postmortem
Post Mortem: Wargames 2.0
History of WarGames 2.0:
My name is Ron Rejwan, and I’ve created a relatively small game called WarGames 2.0, which at the time of this document being written has approximately 45,000 registered users.
WarGames is the very classical definition of a browser-game – it runs on your browser, requires no downloads, supports all the major browsers and – the most important part – doesn’t have all the amazing graphics that are being made for all of the new juggernaut game projects.
In a nutshell – as soon as you sign up, a virtual nation is created and from that moment on you run every possible aspect in it; from setting taxes and the national budget, to conquering land, conducting espionage operations and run a huge alliance.
I have gotten the essence of WarGames from Earth 2025, which was a favorite of mine a long time ago. I’ve decided to take it, put it on steroids and give it a professional look and feel.
The soul of the game – The players:
No matter how good your game is, how pretty, how much functionality or innovativeness you’ll implement in it – if you won’t have players or players won’t stick around for more than a short while, your game will be stuck at the ground floor forever.
As I’ve mentioned before, WarGames lacks the impressive eye-catching graphics of corporate games, and that’s where attracting new players is a problem.
The game itself is highly addictive – you can ask any of the hundreds of players who are playing for 6+ months now (Around 2-3 hours a day) – including myself!
GUI:
Do yourself a favor, spend a couple of hundred bucks and pay a graphic designer to design your GUI. Usually that’s the only graphical aspect of this type of games, so invest in it. It’s worth it.
The Community:
Devote as much time and effort as you do on improving your game as in growing the game’s community – this is a big one! Give your players as much of freedom of creativity and communication as possible. Here’s a list from my game, you can “borrow” these ideas if you want to (I don’t mind, really):
- Organized and moderated forums – Critical to any game
- Wikipedia (Or WarPedia in WG2) – Not critical, but very helpful
- Global chat
- Alliance forums – These are automatically managed by the game’s engine and add a nice communicative tool for my players
- Instant messenger – Personally I’ve taken this idea from FaceBook’s IM. You can always see when all your allies and friends are online and immediately chat with them.
- In game message system – Vital for any online game.
- In game alliance messaging system – Very important to keep alliances organized.
- I keep posting contests and important announcements in the forums, and then publish them in the game’s admin announcement page, to get newer players into the forums as well.
- Country and alliance flags – each player can design his country’s flag in a small editor I’ve given all players. Also once in an alliance, the leader can design a flag for the entire alliance.
New players:
New players are hard to attract. Especially in non-graphical games like WG2.
I’ve decided to make WG2 newbie friendly as possible by doing the following:
- I’ve written an automatic tour that fires up as soon as a new player registers (And can always be viewed later in the game)
- AQHS (Auto Quick Help System – Also a part of my terminology ) – This nifty little JavaScript code has a dictionary of certain words in the game and automatically marks them. As soon as a player moves his mouse over one of these marked words, a small pop-up with a short explanation shows up on screen. I’ve obviously left an option to turn this feature off – as it can be quite frustrating for more experienced players.
- Since the beginning of the game I’ve designed it so that every single piece of text is loaded from a formatted XML language file. Later when I reached around 20,000 users, I’ve asked for their help, and the game has been translated to Hebrew, French, Chinese, Arabic, Romanian and Spanish.
- Since WG2 is a free-to-play, no ads, no spam – donation based game. I don’t have endless amounts of funds to throw away on publishing the game to get more players. So instead I’ve given players an automated system to bring in new players. Once a player signs up and plays for a while, both the player who signed up and the player who brought him in get a bonus.
- Give away free bonuses in the game for players to vote for your site daily on 10-20 game listing sites. It brings a lot of traffic.
- In the forums I’m giving away bonuses to all players who post a link to the game. Obviously, there are certain rules to keep away senseless spamming which will do more harm than good to your game. Only allow established forum users (on the published forum) to post a link to the game, and ask them to post both a referral and non-referral link – as most people are automatically deterred by referral links.
- New players are protected from attacking or being attacked until they play 300 turns. This is to prevent new countries from being eradicated the moment they are established.
