My game project has been working on game concepts and writing an engine for a long time now. Recently, we decided to give up on the idea of making the "same old RPG" and try to do something new and interesting. Having read the posts on gamedev for a a few months, I realized I could probably gain some useful insight by posting the design here. We wanted to make a multi-player online game that can handle low-bandwidth and low-power servers. We all have an affection for the fantasy genre, so we stuck with that. After some work, we came up with this idea for our game. To summarize, each gaming session begins with players milling about in a social area similar to Blizzard's Battle.net, except this would be graphical. In this area, players form parties to adventure with. Once ready to set out adventuring on a Quest, a server list appears and the party selects a server. Each of the Quest Servers hosts a single party on a single quest. The players do FRPG-type things such as battling monsters, looting corpses and raiding hordes in a 3D game world. We haven't exactly nailed down the gameplay here, and I would certainly appreciate any interesting suggestions. The key part is at the end of the Quest: the XP earned by each player during the quest is calculated into a Score. This score is submitted to a High Score server and posted. The competition for the High Score of each quest is what we hope will keep the game fresh for playing over and over. We'll also keep individual stats such as Kills, Deaths, XP, Gold, etc. There is some supplemental information about the game world, the races, some history and whatever not included in the design doc since it is on our web site (linked at the bottom). Now I ask you: What do you think? Is this interesting? Are there any glaring problems? Any neat ideas? I appreciate any help. Thanks. Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project [edited by - Oort on August 25, 2003 4:06:53 PM] - Edit: updated the design doc link [edited by - Oort on September 3, 2003 8:40:59 AM]

Who are you going to get to run the servers?

quote: Original post by Drooling Iguana
Who are you going to get to run the servers?

Just like Counter Strike or Quake III, the Quest Servers will be hosted by people in the community. The Quest Server should run on a DSL or Cable connection with a modest computer. Quest Servers connect to Master Server when they start up so they can be added to the server list. The Master Server will also be able to run on a DSL connection. There are several members of our project with DSL who would be happy to provide a connection. We also have friends with servers and high bandwidth connections. Suffice it to say I''m not particularily worried about it.

This is not another "I RILLY WNAT TO MAKE AN MMORPG BUT CAN''T MAK A VISUALL STUDIO PROJECT!!1!1!" posting. We are NOT trying to make an MMORPG. This is a multi-player game with no more than 16 players on a server, so it shouldn''t be too hard to find people willing to commit a PC to it.

I forgot to mention in my original post that there is a working demo of the engine, without much gameplay, available on the Downloads page of our web site.

Anyway, perhaps my initial post was too vague. I would really appreciate sincere game design advice, particularily in the core gameplay. What will the players do between hacking up monsters and running from place to place? What kind of puzzles can we make?

Thanks.



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Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project

Maybe I''m still being vague.

The primary reward mechanism in our game is XP. The Score of your party comes from the XP gained during the quest, so obviously getting XP is a big deal in this game. You get XP for killing monsters, using your skills successfully, achieving quest objectives in a timely fashion, and so on.

Achieving a mission goal is fairly easy to define. For instance, a primary goal of the quest might be to reach the top of the castle and rip down the Evil King''s banner. Upon reaching the top, the flag comes down and everyone gets 100 XP.

The hard one is to design exactly how players can use their skills to do interesting things. In this game we have 6 races: Human, Arbag, Golurut, Berman, Golmek, Warmek, and Valun (all of which you can read about here.

Each race has special abilties, except the Humans. As in most games, when we designed the races we just ended up with "Humans are average." I don''t like this very much. We tend to think of ourselves as normal or average and give other races special abilities, but that''s pretty narrow-minded. Perhaps other races would look at Humans and think: "Wow! Look at the way they do X!" So I was thinking perhaps we could make the Humans particularily quick to heal compared to other races. Any other interesting ideas?

Back to puzzles, one idea I had was to make the puzzles depend on a races special abilities. The Bermen can glide from short period of time (they have wings), Goluruts can track by scent, Valun are very skilled with magic and move quickly through water, the Arbags are stealthy burglars, the Golmeks can fix and build things, and the Warmeks are berzerkers so they just smash stuff up a lot. What puzzles are possible by exploiting these skills?

