Grid 12 -- Goals

[rob]

Welcome testers, and thanks for playing Grid 12! In this post I want to explain a little about the goals of the project.

We mean for Grid 12 to be a game in which all players work together to defeat the enemies that have taken over the world. This has driven much of the game's design, and led to a number of unusual choices:

* Single battlefront -- the enemies control the whole world, except for a tiny sector in which the players spawn. The players fight side-by-side to expand their zone of control and force back the enemies' lines. Over time, the players cement their control by building structures.

* No level-appropriate zones -- there are no zones, just a single world which players fight to expand. Newbies and veterans must fight shoulder-to-shoulder.

* Limited combat-power awards -- because both low and high level players fight in the same areas, the rewards for leveling up must not affect combat too much. We can give class unlocks, badges, decoratives, storage space and other things, but we can't buff combat power by the typical 10%-50% per level.

* Co-op world building -- the players work together to build structures, and therefore griefers (and clueless newbies) must not be able ruin others' work.

We are trying to innovate with Grid12. We recognize that while some new ideas are great, many more need massive tweaking or should just be abandoned. We thank you very much for helping us evaluate our ideas.

Rob and the Grid 12 Team

[amitp]

• How long do you want it to take to max? I suggest having multiple distinct types of maxing:
  
  • Use temporary powerups as a way to level up in minutes,
    
  • Use tank levels (separate per server) as a way to level up in hours
    
  • Global progression should be slower, leveling up in days
    
  
  
• How long do you want it to take to travel across the map?
  
  • Bigger makes the game feel grander… more to do, more to see
    
  • Smaller makes it easier to find friends, to know the whole map, but people sooner run out of new places to explore
    
  
  
• How long do you want it to take to build a city?
  

Having these kinds of “scale” questions figured out will help guide the design.

[amitp]

Also loosely related to scale, there should be decisions to make at every scale from seconds to days:

• What do I do about tanks? => I shoot them. I have to decide where to drive.
  
• What do I do about enemy buildings? => I shoot them. I have to decide where to drive, whether to attack the building first or attack the surrounding tanks first.
  
• What do I do about gridshards => I bring them to town.
  
• What do I do in town? => I decide which building to help, but how?
  
• What do I do about lenses? => ?
  
• How do I pick a tank? => ? (figure out later)
  
• How do I choose a server? => ? (figure out later, but gameplay will affect this, and I think you'll want to keep this in mind as you're designing the game)
  

[amitp]

BTW, for those of you who haven't played Steel Chaos, or aren't reading into it the same thing I read into it, here's my (wall of text) writeup: forums.wildshadow.com/node/956#comment-5766

Grid12 is not Steel Chaos, but some of the ideas from that game may still be interesting to ponder in this one.

[rob]

Current thoughts on time scales:

We'd like a player to be continuously "leveling up his/her account." This means that there is always something to do, no matter whether you are a newbie or veteran. The time scales of these things will probably get longer and longer as you progress.

How's this for a player timeline?

Newbies spend the first 10 seconds learning to move.
By the 30 second mark, they've learned to shoot, gotten their first kill (a target dummy), and picked up their first loot.
By one minute, they've made multiple target dummy kills and picked up a lot of loot.
By two minutes, they've learned about shields and been in battles with enemies that shoot back.
By three minutes, they've used gridshards to upgrade the tutorial town, they've leveled up and learned how to switch to new tank classes
By four minutes, they've built a structure in the tutorial town, and then used it to teleport to a starter dungeon
By 8 minutes they've run through a starter dungeon and teleported to the larger overworld
By 12 minutes they're in combat in the overworld
By 30 minutes they've built some buildings/towns, leveled up a few times, tried a couple of tanks, maybe died some
By an hour, they're hooked on collecting loot, unlocking new classes, building up towns, and exploring the world
By a day, they've got a new favorite class and they are actively seeking powerups for it; they start inviting friends to play
By a week, they've got some longer term goals in mind and they are optimizing their path toward them; they are in a guild and making new friends and bringing in people they know from RL or other online communities
By a month, they've unlocked most classes, played many of them and "maxed" a few; day to day they work to enhance their guild's reputation & accomplishments, and earn upgrades for their guild hall and personal garage
By two months, they are working to unlock and max every class, earn the highest badges and find the rarest items, both for themselves and for their guild
By six months, they've accomplished everything, but keep playing for new content updates (classes, dungeons, items, enemies) and to hang out with friends