- New players have an option of creating their nation in “Tutorial mode”. This allows them to play, and as soon as they reach 200 turns, their nation is automatically restarted into the game – allowing them to play around the game before actually making horrible mistakes of their own).
- Power protection – protect lower leveled players from higher leveled ones. In WG2 you can attack other players that are in your 75%-200% power range.
Ease of use:
Besides the initial game tutorial, help files for each page, Wikipedia and the help forums I’ve also taken several steps to make the game less frightening to new players:
- Quick menus jump whenever you put your mouse over another player’s name, allowing quick access for some very common commands (Send message, send aid, attack, spy, etc).
- Country levels – In order not to scare all new players by all the options of the game, I’ve locked some of the more advanced screens (Which are usually only needed later in the game when you have a more advanced nation). I’ve given specific criteria for advancing through the levels, which teach the new players how to play the game, while exposing them to the game’s options slowly.
- If your game is HTML based (Or ASP.NET based in my part – which is basically the same) – use a style sheet (CSS file) to keep certain things consistent in the game. Green colored messages are always good, while red colored ones are bad. This way a player can very easily spot something’s wrong with his country and fix it.
- Notifications – In WG2, sometimes you have to react quickly to attacks by other players. In order to help my players know when they need to act, I’ve put a very basic email notification system (Which doesn’t send over 1 message over 2 hours, and can be turned off) and a small pop-up screen if the player is currently online and playing.
- Important variables are always visible and updated. At the top of the GUI there’s a special spot for how much turns, money & food you have. At the bottom right there’s a small box that shows how much money, food and oil you’re making every turn (And some more advanced stats that I won’t go into here).
- Allow players to restart. Although you should put restrictions on this to prevent abuse.
- I hate it that games show you that something happened at 12:45am. 12:45 where? Is it US east time or is it Australia time? Instead show how long ago something happened: “X attacked you 3 days, 2 hours and 53 minutes ago.” – Much better.
- Technology – WarGames 2.0 is completely AJAXy (I know it’s not a real word). This also makes the playing experience much better and smoother, and also lowers the traffic amazingly!
Bugs and errors:
How many games have I seen that simply shatter their professional look and feel the moment a bug occurs. A hideous page, spewing non-sense code and errors at me, and causes me to hastily close the browser. First of all, add a “report bug page”, which players can quickly and easily report errors directly to you.
And regarding those hideous error pages, always catch them and present the user a nice, “we’re sorry, it happens” page.
Innovation:
I personally play my game all the time.
It’s an amazing way of finding bugs or ways to improve the game.
I think the best changes I’ve made were because one night I’ve tried doing something and thought to myself “Hey, it would be pretty cool if you could do this and that..” – And so a new change is added.
Always encourage players to add suggestions to the game. If I’d had to guess, I’d say WarGames is 50% my ideas, 50% it’s community.
It’s also very important to remember that not all player requests are for the good of the game. In the end, you are the lead designer, and what you decide will happen. Sometimes they’ll love you, sometimes they’ll hate you (They’ll usually hate you) – but they’ll love the game, and that’s what important.
Bug abuse and cheating:
I can’t stress how important it is to protect yourself of these kinds of things. They can really throw your game off-balance and require you to restart the entire game.
You wouldn’t believe how much time and effort some players will invest in trying to overcome all your protections and abuse every bit they can find.
Some issues off the top of my head:
- SQL Injection – If you use a SQL database, protect yourself from this!! It’s coding 101, but it’s worth mentioning (For more on this Google it).
- Buffer overflows and integer overflows – In .NET buffer overflows are no longer an issue, however integer overflows are. Make sure your user’s input is within range of all your variables.
- Input check – In WG2 some inputs are numeric only and some are English only – Simply build 2 controls, one that only accepts numeric input and one that accepts only English input. Problem solved.
- Try to keep as much of your validations in one place. To protect from SQL injection, all of my SQL commands go through one class, which automatically protects from SQL injection.
