You know how board games always have something on the side of them that says, “For 2-5 players,” or something like that to indicate how many people the game is sized for? It’s partially a practical thing, they can’t include enough cards or tokens or a board large enough for a group of 30, but it’s also a factor in the game itself. It was never tested for 30 people, for that matter it may just not work very well when scaled to 30, 300, or 3000. There are PBBGs out there with 30,000 people on a single server, how do you even design a game like that?

I have no idea. Literally, no idea whether the game I’m working on now will be fun when I throw lots of people at it. It could suck. It will suck, the creator of BattleMaster virtually guarantees it, and you know what? He’s probably right.

My current hope is that I’ve got a good idea for a game and I’ve taken the same path a lot of games take by giving every player basically the same starting conditions so they’re left to their own devices in competing with other players. But is just starting with a level playing field enough? Is there a way other than playtesting and adjusting, playtesting and adjusting to have a better idea of how to make a game interesting when you don’t even know how many people are going to play it?

One possibility I’ve considered is the idea of forcing division into groups upon the players. Creating a game and really balancing it well for say 25 and then as players join they automatically get assigned to a group until it hits the magic size and the game gets going in earnest. So a single server might be running hundreds of games at the same time rather than one game with thousands of players. Short of sites that let you play real board games online (e.g. http://gametableonline.com/) , I’ve not seen anything like this though and as with all these questions, I’m not very sure how well it would work short of building a complete game and testing it.

I know it does offer some possible advantages because you can actually have certain people fill certain roles. There will be only three people who can be doctors, two police officers, 12 zombies, etc. The roles are set and they play them out till the end of the game. Cooperative games are all the rage in the board game world right now and often they work on this very principal (e.g. Battlestar Galactica). I’m so-and-so and here’s what I can do. I have in-game abilities that maybe nobody else in the game has and vice versa. You can even have traitors who are working against the group but nobody knows who they are or perhaps even if there are any.

But then what do you do when one of them leaves?

Problem #2: Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town

In addition to being the title of a book by Cory Doctorow that I really enjoyed, this is how I describe a problem that I see as one of the worst ones a persistent online game may face. People come, try it, and then leave never to come back. Or they join it to stay but only a couple of days before it is scheduled to end or after all the empires are all built up and the game experience is completely different from players who started the game together.

Board game players don’t face this problem nearly as much. Sure, people get called away for emergencies on occasion, but the social convention is that if you’re coming to play that you’ll stick with it until the end of the game. Board games tend to have fairly short lifespans compared to PBBGs though. With timeframes of weeks or months their games are much more likely to have people quit because of something coming up or losing interest. What happens to those players? Are they a zombie that sits there unresponsive while the player is gone? Do they become a computer controled character when the player is away? Do they fade away as though they never existed?

New players are more easily dealt with. They can be shunted off to a newly opened game in order to keep them from joining too late. Or, if you design an open-ended game then perhaps it won’t matter when they join. Most MMORPGs are constrained to their world needing to exist in a kind of weird stasis. Yes you obliterated that dungeon full of bad guys yesterday. Today, it’s all put back together so someone else can go do the same thing. You’re living in WestWorld and Yul Brenner’s gunslinger will be just fine as soon as we repair him.

Problem #3: Numbers, Complexity, and the Digging of Holes

The last of three big problems that I see PBBGs having to deal with is the problem of numbers and complexity. It’s not that board games don’t have to deal with lots of variables and complexity too, they do. The introduction of a lot of different elements is what keeps a game from being something easily analyzed and “solved” to the point where it’s no longer fun to play. The problem is again one of scale.

Any board game designer has to deal with complexity by saying, “What can my players manage in their head with a few additional play aids I might give them?” Scoring, number of pieces, number of cards, size and complexity of the board are all constrained by what real people can really hold in their hands/calculate/see. But as soon as you get a computer involved the temptation is to throw out all of that. I don’t have to have only four kinds of armor, I can have 40! I can have 150 different weapons, all with subtly different values for attack and defense. I can even have each one keep track of how sharp it is. It can get worn down over time…

But then that complexity comes home to roost when it’s time to actually playtest that game. How do you adjust a game with four thousand variables without getting your own version of the butterfly effect. One little tweak here makes a huge difference over there, or perhaps even worse, a huge change here has almost no effect because of the unforseen influence of some other things you can’t seen working in the background. The more complexity you put in, the richer your game seems. But at the same time you’re digging your own grave deeper and deeper.

This is probably the most solvable of the three big problems; just scale back. But scale back to what? Unless you’re willing to lock the number of players per game at a fairly small number, what are the effects of a small tweak when it may change things for hundreds or thousands of players? Is it going to completely upset the economy in your game?

