Project M – End Game

End game is always a problem for devs, because players should be able to play (and pay) after completing all quests and levels. There’s a smarter alternative to think what a player can do after fully completing the game. Just end the game. I’m going to explain this a little more. A mmoprg is usually seen as an alternative life online. But we should remember that is just a game. Since “Pong” we had the classic Game Over screen. Let’s our mmorpg have it. In order to do this, the game should have a strong story behind. Planning is a must for this kind of mmorpg. You must plan every main event which must occur in the game’s life before releasing it. I would wuggest a year for the game before its end. Obviously after the first “episode”, developers could start another episode. The idea behind ending the game is pretty simple: you have always players attention, events in game’s life (maybe a major event each month?) raise players attention avery day. While approaching the great end players start to guess what will happen at the end.

Depending on what the story behind is, the final event should be a battle against a great monster (with all players of the server against a single monster), or an invasion of monster in a single area of the map. Or maybe the world has splitted in two or three great factions and each players belonging to a faction has to fight others in order to win.

Doing so, all players in the server will met at the end, fighting together a common menace or against other factions to let them survive.

After this great battle, players should gain some rewards like noble titles or somthing similar, which will allow them to get some advantage over others player in the next episode of the saga. Episode just ended, should restart after a week or two, in order to get new players or let players replay from the beginning.

The sequel should start an hour or two after the last battle, not necessary allowing old character to play the new episode, but not necessary deleting them (this could be decided after avery single episode).

Project M – HUD

HUD is a foundamental part of a game. For this reason, HUD should be deeply customizable.

It should have 3 levels:

1. The HUD in game. This level is not modifiable, this is the actual HUD you have to use during your play sessions.
2. The HUD editor. This level should be triggered by an option in a panel or menu, in this level you have all items of the HUD unlocked, you can drag and drop them everywere in the screen. By this way, you can rearrange your HUD as you please. Note: every element, every aspect of your character should have a panel or a bar on the HUD (you could choose to see it or not). In this level you should also be able to choose elements of the HUD from different packages (more at point 3), to build your unique HUD.
3. The HUD importer. This “level” of the HUD should be “off” the game. You could drop in a directory a package which describes your HUD, when the game starts, it prompts you which HUD it should use. Users could create jpegs or gifs for the HUD and import them in the game. Develepers should give 2-3 HUDs in bundle with the game, and let the community build others.

Project M – Equipment

Equipment should be divided in 4 categories:

• Weapons – There should be 4-5 weapons for each class (or race), which you have from the very first minute of play until the last “zone” of the game.

They should be improved in many ways:

1. Equipment upgrade: you buy some gears that fill in the weapon and release a force that makes it better (10-20 different upgrade for each kind of weapon).
2. Accessory: devices you can attach or detach from the weapon in order to gain/lose some abilities or effects (they should be 2-300, not weapon-type binded).
3. Combination: you find similar weapon and you “add” it to your weapon.

• Armors – Like weapons, there’s should be 4-5 armor for each class or race, and they should be upgraded the same way.

• Vehicles – There’s surely need of a trnsportation method, and a veichle should be a very interesting thing to have and to customize. Vehicle should be 15-20 and not race or class limited. They should have statistics which you can improve through Accessory or Equipment upgrade. Vehicles are not necessary real veichle, but could be mounts or some other similar stuff.

• Add-ons – Add-ons should be everything you can add to your character in order to design it as unique and these are some things you could have:

1. Pets, small friends (animal, robothics, other..), which are exatcly like another player (for stats, skills, weapons and armor), but AI based. They act and move or fight with you basing theyr decision on a grade of “influence” you have over them.
2. Small ornaments, not necessary useful to fights, but when you find them, they bind to your character (not tradable), and you gain experience from discovering them (they should be 20-50). They should be extremely rare, with random spawns and not localizable (maybe 1 or 2 easily trackable by doing a quest).
3. Titles, you get them when you do some specific and extraordinary job. This could include defeating a great monster (with other tons of players), discovering 90% of the map, being online everyday for a set amount of time, and stuff like this. This titles should grant you some bonuses medium powerful for a high player or some bonus for characters in the next episode (more on this later).

