Programmer Joe

Another in my ongoing series of ideas I’ll probably never act on. Do whatever you like with this. If you actually make the game and it runs on Android, let me know. I’d love to try it out.

The High Concept

Play through a role-playing game adventure on your mobile phone while moving around your local park, hiking through the woods, or wandering the streets of your home town. Participate in simple quests solo, or play with friends. Or if you prefer, develop your own adventures and share them online for other people to play.

The Inspiration

In the 1980s and 90s there were a series of books called Fighting Fantasy that let players play through an RPG-like adventure without a gamemaster. Combine a mobile implementation of those books with geocaching and then let the users create all the actual content and you have GPS Quest.

The Technology

Building GPS Quest would be straightforward:

1. Develop a simple RPG engine with monsters, loot, stats, and leveling up. Leave as many hooks as possible for user-generated content to modify things. Combat will probably want to be turn-based. Write a mobile app to resolve combats in the system.  This is by far the hardest step. Probably do this with just one player for the first version.
2. Build a back end that can track a player’s RPG stats over time. Include a quest system that can unroll an adventure in front of the player as they move around the world. This would probably be waypoint-based so the user can look at the next place to go on a map on their phone.
3. Build quest creation tools that let a user (you) write new quests in the actual physical world.
4. Publish all this to the world.
5. Iterate until massively popular

There are many hundreds of features that could be added once the basic system is up and running. Some ideas include:

• Multiplayer. First for small parties of 2-5 people and them maybe for raids of 20-40 people.
• Audio for monsters, navigation,  and quests. You could download it all before starting the quest so it could play quickly.
• Custom art for quests. Might want to download this ahead of time too.
• A builder-maintained bestiary
• A builder-maintained loot catalog
• Tools to remap existing quests onto new locations
• Matchmaking tools to help players find each other
• The sci-fi, zombie, pirate, superhero, spy, vampire, giant robot, caveman, and not-at-all-fantasy-medieval versions of the same game. That last one is so some SCA people can feel comfortable playing your game.
• Leaderboards for quest builders, quest remappers, and players to give all of those people bragging rights.
• More simple geocaching features like buried treasure and traps that players can leave for each other.
• Ports to whichever platform you didn’t launch for in the first place.
• Trading systems, auction systems, crafting systems

What do you think? Would you play?

1. Korea is the future. They are five years ahead of us and where Korea goes, the rest of the world will follow.  (I have been hearing this for at least five years. )
2. Free to play with micro transactions is the one true business model.
3. Client downloads are death.
4. We must look beyond the core gamer audience and embrace more casual players.
5. Women are 50% of the audience.
6. Don’t trust the client, it is in the hands of the enemy.
7. You game is a service.
8. MMOs are hard. No, they’re really really hard. Seriously. You can’t possibly imagine how hard they are.
9. Runescape is the second biggest MMO and is the one you should really watch.
10. Club Penguin is huge and is the one you should really watch.
11. Lineage is huge in Asia and is the one you should really watch. (These days it’s actually more likely to be ZT Online or some other game in China.)
12. Flash is the best platform to build your MMO on.
13. Web games are cheesy and no core gamer will ever play them.
14. Rudy’s has the best BBQ in Austin.  No, County Line is better.  Are you kidding me?  It’s obviously The Salt Lick.
15. The game industry is bigger than Hollywood.
16. Triple-A MMOs are a dead end. WoW is impossible to compete with.
17. Game X is going to take the top spot from WoW.
18. Games cost so much to make now that the industry is about to collapse under its own weight.
19. MMOs are just like MUDs and you should all learn the lessons MUDs learned X years ago.  (To be fair, I don’t think I’ve actually heard this one in a few years.)
20. All of these things happened in UO. Why won’t you people learn from UO?
21. The community around your game is incredibly important and you should take care of them.
22. Your players have no idea what they want. Don’t believe anything they say.
23. Forums are very important.
24. Don’t believe anything you read on forums.
25. Launch is just the beginning. The real work comes after launch.
26. Metrics, metrics, metrics.  Record everything!
27. Don’t record too much with your metrics. Too much data is just as useless as too little data.
28. Some people spend CRAZY amounts of money via micro-transactions
29. MMOs on consoles are the Next Big Thing.
30. Casual games are going to save the PC market
31. MMOs are going to save the PC market
32. My background in economics tells me…
33. WoW is a wonderful thing for the industry because of the way they expanded the market.
34. WoW has set expectations so high that you can’t make an MMO for less than X million dollars. (Where X>=30)
35. Person X is a jerk. Let me tell you this funny story about…
36. Company Y is so clueless that they will never put out a successful game
37. Fantasy is where it’s at! MMOs just don’t work as well in other genres.
38. Fantasy has been done. Players want us to move on to other genres.
39. There’s so much money to be made in Asia! Just make sure you internationalize your game first.
40. Gamers in Asia demand click to move so they can smoke while they play.
41. Players are going to trade stuff for real money no matter what you do. You might as well embrace it.
42. RMT causes huge amounts of fraud.
43. Gold spam is impossible to stop.
44. Our startup is the next big thing in MMOs.  Just look at this giant pile of money we raised!
45. Game development is all about iteration. Waterfall doesn’t work.
46. There’s this guy named Richard Bartle who proposed dividing players into four types…
47. You can’t use scripting languages in games. They’re way too slow.
48. Writing all your code in C++ is stupid.
49. Launch early, launch often.
50. You only get to launch once.