In Conclusion

What do you think are the biggest design problems PBBGs face? Have you seen solutions to these problems in existing games or have ideas for solutions that no one has tried yet? I know I’m looking forward to hearing from others interested in PBBG game design on these and other problems.

What role will quests have in my game?

The first part of designing your quest system is to ask yourself “why do I want to have quests in my game? What purpose will the quests serve? How will users utilize quests and what am I hoping users will get out of quests?” These questions are not just nice to have in the back of your mind so you know you are on the right track. You need to come up with concrete answers to these questions and you need to make sure that your quest implementation follows the answers that you came up with.

Like I always do, I will be using my game TerraTanks as the example that we will be following. At the time of me writing this, I do not have a quest system in TerraTanks. I think that the game needs one. So now I will answer my own questions:

Q: Why do I want to have quests in my game?
A: There is a lot of down time in TerraTanks and relatively little to do during that downtime. I think that quests will be a big filler. If you don’t want to fight someone there is even less to do. People are slow to attack someone else because they fear retribution of someone that knows how to play better than them.

Q: What purpose will the quests serve?
A: The quests will give players something to do during slow periods. Quests will give players training and experience in game tasks. Quests will be an alternate route for advancing a player’s character.

Q: How will users utilize quests and what will they get out of quests?
A: Quests will be a non-integral part of play. There will be various benefits including player learning of how the world works and concrete in game rewards like resources or troops. Quests will give the player something to do when they don’t know what else to do.

What is a Quest?

A quest is a state machine where states are changed based on the correct user action. A good quest is significantly dressed up from this, but all quests boil down to this definition. Each quest has several states that it lives in that waits for user interaction to proceed to the next state. The states most often look like this:

1. Quest created – The quest exists and is waiting for a user to accept it.
2. Quest accepted – The user has accepted a quest. New triggers are usually placed in the game world.
3. Quest progresses – Often a quest will have several stages with new triggers being activated. This step can be repeated indefinitely.
4. Quest conclusion – Either the quest is failed or satisfied. The quest should die at this point or get reinstated back to state 1.

Further explanation

Quest is Created – The quest needs to be created without user input on the game. The quest is instantiated in state 1 and put somewhere for a player to find. Usually this means you place an NPC or a button that says “get quests here” for the player to find and interact with.

Quest is Accepted – The quest moves into the second state where the quest is made into a unique instance for the player who accepted it. Appropriate steps are taken to change the world to accommodate completing the quest. You need to decided if these changes are only going to be noticeable by the person on the quest or if they are noticeable by everyone in the game and if the quest is continuously available or just available on a first come first serve basis.

Quest Progresses – When you accept the quest, new triggers are placed into the game world. This could be an enemy that the quest identifies as something that needs to be killed or it could be a location that the player needs to go to or an item the player needs to hold. Part of the design will include how your system will handle quest progression. This will be covered in more detail in a future post.

What kind of quests can I do?

When coming up with quests you will find that many of them fall under the two stale catagories of:

• Delivery quest
• Hitman quest

Unfortunately there is not much you can do about this pig besides put lipstick on it. There are some benefits to these types of quests because they will teach the basics of your game. Once these basics are learned, though, the only thing that will keep players coming back for more are the in game benefits of completing a quest and good story writing. I suggest that you spend a lot of time working on the risk/reward balancing for quests as well as coming up with innovative ways to present the quest. Here are some suggestions on dressing up your quest:

• Make the quest multi-step
• Put time limits on the quest
• Make penalties for not completing quests you are given (making the penalty too stiff is a jerk move. be careful with this one)
• Instead of attack quests, make defense quests
• Think of interesting rewards for quests. What if, instead of money, the player gets to learn a certain research for free or gets attack immunity from a certain faction for a short time. Be creative in the space of your own game.
• Make a quest competitive. When one player gets a quest to make sure something survives, give the next player the quest to go and kill it. Or give several people the same quest to have control over a certain area when time runs out.

In the comments, please feel free to include where you would like this quest series to go.

Be very communicative with your player base:

You are definitely not going to get everything right the first time. It is frustrating when the simulation that you run in your head about how fun something is going to be is not how the users end up using it. Make sure they have channels to tell you what they don’t like. In my case I wrote a form that goes on the bottom of all of my pages so the user can post a comment to me. Their comment is stored in my database with their identifier so that I can talk to them in game. I also made a built in reward system so that I could give people things for pointing out my mistakes. A complaining user is so much more valuable than a quitting user. Treat them like a valuable member of your project.