- If you notice someone who’s cheating, swiftly punish them and publish their punishment on the forums. If it’s later found out that someone cheated and you’ve silenced it for your own reasons – it will seriously backfire on you.
Reward your players:
Let them show off their accomplishments.
I’ve placed a hall of fame with some basic statistics and more importantly, players automatically get medals once they pass a certain criteria (Launched more than 100 nukes). Those same medals later show up on their player profile page and on an automated signature I’ve supplied them with.
I’ve even sent one player a trophy (http://www.wargames2.net/Main/Beta_images/ScreenShots/trophy.jpg) - I planned on making this a tradition, but it was too time consuming.
Summary:
Choose something you love, and stick to it. Don’t try to do something you don’t understand or know enough about. That’s what I did and it worked.
Listen to your players, but develop a thick skin to ignore some of the less polite ones.
Make the best game you can, put your heart and soul into it – and it will be the best game you can make.
Post Mortem: TerraTanks: Dominion (Part 3) What I did well
This post was surprisingly hard to do. As much as I would like to think I can be a pompous jerk (because they are the ones that get what they want at the expense of others) I am a pretty nice and humble guy. It took me a while to formulate what it was I did well in TerraTanks.
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!
Post Mortem: TerraTanks: Dominion (Part 2) Need to improve
Really this section could go on forever. I fell into a despair about the game 2 months ago where every week I would make a large update to fix what I thought was the game not being fun and by the end of the week the game was not fun again. This has since dissipated and I have been having a blast with the game.
I want to focus on 2 things that I think need talking about (and one of them is not web page layout). One is something games in general suffer from. The other is something my game uniquely suffers from.
Thing 1: Scope, scope, scope, scope, scope.
Something I have difficulty with is wrapping my brain around just how big something is going to be. While being big is not necessarily a bad thing, being big and empty is a horrible thing. When you create a space, that space needs to be filled out completely. The first game I made (Atlas: The Gift of Aramai) suffered from this. The driving principal of the game was “we want to make it big”. The fallout of this was 5 years creating content to still have the game seem desolate and empty as you character walked for 7 minuets to the next town.
It is amazing how the power of squares can effect the amount of content you have to generate. Filling area is literally X times more time consuming than filling a linear map where X is the length of that map.
When starting a game, think small. When you think of most browser games they occur on one screen. Depth is so much more valuable than breadth. Depth displays the designer’s creativity. Depth in a small game means that you can actually release your game in a time span that doesn’t drive you crazy.
Far be it from me to follow my own advice. TerraTanks is a very large game. I believe it is also a very deep game. It certainly is a complicated game that evaluates actions in a sophisticated way. It took me 2 months to finish the breadth of the game and an additional 8 months to add depth to a state where I am satisfied with my work. (2 months of that was under the public beta). I have a very long list of things to do to add more depth to the game. It is playable and fun as it is, but the oportunity to add depth seems to be expanding and not getting smaller as I create features.
Thing 2: I created an odd way of displaying the map.
This can be prefaced by saying that compared to many of my peers, I think sideways. It is fun to be unique in my problem solving but it is sometimes difficult for me to relate my ideas to the general audience.
This is what I mean. Most people when they want to create a map they will go about creating a cartesian coordinate system grid. People understand the incrementing value and it is easy to calculate distance using the pythagorian theorem. When I went about creating the map I originally thought of how space looked in my head. You have a universe with nested galaxies. Each galaxy had nested stars. Most stars are solar systems with nested planets. The idea of nesting is what stuck with me. What I did from that was to create a system of nested areas which defined my space. My galaxy was a square divided into 4 square quadrants like this:
0 | 1 ---- 2 | 3
Please note how like any good programmer I start with 0. Each square quadrant was divided into 16 square sectors so in quadrant 0 it would look like:
00 | 01 | 02 | 03 ------------- 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 ------------- 08 | 09 | 0a | 0b ------------- 0c | 0d | 0e | 0f
Now note that since I have 16 squares I am using hexidecimal notation.