For servers, I think it would be great to take several weeks to win a game ("reconquer the sector"). But I've thought that before and never been able to achieve it.

For travel, I think it should be painless to find and play with others. But I agree that instant travel destroys any sense of place and scale. Can we have a grand sense of scale AND painless grouping?

We've currently got fairly quick city-building when the cities are small. Bigger cities take much longer to improve. But there is no artificial waiting period -- if you have the gridshards, you can build stuff immediately.

[amitp]

I like that you have many progress bars in the plan.

I know we need a tutorial but it's sad that they're not playing with others until 12 minutes into the game. That seems like forever. I hate to compare to WoW, but compare to WoW, where after all the hassles are complete (buying the game, patching, registration, credit card, etc.), you jump right in. The first thing you see after you create your character is the overworld, with other people. Then you go through the tutorial, with other people around. I'm not sure if that's practical in Grid12, given that the world is changing and not lovingly hand crafted.

In the game as it is today, destroying an enemy building is so quick that I can see why you can't have servers that last for weeks. My gut says there have to be multiple scales, maybe something fractal like. But when I try to think of something, I haven't found a way to extend those battles to make them grand and epic.

For travel, one of the problems that RotMG has is that rogues will cloak, walk to the end, and then all the players will teleport there, skipping the dungeon. Then they'll open another dungeon and do the same thing. Over and over. Instead of allowing people to skip the boring parts, teleportation is leading to increased grinding. People find the one encounter that maximizes rewards, and do that repeatedly. The desire to maximize trumps the desire to enjoy the game.

Since this is still early on and you can experiment, I think it's worth trying out teleport points. Something that lets you get most of the way there, but also something that takes player effort to build (and maintain?) the teleportation network. That way, you can teleport to the frontier but you can't teleport behind enemy lines. Will this work out? I don't know for sure. How many games have a transportation network cooperatively built by players?

[rob]

Theme parks like WoW have many simultaneous progress bars (quests): kill 10 rats; collect 20 minotaur horns; deliver this maguffin to that dude in Ironforge; rescue the farmer's daughter from the kobolds. You normally work on only one at a time, because rats don't drop minotaur horns and they are not on the way to Ironforge or the Kobold mine. But you can work on each quest individually until it is done, then work on the next, then head to the quest hub to turn them all in. Great job! Now it's time for dinner, or maybe bed. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying; I know there's a lot more to WoW than just this.)

Civilization also has many simultaneous progress bars: you are building a barracks in Corinth, a phalanx in Athens, the pyramids in Thebes; each city is gaining food points towards its next population expansion; you are researching Iron Working; you are building up culture points toward the next social policy; great people are slowly building in several cities; your settlers are making their way through the mountains to the "lush fertile land" beyond; a trireme is tracing the outline of your continent's coastline; each of your workers is building a road, farm, mine or something else.

The major, key, killer difference between WoW's progress bar system and Civ's system is that in Civ you make progress on all 30 bars, every turn. Every turn, one or more bars are filled. Every turn, one or more new projects (progress bars) are begun. There is never a good stopping point. That's why you look up in horror to realize that the sun is rising and you have to be at work in 90 minutes. Just....one....more....turn!

