Granted, you’ll do tons of shooting and bombing, but there is a real strategy to set up when tackling an enemy encounter.

Grind-based RPGs almost never allow for this sort of freedom, making me think that maybe, cross-genre experiments as this one are the way to go to find new ways of bashing mobs…

Just got a comment in my “to be approved box” suggesting me to fuck dogs online. When and why did this shift from “girls” to “dogs” occur please?

ps. not to mention the “online” thing. I could find some real ones you know :p

In the first part of the article, we saw how the Grinding and Leveling systems are commonly used in almost all the MMOGs you can find on the market these days. Mainly, they provide an infinite gameplay loop which require little to no additional content and assets to be produced (that’s cool) and they are a great way to distribute content among the players (player level acts as a prerequisite to access specific contents).

Now, we’ll see LJP’s solution to the points we enumerated in the previous article. After that, we’ll go into more detail on how to achieve those goals.

To put this back in context: Little Jurassic People was meant to be a game capable of bringing immediate fun to a mainstream audience while providing a rich game system capable of attracting more experienced players. This ambition was one of the main influences (and burdens) of our design process.

Little Jurassic People was/is (who knows?) a project aiming to provide alternatives to the grinding gameplay by:

Focusing on a more organic approach:

by abandoning stats-based systems and making the player experience a world where not exactly knowing what’s happening is part of the fun.

Creating a set of basic tools and setting up many interactions possibilities:

the range of “stuff” possible in our game will never rival that of any stats-based MMOG (sword, sword+1, sword+2,etc.), But maybe we can make the interactions more varied, interesting and meaningful.

Building an all-time accessible open world:

we would allow free movement in an open world but access to new fantastic areas would require more inventiveness than mindless monster bashing.

Progression would indeed be less controlled though.

Coming up with a new system based on an interactive ecosystem:

harder to set up at first, a systemic ecosystem based on a set of intelligent rules could present by itself endless gameplay opportunities. Look at GTA, you could offer the basic sandbox experience, and there would still be lots of things to do.

Making our players addicted to feeling smart:

More that having them play endlessy to reach the next level, make them solve problems by combining their available resources to build new opportunities (you have no idea the mess you can cause with a couple of fruits and a dino!)

Making the game easy enough to grasp to ease most of the players in:

no wonder here, a lot of work would go in general ergonomics as well tutorial practices. Hints would be all over the place and interaction would be kept simple at all times.

Yeah, but…how?

Finding an alternative to the grinding/leveling mechanics and those same-old paper RPG mechanics we all love was one the main reasons that brought LJP to life. To come up with a game system inspired by the videogames medium itself, rather than by old school RPGs.

So, we kicked out all the usual MMOG conventions and tried to come up with our own solutions. One early decision was to push forward the idea of “interaction” and to allow the player to interact with a lot of stuff and in different ways. Also, building a “systemic environment” in which this interaction was meant to take place was one other main goal.

But above all, we wanted to avoid the need to play for hours before enjoying the game.

Reward smart play instead of play time

One of the biggest downfalls of today’s MMOGs, is that if you’re aiming to preserve your family/life/work/sex/hygiene…don’t start one.

That sucks. I think everyone should have fun playing MMOGS and more importantly, everyone should have fun together, in the same game world.

Animal Crossing (Nintendo) was a big inspiration. I’ve always been fascinated by its capacity to attract the player almost daily to carry out a series of simple activities. It also manages to appeal to many kinds of gamers by offering a lot of content and interaction while retaining that ease of use which Nintendo is known for.

But making a game for everyone is what in French we call “game designer’s branlette” (…I’ll let you look up the translation

The problem lies in the fact that those who invest more time in the game should get more out of it, there’s no way around that. But how can we provide fun to those that only have 10 minutes a day to invest in the game? And more importantly, how can we provide all of this without secluding those gamers groups from each other?