What I end up with is planets that have identifiers that look like 0b23c5 which accurately descirbes the location of the planet in a nested notation. While it makes complete sense, this is really difficult to explain. Most people don’t have a computer science background and even if you do, people don’t view maps as a series of nested grids. While this way of making maps simplified programming in many respects, but it is not good to make your end users learn something like that to understand your game. The other problem is the effort to convert the game to a cartesian map is difficult and pretty much impossible now that people are already playing the game.
Game makers often fall for the old trap of either trying to show how smart they are or treating their audience with contempt for not knowing the minutea of their own passion. Really smart game makers can present difficult concepts in a way that everyone can pick up and understand. You don’t need to spell things out for your audience at every moment, but don’t make them figure you out either.
Most of the remaining issues with my game involve how to efficiently display large amounts of information. This is something I work on every day so I don’t think of it as something that I did wrong in hindsight, but something that is still in progress.
Post Mortem: TerraTanks: Dominion (Part 1)
It is kind of an odd feeling writing a postmortem on a game that I feel is still living, breathing, and growing. I still make updates to the game almost daily and some of them aren’t even bug fixes :). Like the BlackSword postmortem, I don’t think I can really put down everything in one post so I am going to assume this will extend into other posts. I think the place to start is to describe how this game took root.
After completing a single player RPG (Atlas: The Gift of Aramai) on the Mac with a group of friends in college I decided that I wanted to do a 3d Scorched Earth game and I called it TerraTanks. I worked on this game for 3 years cycling through different open source engines and finally got a good way through it using Torque. I had finally reached the end of my list of friends that wanted to work with me. It turns out most people have dreams of their own. The game was too complicated to finish on my own so I started contriving different plans to be a successful game maker. The plan I settled on was to create the third iteration in my TerraTanks anthology which was an MMO. I switched my thinking towards making it a low tech browser platform game that I could surely finish on my own.
I actually did not approach this project with an “I saw this other game and I can do better” mentality. I had played very little of very few browser or MMO games. I came in wanting to fulfill a couple of feelings through a game experience. I wanted to create a feeling of vast empires and colossal battles, and I wanted to create a feeling of non-tied down community. The real breakthrough came when I discussed with a friend a system where you are put on a team that automatically groups you with your teammates and periodically you vote to see who becomes your leader. Later in the postmortem I will discuss how the great ideas that start a project often become lackluster at the end.
I finished my prototype in two months and sent it to friends to see what they thought. It sucked but there were some really good ideas in it that just had to be extended. I had basically created a sandbox where things could happen, but there was no driving force and no way to tell what you were supposed to be doing. It is not enough to give people tools. People are aware that the environment is set up with a system of rules and they want a general idea of how to best navigate inside that confine.
It took another 6 months to fix and change a lot of my prototype and give the game a sense of direction. I “released” the game and that turned into more of an open beta. I don’t know how many times I have heard it said, I am still in complete awe of how helpful it is to have other people play your game with you. They have uncovered enough issues and suggested enough head slapping improvements to make me embarrassed about the first iteration I released.
In future posts, I will talk about things I think really went well with the project and things that I should have done better. For now I will leave you with a synopsis:
TerraTanks: Dominion - a PBBG where you take over and mine planets in a vast galaxy inhabited by enemies you are sworn to make war upon.
- over 2 million planets
- real time and turn limited play integrated together
- real time travel across galaxy (trust me this actually works well in game)
- research that is global to the player and not local to a planet
- sophisticated combat calculations that allow you to combine your troops with your team’s troops
- simple voting system to move up in rank
- tax system to reward you for moving up in rank
- auction for regulating resource economy
- planet auctions to allow you to speculate in real estate
- in game messaging
- integrated forum
Post-Mortem: Black Sword RPG Part II, “Looking Back”
Welcome back for the second half of a review of my experiences in creating Black Sword RPG. I encourage you to see [link?]Part 1 if you haven’t already. Part 1 focused on the creation of the game, while today will focus on evaluating the product, post-creation.
I’ll start with what could I have done better - always a good question to ask every couple months and after every few updates. I came up with a few things in particular, though this is not an extensive list by any means.