I finished Braid this morning. It was a lot of fun… I got through all but one of the puzzles, but had basically no clue on that one so I cheated and used a walkthrough.  Once I heard the solution, it turned out to be something I totally should have figured out.  Ah well. You can get through all the worlds easily enough without solving all the puzzles, so if you’re stuck I’d suggest trying other puzzles and coming back to the ones you’re stuck on.

I have two non-spoiling comments on the ending:

1. The timed part at the end was really dumb.  Games do this all the time (“Let’s take our careful, thoughtful gameplay and add time pressure so it’s more exciting!“) and it always results in a completely different kind of game that the players have not been trained to play. Maybe that was on purpose as some sort of artistic statement, but that doesn’t make it any less dumb. I ended up finding a video on YouTube that showed me I was about 0.5 seconds behind the required pace and had to back up and do half the level over to get through one section.  The margin of error was way too small and the whole level was extremely frustrating.
2. I don’t get it.  I don’t know what the story was about, in the end. I had fun anyway, though, so it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, it’s well worth the $15. I suggest you pick up a copy and give it a try.

At ION I gave a talk on our development process for Pirates. Darius Kazemi has posted a transcript of the talk. It’s also up at the Vault Network. I wonder how much buzz it’s going to get.

I’m giving the same talk at AGDC this year, so if you missed me at ION you can catch it there.

A few weeks ago Dan Rubenfield posted this (as part of a larger rant putting all MMO developers on notice):

If you continue to refuse to acknowledge consoles as the de-facto standard for AAA gaming, you will go out of business.

Quit making PC games. It’s a waste of time and money.

(NPD respectfully disagrees with the waste of money part.)

I for one would love to build a console MMO. It’s not that MMO developers don’t acknowledge consoles as dominant, it’s that there are many barriers to building a console MMO that don’t exist on the PC. I mentioned a couple of those in my comment to the post above, but wanted to expand on them here.

Barrier #1: Platform Holders Demand a Share

Assuming a moderate success MMOs are almost unique in their ability to give game developers a revenue stream. Most studios live from milestone payment to milestone payment and rarely see royalties off the game after it ships. If they’re smart they make a little extra on each milestone and can build a buffer to help them tough it out between projects, but often failing to sign with a publisher for the next project drives the developer out of business. With a few very successful exceptions, just about all studios live on this edge.

Ongoing revenues from subscriptions or micro-transactions change all of that. These revenue streams require constant updates to keep going. That means that the publisher needs the developer to stay in business so they can keep working on the game. Assuming modest success, it also means that eventually the developer is going to pay back their advance and start earning royalties. This seems to have worked out pretty well for Cryptic who are developing Champions Online without a publisher.