I want Grid 12 to overlap progress bars like Civ does. We've already got gridshard collection as a progress bar for leveling up. We've added lenses as another progress bar which fills over time (get 5 lenses for a prize) even as you are doing your normal gridshard collecting. The crystal splinters currently have no function, but what if collecting them also filled a progress bar? By the time you've collected all 5 lenses, you are most of the way to the next level. So you go ahead and hit that level, but by then you've gotten another lens or two and your crystal splinter meter is almost full. So you go ahead and get a few more splinters to fill it, but that got you two more lenses and now you want to finish off the lens set....

I too feel conflicted about hiding the multiplayer aspects for so long. However, I'm really concerned that putting multiplayer into people's faces at the beginning might scare them off. Also I feel like people want to practice in private a bit before playing with others -- at least learn how to drive and shoot and get loot. Do you feel that the wait for multiplayer in RotMG was too long?

We've got /teleport <town> and /goto <player> right now. I think these are too liberal, but they were easy to code up. I really like the idea of a player-built transport network to replace /teleport. Perhaps /goto (or its eventual menu-based equivalent) could be restricted to people who aren't in towns (so the transport network remains relevant) or only to people in your guild or only to people who've previously /tell'd you, or people already in a group of 3 or more, etc. We want to make it easy to group up, but we want to make the map matter.

[amitp]

Great!

WoW has lots of simultaneous progress bars these days. Quests are designed so that 2-3 quests will overlap. In places you're questing you'll see herbs, ores, or skins to pick up (each character can have 1-2 of these). There are archaeological artifacts to find. There's “reputation” to build up. There are things to do to unlock dungeons/raids. So you can have ~5 overlapping progress bars to work on at any one time (and lots that are inactive until you reach the right area), but being an RPG, there's nowhere near the scope you have in Civ. (Also, if you contribute to the wiki, it has its own progress bars!) These are not all introduced at once. Things like character skills are introduced as you level up, and talent trees don't even show up until level 10.

Civ and WoW both integrate the tutorial into the main game instead of having a separate area that you're forced to go through first. Given that WoW is hand designed it doesn't make sense to draw inspiration from that. But Civ puts you out into a big open world where everything's different each time, and they weave the tutorial into the game too. So it's something we should consider.

I do feel like the wait for multiplayer in RotMG was too long. It made it look like a single player game like so many others. If the first thing I had seen was the Nexus, and if the Nexus wasn't full of spam bots, it'd be exciting. Also, the tutorial doesn't really tell you how to play with others, because there are no others in the tutorial.

Ideas for improving the tutorial:

• Steel Chaos put the help keys up first and then you had to figure out what key causes it to go away. If you already know what's going on you can press H without having to read the page. In RotMG you can press the Nexus shortcut.
  
• I like the “click to move” but once they've done that, are the arrows enough to get them to move along, without “Now Here!” and “Keep Going!”? Also, since we were talking progress bars, it'd be nice to see progress. Once you've clicked to move, either cross out or put a check mark by the “Click here” message. That way the player gets confirmation that they did what they need to do.
  
• Once you can detect what they know how to do, you don't have to make it linear. This demo shows you what to do but allows you to do things out of order. Think of the tutorial not in terms of what you want to tell people but what you want them to know. If they've demonstrated they already know something, skip that part of the tutorial.
  
• Focus on what they need to know. I'd get rid of “Gun awarded” and “Autofire!” and put in something about the actions. “Click to move” is an action. The corresponding action here is “Move near an enemy to automatically shoot”. I don't know how to shorten that.
  
• “Get Loot!” is an ok action but “Move near loot to pick it up” is more clear. I don't know how to shorten that.
  
• After that, “Guns awarded” is a detail I don't think the tutorial players need to know. Gun vs Guns is too subtle.
  
• The next step is “Destroy!” but that might happen anyway if you don't tell them to do it. (Might be worth user testing)
  
• Then “Shields Awarded!” says what happens, but not what to do. I guess that's ok. But it'd be nicer if it told you what you need to know: the HUD should use an arrow to point to the shield bar and health bar, and say what they are.
  
