Ideas are a Dime a Dozen
i thought i would share a piece i wrote about a million years ago — okay. actually only 5.
i thought i would share a piece i wrote about a million years ago — okay. actually only 5. i was feeling a bit melancholy after having written a pretty decent game design brief, shipped it off to bioware, had it swapped to lucas arts (in exchange for kotor) where it eventually became the xbox game “gladius.”
heh. with not even so much as a pat pat “nice work.”
man, i wish i had taken some screenshots of their ‘back of the box’ bullets when they first announced the title. 70% of them were god damn verbatim. ah well. at least i know i can play at that level, eh?
Game development ideas are everywhere. Everyone has one. How many times have you and your friends been sitting around thinking to yourselves “Wouldn’t it be great if someone made this into a video game?” What if there was somewhere where you could put your ideas and have game developers actually take them under advisement?
This, of course, only works if two things happen. First, you have to be willing to share your “million dollar idea” and, second, game developers have to implement it.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but, that idea of yours may be original and unique and the best thing since sliced bread, but there isn’t a game developer in the world who will sign an NDA to listen to your idea. They get hundreds upon hundreds of “idea” submissions every day. Not to mention the ideas of their own. You have to build it yourself or it won’t get made. That is, unless you push it out there to the game development community at large and hope someone picks it up.
Now, if you can cover that part, we at Addicting Entertainment are hoping to cover the sharing of our collective ideas with the people actually building games. If your idea is clever enough to make it into a game, you finally get to actually experience your idea.
Here’s where you may want to just stop reading and opt out of any idea sharing: We’re not in this to make money. Any ideas posted here are fair game.
By posting your “million dollar idea” you are turning it into a “zero dollar idea.” If some developer takes a fancy to your killer new idea for an FPS weapon, well, it sucks to be you. — In the monetary sense. You, of course, still retain the bragging rights to say “Dude! I posted my idea and id made it real! Woot!” You aren’t going to get paid for it. Not by us, nor (probably) by the game developer. Although, it would be nice if they publicly gave you a slap-on-the-back-you-rock-thanks. But they are not obligated to at all.
You might be asking, “Well, dammit. Why the hell would I post my great idea then?” Our answer? Because you are a gamer. We all are. If you are in game development or thinking about being in game development for the money, you need to rethink your career. Sure, just like in the music business there are a few rockstars (pun intended) but also, like in the music business, the majority of us slave away at our labor of love for free or barely enough to eat. If you want to make money building software, move into enterprise level software development. Boring, but lucrative. Games are fun, but you’ll likely be piss-poor if you do it for a living.
So you might as well share with the community and advance the art and science of gaming.
here’s what i was thinking. i’ll make an open call for user submitted design documents. i’ll post a design brief in a bit as an example. i’ve set up a category for them. i’ll see if i can get a couple up there that i’ve got rolling around in my head. there’s just not enough time for me to make them all, so i might as well put them up here just in case someone else wants to build one or two.
not sure how many i’ll see, but it would be fun to find out.
Damn my Obsessiveness
Pulse Pounding. Head Swimming. Fingers flying manically across my keyboard. Scratching and scribbling noisily, struggling to find just the right word.
Water! Temple! Bug! Woot!
Pulse Pounding. Head Swimming. Fingers flying manically across my keyboard. Scratching and scribbling noisily, struggling to find just the right word.
Damn this tiny tablet keyboard! My long, gangly fingers mis-stepping the entire way. I feel like I spend more time on the backspace key than actually poking at letters. Argh! Too late.
Sunshine. I need to go faster.
No! I need to concentrate on the next word.
Dinosaur! Got it! 10 points! I’m a genius!
Catching up to Seraphim now. It won’t be long before I claim that coveted top spot. Before I can reap the glory and spread the fear. Behold the giant: m3mnoch!
Um. How the hell do you spell “exuberant?” Wait! No one is going to use that as a tag. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever thought.
Teeth. Simile…. Ack. click click click I meant Smile. No? Clown? 4 Points!
Ranking is falling. There is only 46 seconds left in the round. I’ve fallen to 23rd. I don’t know if I can recover.
Think, dammit! Simple words. Descriptive words.
Fraudulent. What? Fraudulent? Where on earth did I come up with that one? Better yet, who in their right mind would tag a photo as “fraudulent?” And, how on earth did I spell that right the first time? What? Next photo already? Sand! Yes! 8 points. Hanging steady at 23rd. Times almost up!
Erg. I have no idea on this one. 3… Banging out letters. 2… No! Not yet! 1… I can get it!
Too Late.
What? “THE Kevin Federline check out my site yo!” beat me? The absolute shame. I lost out in a competition of cognitive prowess to Kevin Federline? I guess there’s no chance Britney will shack up with me now, eh?
Is it really 9:30 already? Have I really been doing this for an hour? Wow. I need to pull up out of this swirling vacuum of….
Vacuum! I bet that was the last one!
Oops. New round. Gotta hurry.