Listen to your players frustrations but remember that you are the game’s architect. Don’t implement a feature just because a user wants it. One of the most valuable lessons I learned in a class about Quality was that the end user, most likely, will not tell you what THE problem is, they will tell you what THEIR problem is. You are the expert of your game and you need to make sure that you are alleviating the pain of the end user while not throwing off the game or compromising what the experience is supposed to be about. A great example of this is that when people started playing the game they were confused about what to do or how to do things and they would ask me specific questions. “Do I need a surveyor to survey a planet before I build? How do I get units from my highliner to the planet?” I asked if the tutorial that I force everyone to go through did not explain it well and usually they just said that they skipped through it and tried to start playing. Throwing up my hands and saying “well it is your fault for not reading the tutorial” is actually not the correct answer. Instead I made a series of video tutorials for the game.

Another way I made communication easier was to include a forum in the game. I am using phpBB, but I integrated it directly into the game by creating the forum account when the user’s game account is created.

Games are interesting when they make sense:

One of the things I strived for when building TerraTanks was that if something happened to you that was unexpected, it would at least make sense. The simple visual presentation belies the depth of cause and effect that goes on in the game. Here are some examples of what I am most proud of:

• In order to find out about enemy locations to attack them you have to use your spies. To keep with the global management theme, you just have one ’spy level’ that is used for your character. When you spy on someone the game compares your spy level with their spy level and you are given spy report based on how you compare. The spy level is only based on how much you are willing to pay in gold every day so while larger players should have a better spy level, they need to play it correctly to do so.
  When you get your spy report on a player, you will find out about all buildings that exist a set distance away from your closest base for every week the building has been around. So if the distance is 25 for every week I will see buildings that are 50 distance if they are 2 weeks old.
  While this system seems complicated, it expands the strategy of the game. New players are harder to find and attack giving them natural setup protection. Building a base in enemy territory becomes a good strategy for scouting. It gives you a reason to keep expanding in new places. It balances old big players with new small players. It makes sense that it would take a while for your spy network to find a newly populated planet.
• Combat is designed to play out more realistically. There are bonuses for different combinations of units that you use. For instance, the APC (armored personnel carrier) will make your foot soldiers and sappers harder to kill. If you have Scout tanks and Behemoth tanks, the scouts will act as spotters and you will destroy more tanks during that attack. Also, battles go more quickly if the forces are lopsided. If you go in with an even number of troops, you will have to slog out several attacks with fewer troops dying on each side. The attacker is charged action points for each attack and he would probably want to use those points on other things. Lopsided battles are over quickly and produce many more casualties on both sides.
• Actions in game frequently require the use of action points. You acquire one action point after some set period of time. It makes sense that as your empire expands it would take longer for you to do things. The refresh rate goes from 15 minutes when you have nothing to 1 hour when your empire is very sizable. This helps new players get set up more quickly.
• Bases are the central hub of your civilization. You put a base on a planet and you can have things up and running very rapidly. As you build on planets further from the base things cost more and take longer to build. This is a common strategy in games but it made sense to the story of the game.
• Moving your ships around in system takes 10 minutes of real time. Systems are spaced 1 hour apart from each other. When thinking about space, solar systems are pretty densely packed when compared to distance from one system to the next.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end of this post-mortem. I would love for you to come and try out my game and let me know what you think!

www.terratanks.com

Spreadsheets are useful because it provides a way for you to enter or create equations for things such as Health Points and then actually see the data at different levels. Another great thing is that Excel functions can use data from another cell. This means you can create several different data sets, one building off the other. This allows what I like to call Relational Formulas. These formulas stay consistent and balanced because as one factor changes, they also change.

I recently decided to see what I could do to improve my game’s current HP formula and rate of increase of weapon’s damage. What was happening was maximum HP was not increasing with each level as much as player’s stats and weapons at low to mid levels, but HP started to get very high at higher levels. This meant very short battles for level 5-30, but long battles for those 50 and up.

Lets build a basic HP formula sheet and I can show you how I balanced this. Open a new spreadsheet and name the first three columns: Level, HP and HP Diff., respectively. I usually make my headers bold just to stand out as well. Put a 1 in the first level column cell (A2).

Now in A3 type the following: =A2+1
There are a couple different ways of expanding a formula across a column or row. One way is to copy the single cell and highlight all the cells you wish to paste into and paste. Excel also allows you to hover over the bottom right corner of a cell and click, hold and drag over the cells you wish to put that function into. Keep in mind that wherever you move this equation, the cell it references will always stay relational. In this case, no matter what cell you copy this into, it will always add 1 to the cell directly above it. For the Level column, this is an easy way of not having to type 1-100 manually! If you ever wish to copy the value of a cell using an equation instead of the equation itself, just copy paste and then click the small box that appears nearby and select “Value Only.”
Lets click and drag the bottom right corner of A3 down A21. That will give us 20 levels to see.

Now for the HP formula. Most HP formulas involve level, that is why I included that in the first column. You could use this template to experiment with different formulas. If you have another factor in your equation, just add the data to another column and reference it in the formula. In my game I like to have each level’s new HP build upon their previous max HP since they may have increased their HP through Stat points. If I limit my equation so that each level has to have X many health points, it will not work well with any other means of increasing max HP.

