WARCRY - Simple Economies

 

WarCry: It was mentioned that as the designer, you purposely kept the world economies simple and left out some of the standard strategy concepts like tech-trees in IWars for a particular reason. What reason would that be?

Larry: The short answer is that you want to eliminate everything you can that might impede play between human players, which is where real interactive game play fun comes from. Tech trees can only be considered standard in stand-alone solitaire strategy games. They were one of the ways devised to create challenge to a player in building up civilizations in a solitaire strategy game. I have seen in some of the RTS games that sometimes tech trees are ways for the same basic player types to differentiate themselves. In Imperial Wars, the character types are already differentiated; Traders can carry more raw materials, Warlord Battlestars can move faster, Philosopher’s convert minions, and so on without getting into too many game play details. We want to make sure the game balance is consistent and that the emphasis of game play goes towards player interaction and not solitaire play.

For instance, one of the earliest online space games that I ran across spent way too much time on waypoints between worlds and what kind of hulls, weapon systems and/or ship types for my taste. While I admired many of the game’s concepts, it rapidly became too about accounting instead of the interactive adventure I had hoped for. My goal for Imperial Wars was to create a universe of worlds for Starlords to inhabit without lost time on solitaire game aspects left over from previous game designs made for a different medium. Challenges in IWars should come from the other Starlords and the interaction of their different character types rather than calculation of time and distance, manipulating intricate world economies or comparing the benefits of seventy different kinds of laser canons. What’s fun in that? Stargates connect the worlds and travel is instantaneous so Starlords can get around their universe and play the game. Trading fleets is a valuable and common way to integrate players into each other’s empires to maximize their potential. It is a game designer’s challenge to find just the right balance between simplicity of play and the complexity needed to allow a player to suspend disbelief in the game environment. It is the same challenge that a literary author has. Reading a story or watching a movie requires that the story be able to move forward without so many mechanics that they get in the way of the story while still keeping a plausible background to support the story. While I love all the classic strategy games, our new online strategy game designs have to sort out what is needed in the environment of the Internet and discard everything else.

WarCry: Speaking of strategy, could I, or anyone else, use the well known strategy that gives you (unfair) "advantages"?

Larry: There are two areas that we are adamant about cheating. One is hacking in an attempt to cheat in our game server. We have gone to great extremes to make our server as secure from hacking as we know how. Even if our client is reverse-engineered, it will not help a player change any aspect of the game data.

WarCry: As a self-funded developer who is now beginning to self-publish your online game, have you had to live with limits on what you could offer in your first version of Imperial Wars?

Larry: We have had to live with many limitations in the execution of the game but none at all at the basic game design level. At most game studios they seem to design games by looking at their technology first and then seeing how to fit a game to it. For a number of reasons too lengthy to go into here, IWars was designed as a game concept outside of a computer. Actually, it conceptually began life as a cross between a game and an interactive television series.

As a game designer, I believe strategy games are actually played in the mind. The pieces on the board or on the screen are merely placeholders for the mind and ways to help visualize the patterns and actions of the game. [Editors note: Larry must be a Matrix fan] In online games, especially, is not about the skill of pounding a key or mouse button and winning because your computer is better or your connection faster or where you happen to live geographically. I think real-time game play on the Internet is a complete myth. The Internet is just not designed for it and despite the brilliant men who program the servers to make them appear to be, it just isn’t so.

Anyway, the goal of the graphics, animation, anything that exists on the screen is to drive the game play, to move the story and to help immerse the player in the game world. We have delivered the entire Imperial Wars rule set for how our game universe works so all the game play is there. I believe we still have much to do in using available technology to bring more immersion and clarity to future versions of the game. Early on we had to make the choice with our limited resources of where we would put our effort and we chose the backend over the game client. This means the game client can be much more robust, with fuller animation, art and integrated web services without altering the backend database to any great degree. This choice also means that we can do it incrementally so that development can continue parallel to the game service itself.

 

 

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