the woods/sneak into the creature’s lair and fight it is determined by the game world and the existing game mechanics, not by Wiz132.

Now if someone goes and does this quest and brings the quest item to Wiz132, they’ll receive the reward. This should happen whether or not Wiz132 happens to be online (an NPC version will appear in his laboratory if he is not). Another issue here is: how does the player get to decide what rewards to give? Money seems straight-forward, but do they also have to give up xp to finance the quest reward? That might be interesting, but I’d be more likely to include some kind of item the player can acquire that can be used to create quests worth a certain amount of experience.

Now you might wonder how this is different from a player running around killing everything in sight and then selling the rare drops they get in an auction house? Well, aside from the fact that they can get experience, as well as money, you could solidify this quest concept by requiring the user to have the quest in order to make progress on it. For instance, what if the monster in question doesn’t even appear unless someone with the quest shows up to fight it? Or perhaps the monster exists, the but the eye only drops for people with the quest.

The point is that user generated content should both feel like part of the game, rather than a separate activity the player can do instead of playing, and it should be fairly high-level. User generated content, as part of a game, shouldn't be asking the player to take on the role of game developer, but give them a way to add to the content of the world simply by playing it.

-Ellipsis

*I hear that City of Heroes is going to get a quest creation tool sometime soon. I'll be interested to see what that looks like.

Crazy Ideas for Crazy Times: Social Credit

Yet another non-video-game post. Be forewarned, this post is full of crazy ideas.

First, background: I see both the government and corporations as basically serving the same purpose, which is that they're ways of organizing human capital so that we can accomplish projects that take many people to complete. The downside of corporations is that strict pursuit of the bottom line will often cause them to compromise the projects in the name of reducing cost or increasing profit, while the downside of government is that it has a very slow feedback mechanism, which results in lower efficiency. Both can get a lot worse if the wrong people get into positions of power, and both are capable of good when the right people are in positions.

Anyway, so the question is, how could we get the best of both worlds? How do you allow people to give immediate and variable feedback to projects without dumping those projects into the free market? How about we have a pseudo-free market with explicit controls? I'm not talking about the economy at large - I'm talking about a separate self-sustaining economic structure. What you do is you take some of the money that people are being taxed, and instead of having the government spend it, you turn it into social credit.

What's social credit? Well, it's like money, except that you can't spend it anywhere - you can only spend on specific kinds of projects (government sanctioned projects, essentially), and generally speaking, you're not "buying" anything with it - you're just choosing where this money should go.

So let's say you want to upgrade the theater at your local public school, for example. In order to raise the capital to pay for the project, you could ask people to donate their money, but they'll be hesitant because they could buy something else with that money (so you're asking them to sacrifice something personal in order to get the public good). If you have social credit, however, the situation is different - everyone has money that's already set aside for investment in public goods, that they CAN'T use to buy personal goods with, so if they want the school to have a new theater, they'll contribute some of their social credit toward the project.

Now that's pretty cool, I think, but here's where it gets crazy. You can have any corporation become "social credit approved" on the condition that it accepts no other form of payment and makes it services available both to those who pay and those who don't. Now this would not be a practical move for many companies, but for some, particularly information-based companies, this can be an effective source of funding. There's another advantage for such companies built into this system: piracy vanishes. Completely. There is no such thing as piracy when you give away your products for free to begin with. Instead of trying to convince people to pay you for mp3s and computer games that they can just as easily download for free, you just give them the products for free, on the understanding that the consumer has a set budget that they can only choose to spend supporting companies like yours - so if people like your stuff, they'll just hand you money.

So that's the crux of it. Now feel free to let me know what's wrong with this idea. Also feel free to comment that you don't get what I'm talking about - it's still kind of fuzzy around the edges.

Guiness Knows Video Games

So apparently Guiness World Records decided to put together a list of the most influential console games in history. In short, it's ridiculous. I'm not going to reproduce the whole list (it's a top 50 list), but let's just look at the top 10:

1. Super Mario Kart
2. Tetris
3. Grand Theft Auto
4. Super Mario World
5. Zelda Ocarina of Time
6. Halo
7. Resident Evil IV
8. Final Fantasy XII
9. Street Fighter II
10. GoldenEye

Now remember, these aren't supposed to be favorites, or best games, or anything of that sort - they're "most influential" games. Now, I would measure influential games by the kind of impact they had on the games that followed them, so one rule I apply from the get-go: No games from the last couple years. And yet there's FFXII staring me in the face, and a little further down (at #14) they have Call of Duty 4. Even the Orange Box (further down the list), which seems like it's guaranteed to have a long-lasting impact on gaming because of it's inclusion of Portal, is something I would hesitate to put on their, because there simply hasn't been enough time for it to have a "legacy," which is one of the criteria used to judge these (supposedly).