• ExtraGear – This kind of stuff should influence negatively your character, and they should be time-limited. As your character wear this ExtraGear, you loose some of the benefits from your equipment, but you gain more experience. You should be able to decide which ExtraGear wear and how many of them. Maybe some quest should require to wear one or more of these in order to be accomplished.

Project M – Quests

There are two main parts in a mmorpg: the quests and the end-game content. I’ll cover a small part about quests here. Quests can be divided in three main categories: killing mobs, speaking with npc, events. These three main categories are anachronistic for a mmorpg: quests should be variant, more rpg style. I’m going to explain this, this are the kind of quests there should be in a mmorpg:

• Exploration: you go around and discover the map, discovering a certain % of maps give you experience. If you are never been before in an area or in a cityt, when you done the 60-70% of discovering you’ll get experience points. If you explore the whole (95%-100%) area, you’ll get a bonus.
• Knowledge: anytime you see or kill a type of monster (creature, different race, different job, etc. depending on game setting), you’ll get experience. If you have some sort of skills which allows you to “explore” the interior of the monster (to get leather/other substances) you’ll get experience the first time you complete your job well on that kind of monster.
• Combat: Experience in combat situation aren’t the only or the main way in order to get experience. They’re still a great part of growing up your character, but you get experience the first time you enter in combat with a different monster, the first time you use successfully a combat skill, the first time you kill a kind of monster, every time you do a “Critical Hit”.
• Speaking: This kind of quests are the “boring” one, relegating you to just click and click in order to exit as fast as you can from the dialogue, in order to get the experience faster and get a new quest. This should be modified a little. Imagine all npc have a “friendly” bar and are linked in groups: every time you answer “correctly” to a npc, you’ll get a bonus over his “friendly” bar and a small % bonus over all the members of his group. Some quests will throw you in a middle of a dispute between npc and you’ll have to choose which side to support. This way could be generated factions, but will talk about it in an another posts.
• Not linear quests: This kind of quests usually are a no-combat or poor combat quests. In this kind of quests you have to do some kind of job (in an instance) with someone else in the party. Could be “get inside and steal the gold” but you can’t kill everyone (otherwise a monster of too higher level spawns). This way you are forced to be in party and divide jobs among members. A typical example could be: “In that cavern there’s a dragon, the dragon is sleeping now, but there are some small monsters guarding it. Be careful, you have to sneak in and steal the treasure, but remember: if you make too noise or kill too monsters, the dragon will awake”. This quest would allow very high level players to come back and play again in a certain area. They should not get a quest (at their level) to kill the dragon, but if they remember the existance of that dragon and come back after, they could get a good loot.
• Dungeon: Quests involving dungeon should be like “go there, see what’s inside and come back”. Dungeons will be covered by another post later on.

Project M – The base character.

Statistics.

The base character should be universal: many “races” or “species” or something similar, but all of them with the same base statistics. The differences between players shouldn’t be based on racial templates (maybe I would like a kind of character, but the statistics for that template aren’t compatible with my kind of character). Instead, the polygons shouldn’t influence the character gameplay: in this way, a player can choose his favourite “flavour” and play with that one, regardless of stats or charts. In my opinion statistics should be:

• Strength – the character’s strenght, on this you will compute melee damage, points for melee skills and weight that can be carried.
• Dexterity – the character’s coordination and capacity on movement, on this you will compute accuracy, dodge, points for ranged skills and speed.
• Mind – the character’s mind strength, on this you will compute mental fatigue points, “power” influences (damages or effects) and points for knowledge or “power” skills. On this the game should base also a minimum % of experience gained: a more intelligent character will evolve faster than a “dull” one.
• Health – the character’s health and capacity to take wounds. On this you will compute character’s health points, physical fatigue points and all points recover rate (health, M fatigue, P fatigue).