• Civ will tell you what settlers and warriors do because that's what you start with. But it doesn't tell you about spies or ships or workers at the beginning. If a tutorial tried to explain all of Civ, you'd forget it all. For learning it's better if you space things out. It's also better if you tell them at just the right time.
  
• The first time you get a tank with nonuniform shields, that'd be the time to point out the action: “Turn to use the shields to block enemy fire.”
  
• “Fortress Ahead!” doesn't tell you why this matters. It would be better if it was an arrow pointing to the fortress, and what you need to do: “Destroy fortresses to stop enemies from spawning.” What if you did what Civ does, and wait until you encounter a fortress before telling them what to do? Show the message 1 or 2 or 3 times and then never again.
  
• “Mouse wheel zooms” could be “Zoom out with the mouse wheel to see a larger area”.
  
• “Teleporter ahead” could be “Move to the teleport pad”
  
• The first 1-3 times you see a town socket, draw an arrow and tell the player “Move here to deposit shards to grow the town”. Same thing for all the other sockets.
  
• I like the text on the ground effect from the tutorial. You could use it for showing town names, town level, and the wealth progress bar. Then you don't need the tooltip. The same goes for all the buildings.
  
• The first 1-3 times you see another player, draw an arrow to the teammate's tank and explain that these are other players. Then point to the chat box and “Press Enter to chat with others”.
  
• If you want to move even more of the tutorial into the main world, at the beginning of the game you can dim out irrelevant stuff, such as other players, the chat box, towns, etc.
  

[rob]

Some more design foundations:

The core combat gameplay is "positioning and orienting your tank". All of the typical combat tasks, such optimizing your damage output, minimizing the damage you take, working with teammates, etc, are expressed by putting your tank in the right place and making sure it's pointing the right direction. The emphasis is not on aiming, shooting or dodging.

Nobody, either accidentally or on purpose, can make life worse for anyone else, or all of us. Neither clueless noobs nor evil griefers should be able to ruin the fun of others. At worst, a dumb/malevolent action should have no effect, or should waste the time of the actor. For example, building the "wrong" building is a waste of gridshards, but it doesn't prevent someone else from building a "correct" building.

The more the merrier. Grouping should always be at least as fun and rewarding as soloing.

Don't separate people from their friends. Don't segregate noobs and pros. Allow people to find each other quickly.

[Justin]

I'd really like to discuss a lot of the ideas mentioned in this thread, and see what can/can't be achieved from what we have in the game as it is now.

Aug 23, 2012 13:11:44 GMT -5 rob said:

* Single battlefront -- Over time, the players cement their control by building structures.

* No level-appropriate zones -- Newbies and veterans must fight shoulder-to-shoulder.

* Limited combat-power awards -- We can't buff combat power by the typical 10%-50% per level.

* Co-op world building -- the players work together to build structures, and therefore griefers (and clueless newbies) must not be able ruin others' work.

Cementing control by building structures. We're only just beginning to get a crafting system, but I'm hoping this will lead to the return of building in this game.

Creating power cells for your tank and having them last a very short period of time is a good idea. Creating something like this that works for other major functions we take for-granted as players, like teleporting, region-50%-bonuses, and prisms would be interesting. I don't want to go into too much detail on what I'm thinking for this yet.

No zones is something I really wish we'd stick by. I haven't had an experience where my game is negatively affected by new players. However, trolls can easily ruin the game for others with the whole 'shared loot' concept.

Imagine there's a supply cache that spawned with one fortress in it. Someone can use a trailblazer, speed/blink ahead of the group, switch to a thunderbolt and secure the cache before anyone else catches up to them. Depending on teleporting to catch up to a troll isn't very fun.

Zones definitely would not solve this issue.

Sept 9, 2012 14:33:12 GMT -5 rob said:

There is never a good stopping point. That's why you look up in horror to realize that the sun is rising and you have to be at work in 90 minutes. Just....one....more....turn!