Puzzles can be central to the quest, and thus not dependent on a particular race''s abilities (so it can be solved by anyone), or they can be a side-quest there just to get more XP and raise your Score for the quest.

One thought I has was a puzzle where the Berman has to fly over an old volcano and drop a rock onto a switch. The switch opens a trap door so the rest of the party can enter a dungeon.

Any other side-quest or puzzle ideas?

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Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project

If players host servers, and submit high scores to a central list, I wouldn''t be able to trust that high score list, because player-hosted anything will submit tampered data.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
If players host servers, and submit high scores to a central list, I wouldn''t be able to trust that high score list, because player-hosted anything will submit tampered data.

Yes, I''m quite familiar with the server issues, bandwidth expenses, and security problems so please stop posting these easy criticisms.

It''s an open source project so absolutely nothing is safe at all. Someone could just download the code off SourceForge and make their very own l33t hax0red server. Whatever.

My hope was that we could find some way to ensure the data coming from the Quest Servers was genuine, but if we can''t we''ll only allow "trusted" servers to submit to the High Score list.

Anyway, as much fun as it is to talk about server security, I don''t really care. We''re just a bunch of guys hacking around because we enjoy it, not because we''re trying to make money or remake the world in our image. With the limited resources we have, we could be taken out by a DoS attack almost instantly, but we''re not going to sit around scratching our butts and worrying about it. We''d much rather accomplish something.

I was asking for game design suggestions for the core gameplay... if you need more detail, just ask.

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Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project

I like his persistance..... and that he actualy has a battle plan. Needless to say, ill be interested to see what comes of this project. I have been working on a non-dedicated server technology (propiatary) for games, and here is how it works, you may wish something similar, or perhaps would like some code. it basicaly hosts what it can off of other people, IE chats are direct connections and non-monitored, graphical portions of the maps are taken from the user (though compared to the the object maps on server every (set number) of frames), But the server handles the charactor, object maps, items, and battles (well, the strikes in them anyhow). This cuts over 60% of the bandwidth, and you still get your centralized server for the important stuff. This setup could be modified to use individual servers for graphical data, even object maps, but which must pool the central server for items and monsters (and battles). This would keep the servers from having cheats that allowed the charactors to be given more then natural amount of expiriance, since the battles are held on the central server. And then set the individual servers to each have there own high score charts. Lable servers as trusted or not, and people should react fine. Hehe, complicated enough?

quote: Original post by PaulCesar
I like his persistance..... and that he actualy has a battle plan.

Our project has been in development for over 4 years now. This isn''t just something I idly cooked up last night while watching reruns of Friends The only new part about this is the direction of trying to innovate gameplay, rather than duplicating Diablo or some other RPG.

quote: ...more server stuff...

I did think of something similar but then realized that a pseudo-distributed implementation would still allow many of the same security problems (in our case) while increasing the load on our central server (with an obvious trade-off between security and degree of distribution). With bandwidth being a primary design constraint, I discarded the idea.

Anyhoo, although I appreciate your comments, I really was more interested in the gameplay part of game design, not the server part of game design. I''m really open to any kind of innovative gameplay idea within the context of a party of players running around with medieval weapons and I''d love to see the gamedev community''s ideas.

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Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project

Heres a few suggestions

score:

Bonus points for the following
Most kills
Biggest kill
Most valubale piece of loot
Most loot

Are quests co-op or competitive?

How about giving humans the power of techonology? They can use special tools that the other races cannot in order complete tasks. For instance you have you have to get out of the castle. But the portcullus rasing mechinism is broken.
Now the fixer can repair it.
The beserker can raise it by hand.
the glider can fly over the wall.
The mage has a spell such as etherreal or levitate
the theif can crawl under it
the Human can use a grappling hook to scale the wall.


Also think you should make the lobby a town or city where players gather and spend there gold on new equipment.

that all I can think of at the moment...

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

well it''s look like the Phantasy star online series on console

did it??

you may have a look at this game