After much experimenting I will use the following equation: Square root of your level * 1000 + your previous HP.
So enter into B2: =(sqrt(A2*1000))+168

That is just level 1 though, so enter into B3:=(sqrt(A2*1000))+B2
Why add the 168 you may ask? Well you can change that to whatever you want to move the starting HP. With 168 it gives us 200 as our starting HP, but you could add +968 and start at 1000 HP if you wanted. (If you are wondering where that equation came from, keep an eye out for a future post about how to create equations to do what you want. In this case, the square root allows me to have large increases in HP even at low levels, but still larger at higher levels, just not exponentially so.)

But what about the annoying decimal numbers because of the square root? This is where you will want to use the ROUNDUP or ROUNDDOWN function. Simply add it to the beginning of your equation and then add a coma and zero telling it to round to zero decimals. =ROUNDUP(sqrt(A2*1000)+B2,0) Putting 1 or 2 will make it round to 1 or 2 decimal points, respectively. Putting -1 or -2 would go to the opposite side of the decimal point and round to the tens and hundreds.
Now drag that equation down the column to row 21 and you will see the base maximum HP for up to level 20.

I am a big fan of seeing every possible variable I can and having them in data cells since I never know when I might want to use them in a formula.
The third column will simply show us the difference in HP between the HP for the previous level and the current for each level. The first row (C2) will be left blank. Type this into C3: =B3-B2
Drag it down to row 21 and you can see how the HP increases per a level. As mentioned before, you can now see how the HP jumps up a good amount just from level 1 to 2, but it continues to increase gradually, just not on a drastic curve.

The basic tips on making equations, dragging equations and rounding up or down can be used for anything, not just HP. You could use it to make a sheet that shows you the Experience points required for each level.
You could use this to list your weapons and their damage and then make an equation to make the cost of the weapon dependent on how much damage it does; now it is consistent and you don’t have to come up with numbers out of thin air.
Get creative and use this valuable tool to both document data as well as balance things by making them relational, or just experiment with different stat or cost values.

A lot of developers create browsergames without thinking about balancing them first – this usually tends to result in games that are released with some serious balance issues. Certain characters might be over-powered in comparison to others, and certain items might be complete gamebreakers – things that make the game virtually unplayable for players without the item by comparison.

How will you solve the balance problem in your browsergame?

One approach that a lot of browsergame developers take is limiting users to a certain number of turns in a day – that way, a user who has all the time in the world and a user who can only sign in for 5 minutes each day can both remain relatively close to each other in terms of in-game performance.

While action-point/turn-based systems are a good way to keep your players a little more evenly matched, they don’t (unfortunately) fix balance problems – at best, all they can do is prolong the amount of time that it takes for a balance issue to appear.

Here’s an example: you run a small browsergame, with 5000 users who are active daily. Players can play the game in real-time, and at any given moment there are at least 200 players online at once, interacting with the game. In a weekly update, you push out a new sword that can only be found after defeating a particular boss monster. Unbeknownst to you, this sword in combination with the armor you released three weeks ago combine to form the most powerful combination in the game – capable of instantly killing any player who is attacked by a player using both of them.

In a real-time game, you’ll notice this issue fairly quickly – all of a sudden, a handful of players will be able to instantly defeat any other player. You’ll soon start to see complaints in your forums (if you have them), and you’ll be able to watch as more players find the item and begin to exploit the balancing issues present.

Now think of the same scenario, in the context of a turn-based game. Users get 25 turns per day, and it takes them 40 turns to get to the boss (if they don’t use turns, they stack up). It will be at least 2 days post-update for a user to get to the boss, let alone retrieve the sword – and if it takes them a full turn to attack a player, a user who just acquired the sword (assuming they had 50 turns saved up) will be able to instantly kill 10 players. Now, is the 10 players being instantly defeated by a single player a balance issue, or just a player who is that much stronger than 10 other players?

As you can see, there are pros and cons to either system. If you build a real-time system, there are more balance issues related to keeping casual and hardcore players even – but you will quickly find balance issues that have to do with gameplay features. In a turn-based system, there are far less problems keeping individual players balanced – but gameplay features can easily cause balance headaches that you won’t find for a long period of time.

So how will you balance your game? The answer is entirely up to you – although I would recommend setting your game up in a way that suits your development style. If you heavily test your changes before deploying them to a production environment, you can probably safely get away with a turn-based system – you’ll just need to make sure you thoroughly test all of your changes before you deploy them. If you’d rather have your players do the testing for you, and just fix balance issues as they come up – go for real-time. Either way, it’s your game – and the only important thing is recovering from balance issues when they do appear.