I want Grid 12 to overlap progress bars like Civ does.

---

We've got /teleport <town> and /goto <player> right now. I think these are too liberal, but they were easy to code up. I really like the idea of a player-built transport network to replace /teleport. Perhaps /goto (or its eventual menu-based equivalent) could be restricted to people who aren't in towns (so the transport network remains relevant) or only to people in your guild or only to people who've previously /tell'd you, or people already in a group of 3 or more, etc. We want to make it easy to group up, but we want to make the map matter.

I wish I felt like I could play this game non-stop right now. I'd like to assume I don't feel this way because there aren't always people online, but I know this isn't the case. There still aren't any goals.

There was a huge discussion about progress made in the game, but what is the goal? Upgrade your tank and then what? Clear the region, kill bosses, upgrade your tank, clear a convoy route, kill some convoys, repeat, upgrade your tank, and repeat?

Right now I don't feel able to upgrade my tank anymore, and therefore see no reason to do anything.

---

Why do people not want to sacrifice their instant teleportation? I know a lot of people who played before the teleport delay was implemented don't like the change. Players tend to refresh in order to bypass it when fighting anything that gives 'decent' loot.

Teleporting is directly related to looting. When the game gets more players, if it remains as a single battlefront concept, the more places you can teleport to instantly, the more loot you'll be able to get. Right now if there were a hundred players online (assume no server issues would occur), they would either form a massive group in one region or separate and clear multiple regions at once. The first is what is most likely, because without organization people tend to follow the group making the most 'progress' at the quickest rate. However, assuming the 2nd were possible, people would be constantly teleporting to catch up to things that are spawning and getting the maximum possible loot.

I'll change my question a bit now.

Why do people not want to sacrifice their loot? Why is loot the priority?

Modules and temporary upgrades are nice, but are they not creating a larger gap between newbie and veteran?

Sept 24, 2012 10:26:49 GMT -5 rob said:

The core combat gameplay is "positioning and orienting your tank". All of the typical combat tasks, such optimizing your damage output, minimizing the damage you take, working with teammates, etc, are expressed by putting your tank in the right place and making sure it's pointing the right direction. The emphasis is not on aiming, shooting or dodging.

The bug with the red sticky stationary rotation option for mouse-users seems to be fixed. Either that or I forgot how to reproduce it.

I'd like for it to be reimplemented as a feature. The direction that the red stationary rotation arrow points is the default rotation direction your tank will try to go to when not moving.

I find it hard describing how it would help in words. I'll try to make a video of it eventually. It'd help the spectre immensely.

What I really want to talk about is tanks that CAN 'aim', and how overpowered they are. Why do all tanks that can aim deal more damage than tanks that can't? It seems like the opposite of what it should be.

The hornet seems to balance the aiming idea, with only one turret and terrible shielding, but massive range and damage to compensate. The thunderbolt on the other hand can aim, deal a lot of damage, and protect itself with its forward-based shielding. Plus, it can switch modes to target multiple enemies aswell.

Unless the goal of the game IS to have everyone use thunderbolt, then a change is probably necessary.

---

I really wish I were able to set goals for myself with this game, like "Kill X of this, accomplish X, etc", but I can't think of anything that I can do that isn't too simple and grindy, or too hard and time consuming.

50 drills? After getting 12/12 pulchs, what is the point?
10 subcommanders? Two whole regions? As a tester I don't see this being possible alone.
Scout 5 towns? They're too unpredictable, and then I have to connect and clear them through non-debuffed regions before I can scout further.

Right now everything MUST be done with groups of people. I don't see testing this with the small group of active testers we have now as useful means for testing the game.

EDIT: One more thing I completely forgot to mention. People never clear regions unless they're debuffed. A lot of regions are completely ignored unless debuffed. Is this a good thing? It definitely prevents map expansion, as can be seen by the rapidly closing sectors.