When you introduce a platform holder to the mix the economics change. Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo is going to demand their cut of all ongoing revenue, and that cut is rumored to be between 25% and 35%. With one more player getting a piece the revenues shrink for both the publisher and the developer and it becomes harder to turn a profit from a “modest success”.

Barrier #2: Certification

Absolutely everything released on any console goes through an extensive testing phase called certification. This is a slow, expensive process that is imposed by the platform holder to keep a consistent level of quality and a consistent user experience for all titles on their platform. It works too, so certification isn’t likely to go anywhere any time soon.

How does certification interact with the need to put out patches on a regular basis that add new features to the game? It’s bound to slow things down (and make patches more expensive.)

Barrier #3: No Keyboard

Voice chat is great for small groups. It even works pretty well for short messages from one player to another. It really doesn’t work so well for chat groups of 100. All the current consoles can take some kind of keyboard, but requiring one is something your users are going to object to. The game console is in their living room, after all, and they are probably running out of room after the drum set and all those extra Rock Band guitars.

Even if you could guarantee the players have keyboards, text chat is still problematic. People sit pretty far back from their televisions, and even HD displays really aren’t very high-res compared to PC screens.

Barrier #4: Long Development Times

MMOs take four to five years to build. People keep trying to convince themselves that they can do it in three years, but they’re wrong. They are going to schedule everything for three years and then end up slipping by a year or two.

The Xbox launched in November of 2001. The Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005. Playstation 2 launched in November of 2000, and Playstation 3 launched in November of 2006. The last major generation change on the PC was Windows 95, and it’s had a pretty smooth ramp since then. It’s really hard to spend four to five years building one title when your platform is only going to be current for five to six years.

Barrier #5: Consoles Have a Smaller Installed Base

Yes, I said smaller. There are 189 million NVIDIA GPUs installed in PCs, a number which doesn’t count any of the ATI cards out there or any NVIDIA cards older than the 5 series. There are 120 million Playstation 2s, 25 million Xbox 360s, 25 million Wiis, and 20 million Playstation 3s. That’s a total of 190 million consoles. Whatever ATI brings in installed base pushes the PC way over the top.

This entirely discounts the fact that every single game console was purchased to play games and every PC was not. It also discounts all those GeForce 2s and 4s that a PC developer really should use as their min spec.

Barrier #6: Duo Play

Many, many people play MMOs (and other games for that matter) in pairs. I’ve played 6 different MMOs with my wife. Lots of people play with their spouses, siblings, or kids.

As long as you have an appropriate min spec your game is likely to run on the second-tier PCs in the house. But how many people have a second Xbox 360 in their house? Some do, to be sure, but that number is tiny compared to the number of two-computer households.

Console MMOs really need to support split-screen play on a single machine, which adds to the development complexity. On the other hand, split-screen duo play would be fantastic for people who live in the same house and is actually a feature that consoles can offer over PCs.

So We’re Doomed Then?

In the short run, yes. None of these are insurmountable obstacles, but they do make a console MMO more difficult than a PC MMO. There is enough money to be made in console games that future MMO releases there are inevitable. It’s just a question of when they arrive.

Several console MMOs have already launched. The most successful of these by far is Final Fantasy XI on the Playstation 2. Everquest Online Adventures and Phantasy Star Universe (and Phantasy Star Online before it) are two more examples. There are probably more that I’m not coming up with. All of these games have seen some modest success, but none of them are either major console hits or major MMO hits.

To add to those, some new console MMOs are in the works. SOE is working on three PC/Playstation 3 titles, with Free Realms being the first one to come out. PS3 is the loser so far this generation, though, so that may not make much difference to most console gamers. There is a rumor that Nintendo was working on an Animal Crossing MMO, but it’s just a rumor at this point. Microsoft obviously doesn’t have the institutional fortitude to build MMOs; they have canceled Marvel twice. NCsoft also announced a partnership with Sony to bring an NCsoft game out on the PS3, though they aren’t saying what game yet.

Eventually MMOs are going to come to consoles. It’s just going to take them a while to get there, and they will probably never emerge in the same numbers as they do on PCs. Buck up, Dan. We’ll get there some day.