Based on last week’s run-through of the very bare beginnings of still-very-fluid Twitter RPG, I rewrote the entire thing from scratch. It has very solid underpinnings now. The timeline loop — rock solid. Fights with multiple monsters and players worked fine, though it was somewhat chaotic and I was having trouble keeping track of every actor’s health without the handy visual aid of health bars to keep me informed.
The first issue? The game was TOO FAST. Seriously. I had to keep slowing it down, finally slowing it to a twentieth of its initial speed, so that someone following the fight on Twitter wouldn’t have to keep refreshing their Twitter client to see it. The rate the fight progresses should be about the same rate a Twitter client would refresh.
This issue became yet more serious when I found out Twitter, not surprisingly, limits the number of tweets you can send out in an hour to 100. There’s no way I can guarantee that this limit won’t be exceeded except by basically running the fight internally, then spacing out the fight’s log evenly over how long it would take not to exceed this limit. While this would eliminate the long pauses where everyone is waiting for their next turn, it would mean you would set up your action and reactions to the fight before the fight, then the fight would happen, and then you would be given the rewards — but you would not have any real-time control over the fight itself.
This might not actually be a bad thing, given that the fights have to be slow enough to deal with Twitter’s limitations. As long as setting up the fight was fun, and the rewards were fun, and reading how the fight went was fun.
Which… brings up the second issue. What you’re reading on the right is my last run of #bearraid before I took it offline last night. It’s a combat log. That’s all it is.
I was doing a postmortem of the whole thing with my guildy Kasul, explained to him my disappointment with Twitter’s limits and the non-excitement of reading combat logs, and we came up with a couple of ideas. This is why it’s really important to get feedback really early (and, Kasul, be brutal if you have to. If this game isn’t fun, it’s nothing).
We decided it needed a sense of place. Right now, the combat takes place in a vacuum. Where are they? You don’t know. Why are they fighting? A mystery.
A couple of things we can do right off. When you miss, you shouldn’t just miss. Your tripped over a rusting gear, buried halfway in the ground. A swinging pendulum deflected your blow. Your opponent ducked behind the remains of a broken wall. Something appropriate for the environment.
Suddenly, you’re no longer floating in space. You’re fighting amongst the ruins of a factory.
Adding in the actions and reactions will give the actors some personality as well. When you’re low on health, I’ll heal you. But no, I’m out of action points so I’ll comfort you with some soft words instead. Giving your character some of the player’s personality will make them seem slightly less like bots.
But what this game really needs to turn it from a combat log into something fun, is a STORY. A progression of encounters that, completed successfully, bring you through a story. Perhaps, like Wing Commander, even if you lose a battle, that just brings you to a different branch of the story. Depending how you do, how you tune your character and who else fights alongside you, depends how the story ends.
Now, that game is starting to sound a little fun. A lot of work still, more work than I started with, but it’s all about the fun and telling a fun story.
Follow @direbear on Twitter, or search on #bearraid, or both. to keep up to date on what’s happening with the game. If you would be willing to be occasionally spammed and would like to participate in some battles, send me your Twitter ID and you’ll soon be in the fray.
There will be a web component where players can personalize their character and choose their battles, but that’s not even going to start until the battles themselves are fun to watch.
Further notes:
NPCs will occasionally join a battle on your side, and if you treat them well, they may join you. If they join you and subsequently are defeated, they may join the other side and fight you in future battles.
I lied in the post; I do need to start the web integration, just so if issues come up that affect the game play, I can deal with them early. An hour of work at the beginning could be worth days at the end.
First campaign (yay calling it a campaign now!) will likely be solo, just to limit the complexity and to be able to tell a compelling story. There will be NPCs and hirelings to fight with you. Not every battle will be a fight to the death.
That last sentence implies victory conditions, and THAT sentence implies being able to get a basic idea of the fight to come before you enter, while you’re setting up your character and NPCs friends. Of course, surprises could come mid-fight that you could not prepare for…
I need to write a good, basic scenario. The very first fight must both explain the game and be fun enough to make someone want to see the second fight.
Feel free to add me, you know my TwatID — but I’m in the off-again phase of my ambivalent relationship with Twitter and I’m not checking in too often. However, if bums-on-seats (even offline) will help, I’d be happy to contribute. I’ll also be back and more active sooner or later.
Heh 🙂 I just need someone who won’t mind being spammed occasionally just to see how it deals with multiple Twitter IDs in a message re: does everyone see the message in their replies? Etc.
Thanks!
I’m in too. I joined Twitter just to see why I have referring links from it to my blog and didn’t investigate it much more When I get back in town I’ll look into it for real and send that ID (think you picked it up already) or a new one, as I only typed in trash that time to get at the link I was chasing.
Heh… yeah I did a scan of my contact list and it picked up that you had joined. So naturally I started following you!
I’ll admit that I’m intrigued to see what comes of this from a technical perspective, you’re doing some very interesting things with the twitter API.
The thing that strikes me though is that you seem to be moving twitter away from what it does best, the social part. I’ll be honest I’m not sure how you’d go about it but I think that instead of trying to recreate the modern MMO in twitter it would be much more interesting to try and evolve the MMO paradigm back into the social experience it once was.
I’d be intrigued in seeing something like a D&D toolkit for twitter. Have a web based component for character creation and current game status but allow the players to update their actions and be updated via twitter.
Still, I’m interested to see what happens and once I figure out some of the twitter tools available to keep things straight I’ll be signing up.
Looking forward to alpha/beta test it 🙂
@Sisca — that’s an excellent suggestion — but I can’t write that game, yet. Maybe I’ll have learned enough fro mthis effort to do something like that after, but if I get started on something bigger than I can do, I won’t do anything :/
You could try and get your application whitelisted to help out with the rate limiting.