Other improvements.

It should have something more to customize your character deeper. Something that adds a “plus” to your character. You can call it “mutation”, “DNA Improvements”, “Force” or something similar. This is something you add and train, in this manner you can deeply differ from other similar characters in game. This kind of improvements should be limitated (1/4 usable skills) and should improve your stats or skills. They should be time-triggered, event-triggered or permanent, depending on effect and impact on gameplay.

Skills, spells, powers and such things.

Skills should be many. Something like 3-400 including “spells”, “PSI” or other kinds of powers. Skills and powers whould be based on different statistics and should “consume” some fatigue points (mental or physical, depending on the skill).

There should be some templates as guidelines, it’s hard to remember every skill and decide which one is useful and which is useless. This guidelines should be some kind of quest, like a tutorial based on a small selection (to choose the type of character), to let the player see some base builds where to start his own customisation. I’ll return on this in a separate posts only for quests.

Skills should be “unlocked” doing quests, all skills should be unlockable (maybe for free mmorpg with Item Mall could be useful if in quests you can choose which skill to unlock, but the skills not choosed will be locked until you buy an item at the Mall). But not all skills could be used at the same time, only 20 of them (but in non-combat situation or in “safe” places, you can swap skills).

Later on, I’ll post about quests, equipment and more.

Project M – Definitions

I’m opening a new section here, it’s dedicated to define my ideas of mmorpg, how it should be to get my attention. There will not be any definition on background story or settings, I’m not interested in such things, it will be about the game design, features and gameplay.

Soon i will add some ideas, got to have dinner now!

A safer Car.

Another tool for a safer car: a receiver/transmitter which is directly connected to the electronic system of the car. This device should transmit to other similar devices in nearby cars when an emergency break occurs. The receivers of this signal could be informed in real time of an emergency going on nearby (with some trick, they could be informed also about the distance from the source). Should be pretty simple to implements and install on the new models. Could be sold in two variants: the basic (3 different alerts, based on distance), or the full version (car accident, emergency break, queue).

Apple managing software

I’ve done some research, but I didn’t find any management software on Mac platform. Could be useful for small/medium shops to manage items in shops and in warehouses. On Mac you have a great stability, no virus problems, a very user friendly interface.

I’m still searching…

Customizable mobile phone

On July 11th, Apple will release the new iPhone 3G. So let’s talk about mobile phones.

I would like to see in future a mobile with “pluggable” devices, just like computers. Imagine a mobile which have 4-6 ports where you can plugin add-ons. GPS module, Encrypting key, HSDPA module, Wi-Fi chip and some other stuff. The phone itself could costs a lot less than a full optional one, but you could easily plugin later the stuff you need (allowing different bundles and a higher cost for single module sold later). Could be very interesting the new capabilities of this kind of device. You could add irda or bluetooth, you could remove all module to have a longer battery life when you don’t need them. Remember when Nokia released all mobiles which allowed to change the cover so easily? Could be the same, but with some interesting options, not only a matter of aesthetics.

Could be improved.

A world changing.

It was yesterday, I was thinking about this mmorpg explosive diffusion through players all around the world. It’s weird, they are always pretty similar one to each other, there are more or less the same features in each one.

But there is a feature which I never seen before: the quests to “save the world“. In other terms, during the course of the year (the real year), in the world something happens. There’s an event which all players in all maps can see (like a different video for each zone of the mmorpg’s world), during the video you can spot a player or two which (from now) will have a special quest. This quest represents the key to change or save the world, everyone should help this player in order to accomplish this job, otherwise something will go wrong (for the world, for your side). This is a one-shot quest, you can’t try it two times, if you die, that’s it: you failed. As you do it or you fail it, something *big* in the world will change (maybe maps will become different, mobs will not be the same again).

Maybe this idea needs some redefinition, I’ll come back to this later.