Puppy? Paw? Fur! Yes! 7 points!
Huh? What? What was the link? Oh, yeah. it’s http://randomchaos.com/games/fastr/.
Fixing Game Economies
How I Learned to Stop Up the Sink and Love the Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey and Wage Slaves
In the real world not everyone can be a winner. Not everyone is successful. I know it’s hard to believe, but there actually are people out there who don’t like their job. The way real world economies are built depends on a lower wage class — the wage slave. There has to be someone to work the low paying, thankless jobs from the garbage men to the guy at the counter at McDonald’s. Not everyone can make absurd amounts of money just by essentially ‘showing up and having fun.’ If that happened, our economy would come crashing to its knees. Inflation would rise uncontrollably until the dollar approached near worthlessness.
It would be just plain bad.
Game worlds don’t work like that though. In a video game, everyone can be a winner. In a video game, players want to have fun and win. They have that right. After all, they bought and paid for the game. Why should anyone be expected to play a game where they are just one of the unwashed masses teeming with mediocrity.
Unlike in the real world they don’t have to battle each other to be the best. They battle the environment and the monstrous inhabitants living there. Each individual player is on their own Hero’s Journey. They all are playing to become more wealthy and powerful and none of that really depends on the other players in the game. It might in some small way, but, by and large, games are built to allow a single player to succeed without the help of anyone else.
Along each step of this journey, as they gain more experience and get more powerful, they are able to accumulate wealth easier. This propagates economic models that show each player’s individual wealth and power grow on an exponential curve. Goods and services provided in the game don’t. And they shouldn’t. If prices went up for these goods and services, lower level players wouldn’t be able to afford them. They wouldn’t have any fun and the game would tank. This causes inflation within the game. More money, fewer products for you to spend it on.
Money Sinks Aren’t Working
To counter this exponential growth in wealth across the board, developers have tried to implement money sinks. They are trying to siphon money out of the system with things like paying for transportation or paying rent on any property the player’s character might own. The issue with this is that the sinks aren’t exponential and thus won’t match the character’s potential income. The growth in wealth will always outpace the cost applied to these sinks. Eventually, they will get to a point where the player is making so much money in the game that these flatly priced money sinks will essentially have no effect on their wallets and we’re back to the same problem.
The developers could scale the cost of these sinks up, but that’s silly. Just because my character is a higher level than yours, I have to pay a higher price for my equipment? Even though it’s the very same equipment you are purchasing? Shouldn’t that be the other way around? With money comes power and influence — price discounts, not increases. Regardless, not only are there metagaming ways around this weird price fixing (low level fences, for example) but, it’s just a terrible idea. How many players do you know that enjoy paying arbitrary ‘taxes’ in any game they play?
Why Do We Have Two Currencies?
The problem at the root of all this is the simple fact that a game has two currencies — experience points and money. really, these days, we have to have three currencies. two we earn and one we purchase with real money.
Sure the theory sounds like a greatgood idea, after all, you need more money to purchase better equipment so it should just balance out. But, the player doesn’t need every suit of armor or sword they come upon. Either their character can’t use it or it’s not as good as their current item so they sell them.
For example, you can kill 100 different monsters with a 10gp sword, but the items and equipment and money that come off of those 100 monsters are more than likely worth a lot more than the 20gp upgraded sword. That, and along the way you are getting experience points for killing the monsters. So, that 10gp sword gets more effective without anymore cost to the player.
In our example, it costs the player nothing to make fistfuls of gold and become more powerful. That 10gp sword is netting huge ROI because of the multiplying effect of having these two currencies. All this and it’s actually fun!
Money Equals Power
The simple solution is to tie money to power. If experience points were inextricably linked to gold, it would negate the desire to stockpile the money and reduce us back down to a single currency. If characters had to pay 1 gold (or however your currency breaks down) for each experience point, it would solve the problem. You need to pay for power.
This will make money scarce again. Does the player buy that new armor upgrade or do they put the money (in addition to experience points) into leveling up? What’s the best part about that money spent on leveling up? They aren’t buying anything they can resell and the gold required scales with power. It essentially drops us back down to a single currency.
This levels the playing field. Just because a character is a higher level doesn’t necessarily mean he can afford goods and services any easier than a lower level character. Sure, it’s easier for him to make and hold money, but players should be able to make that decision. Do you think they will want to hold the money and stagnate in their power or do you think they will spend that money on experience points and be broke again?
The idea of paying for training is essentially what we are talking about here. It’s an ages old concept in games — one that was done away with in this age of instant gratification. As it turns out, paying for training is actually a critical part of keeping the economy in check. It gives those players somewhere to spend their money.
Buy better equipment or advance in levels? It’s a fantastic choice to put to the player. Chances are that the entire game is built around choices like that anyway. Do you want the fireball spell or the strength buff spell? More mana or more hit points? This means it shouldn’t affect gameplay in any negative fashion.
In fact, it should actually enhance the gameplay by adding an additional strategic element to it.