I could have involved the storyline and quests more. Black Sword actually does have a storyline, but it got left behind in the rush to get a working game released. I’m not sure if I could have done more about this, but whether I could have or not, it is a shame that I didn’t. It would have helped with player immersion and involvement.
We should have had better help files and/or tutorial available from the very beginning. While my game is actually based upon fairly simple foundations with complex results, it is still hard to gain your bearings when you first join a
I failed in the area of successfully advertising the game; a small thing that can make or break a game. Our population is far lower than it could have been. Money and time both factor into this (I’m a full-time college student and first year husband) but more could have been done, regardless.
By the way, I play my own game. If you don’t enjoy playing your own game, you should stop making it! Playing my own game has allowed me to see through the eyes of my players. In other games I played I would come up with criticisms of how something could work better or be streamlined. Now I can turn that same critique against my own creation, to step out of the owner and into the player. I suggest you always take the time to do this as it can show you faults and holes in the game that cannot be seen when looking down on it as the creator.
As you have seen, it wasn’t an easy process. It took a lot of patience and determination to make it happen, but it finally did. Nine months passed from when I started the project until it launched. And only four months after release did we finally have everything from the original design document added. I still don’t consider it finished, as there are several key features that I had always planned on adding later that will help to flesh out and balance the game a little bit more. I have always had the tendency to not finish projects I start. When I started this game I knew it was going to be long and hard, but my passion for the dream would push me on. If you plan on making a game, don’t expect it to come overnight. Make sure you have a passion for what you are doing, something to drive you onward through the monotony. But I assure you, your work will be well worth it in the end - maybe not in dollar signs, but at least the pride of creating something you can call your own.
Post-Mortem: Black Sword RPG Part I, “Getting There”
After twenty years of growing up with computer games and three years of playing various persistent browser-based games, you start to find yourself asking questions. Like, “why can’t we do this?”, and “why does it always have to be like that?” - but when you find yourself saying “I could do better” then you are in trouble. You will never be fully satisfied with any game you play. And you will always have ideas that you think could make whatever you’re playing better. There really is only one way to solve this problem: make your own game.
I’m Joshua, a.k.a. Turin, the designer and project manager of Black Sword RPG. I have been kindly invited to share an article on my experience of designing of my own
I had my basic game doc finished in November of ‘06. I’m not a coder, so I needed to find a partner that was willing to code what I designed - in return, I would handle the management of the game. I found a coder in February ‘07 who started building the base structure and most of the communications. However, he had to drop the project due to personal reasons. Luckily a coder who had said he was interested after the previous coder had started was still interested and took over. He started construction again in April. After several months, the game was ready to be released in mid July.
One thing that I found helped me greatly is that I did not approach the game from a coder’s perspective but from a player’s perspective instead. When I actually applied that perspective to how I designed the game, it improved the finished product. By imagining playing the feature I was designing helped me figure out what I did and didn’t like about certain features. Whether it was too complicated or too simple and boring, asking questions from the viewpoint of a player helped guide me.
I had lots of new ideas and ways to improve old ideas, but I am very glad I came up with an original feature to focus the game around. Without at least one such idea a game cannot stand out, it looks like any other game. I’ve seen far too many carbon copy
We built Black Sword in the following order: Communication, Stats & Battles, Shops, various pages and special features (the Black Sword) and finally Clans. Splitting up production like this worked very well and helped us have a very structured plan. I’d suggest doing a similar structure if you are ever building a game from scratch. I learned a lot about how a game works behind the scenes. I learned, and am still learning, what can and cannot be done with PHP. Sometimes this is disappointing, but more often than not I found out about a function that suddenly opened new doors for designing. A javascript countdown allowed me to create real-time skill cooldowns that I ignorantly had thought would have to be done with cronjob ticks! I also learned to think about entire features that run behind the game. Recently, we created a system to handle inactive players. Players don’t interact with it, and it’s not a “part of the game” - yet it has become vital to the game as a whole. I didn’t realize such a thing was needed until several months after release. I would not have thought of such a thing when designing the game originally.
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