But that's not the big issue. The big issue is all of the things that aren't in the top 10 list here. I mean, where's Mario - you know, the game that invented the side-scrolling platformer, which for a while was the pre-eminent genre? Where's Dragon Quest, the first console RPG? If you're going to include a Final Fantasy game in the top 10, why isn't it VII, which not only made JRPGs mainstream in America, but got a movie made about it? Why are Super Metroid and Castlevania: SotN so far down (in the late 30's) when they're the origin of "Castleroid" games? DDR isn't even on the list, even though it's a predecessor to games like Guitar Hero (which did make the list)?

And that's granting already that they're discounting all PC games (in some cases, this also seems kind of disingenuous, since titles like Oblivion and Call of Duty are probably more significant for their PC versions than their console ports). That means things like SimCity and Civilization aren't even in the running.

I would probably feel better about this list if they at least had a consistent metric that they were basing it on, but from the Kotaku article, it sounds like every item on the list has vague justifications. Guiness should probably stick to things they can measure, like "largest game cartridge ever," "longest loading screen ever," and "most copies sold back to GameStop."

-Ellipsis

RocketOn Embed

Hello. This post is just a test to see if this embed works. Clicking on the image below should open avatars over the page (I know, crazy, huh?). Here goes:







-Ellipsis

Waving Hands 2: Finite Resources

So, given how fan-ish I was in my previous post on Waving Hands (aka Spellcaster, aka Warlocks), it shouldn't surprise anyone that I've continued playing the game in the interim (though a little less frequently now that my boss has figured out what the strings of random letters on my monitor are), and I think it's time to return to what makes the strategy feel particularly deep.

In particular, it's occured to me that several of the elements I discussed before are enabled by a single feature - finite resources. In this case, your primary resource is your HP, which you "spend" for better position and the chance to complete major spells. The key here is that your HP starts off at a set number (15), and generally only decreases. I mean, there are healing spells, but they're less efficient than their analagous damage spells, and in any case your HP can't go above 16. The healing spells have their uses, but in general, the game is about gradually moving toward 0 HP.

Why does that matter? First of all, it keeps the game from dragging out - every turn that passes brings you closer to the conclusion because resources are always being spent faster than they're generated. More importantly, perhaps, it prevents either player from establishing an unbeatable advantage, like you can achieve in many real-time strategy games. In Age of Empires III, if I played the Dutch and survived to the Imperial Age, I got an economy going that was so absurdly efficient that it was virtually impossible to defeat me (because I could replace units as fast as they died without putting any significant dent in my resources). In warlocks, you can't build up your resources and then steamroll your opponent - you only have the resources you started with, and even if you have a clear HP advantage, you can always be defeated by a single Finger of Death or permanent enchantment, so you're never safe.

Now, in order for this to work, it doesn't require that there is actually no resource generation at all, just that resource generation is limited. In addition to healing, I would count monster summoning as "resource generation," in which case it might seem possible to build resources (by summoning endless hordes of monsters). The fact of the matter, though, is that getting out multiple summoned monsters is hard. Not only can your opponent disrupt or dispel you, but once you have a monster summoned, you have to pay attention to them, or they might be charmed by your opponent, and become their ogre or troll. Monsters are a good investment, but they have to be maintained, and can be expensive to cast in the first place, so the decision to bring out a monster is itself an important strategic decision. While summon ogre is a popular opening spell, you can win a match without ever summoning anything.

And that's what really matters here - that every decision is meaningful. In most RTS games, resource gathering is so central, that it single-handedly determines the outcomes of the game, and decisions like army makeup and where and when to deploy units are secondary. While I immensely enjoyed AoE3, over time the games start becoming identical - the game was about perfecting my rapid development strategy. Games of Waving Hands, on the other hand, are wildly different and unpredictable, and that's what keeps me fascinated with it.

Speaking of strategy games, I just got my hands on a copy of Valkyria Chronicles, so now I have something other than Valentine's Day dinner on my to-do list this weekend.