In LJP we did a very peculiar thing. We decided to leave out the notions of casual/core/hardcore that seem to cause nothing more than misunderstandings (casuals like to play for short times…no wait, they play for long times but silly games…no wait, they can play for days if the scoring mechanic is good….whatever). We chose to focus on other parameters, mainly free time and curiosity.

We divided the user base in three groups and decided to provide a “game path” for each kind of gamer:

Assuming that each group needs a different degree of guidance (and by guidance I mean, clear goals, clear directions and so on), the idea is to provide different content types tailored for each group but seamlessly blended into the same game world.

A person who can only find 10 minutes to play the game can play some Jurassic Events (self contained mini-activities) like Jurassic Snowboard, and compare its results with other player’s, thus creating a motivation to come back and get better at it (combine it with a high-score table pitting his times against his friends’).

Meanwhile, on the side of the snowboard track, a gamer from the second group is hunting some Sabertooth tigers. The hunter’s guild has asked him to do it as part of a quest. As a reward, he will get a big wooden club or fishing net, allowing him to hunt new animals.

Finally, a sandbox-loving player is trying to lure those same Sabertooth tigers into following him and scare off a group of Triceratops. The player wants to make them run into a fence he just built and capture them. Once these are captured, he can tame them and use them to explore the world faster or trade them with other players.

Hopefully, those who’d come to LJP to play some snowboard would see the other two players doing enough incredible stuff to get them interested to invest more time in the game.

I’m giving very large guidelines here. Every mechanic I just described must be detailed and mixed with the rest in a functional (like no crossing the snowboard track) and enjoyable way (make a bridge that crosses the track and is ideal for spectators). No easy feat.

But that’s the basic layer: providing different content for different gamers and immerse them in a huge sandbox with missions and stuff to do, yet leaving them free to choose to way they want to experience the game.

Conclusion

So, this is basically what we did to set up a game where different types of gamers could cohabitate in a same game space, have meaningful exchanges and find content suited for their play needs.

Straying from the usual casual/core/hardcore formula is a risky bet and one that wouldn’t go down in the current industry marketing templates.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one seeing the MMOG genre as stagnant (Ultima Online still lives and every other MMOG is based on its model) and a big consensus is building in that way. Many MMOGs currently in production seem promising and dare to do some new stuff. Games like Free Realms are already trying something new, albeit timidly (mixing mini activities with levevl-based progression), by blending genres. And with great commercial success I might add.

That’s a good path to walk on and I suggest we designers keep walking it until we are able to provide a compelling virtual world experience for everyone.

I believe MMOGs greatness comes in big part from their ability to level any real-life social or material differences between players. It is only natural then, to try and have everyone participate in these compelling virtual spaces, regardless of the time we can dedicate to it and of the previous knowledge of RPG/MMOG/l33t/whatever mechanics.

We managed to give MMOGs the unique potential of making all of us interact as equals. Now, let’s try and fulfill that potential.

Little Jurassic People development has ended. I’ll probably get into more detail in a later post but the final presentation went well, sort of. We didn’t succeed to produce the online demo we were hoping for (instead we delivered three solo demos) but we managed to put up a nice enough presentation in front of a professional jury.

These days and until the end of December, I’m working as a game designer (internship) at Fishing Cactus, a great small developer located in Belgium. We’re working on several Iphone and Wiiware/XBLA/PSN projects and it’s a lot of fun!

Check out their website, it rocks

One of the main advantages of the entire Little Jurassic People project is to be able to experiment and look for alternative solutions to the grinding and leveling mechanics that pervades, and have always pervaded, the MMO genre. All of this, with no commercial pressure.

From Wikipedia:  “Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive and/or non-entertaining gameplay […] in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over and over again, in order to advance their character level to be able to access newer content.”

Why are these mechanics so widespread? For several reasons actually…

• It is tied to well-known stat-based game systems: RPGs, both offline and online, make intensive use of stats based systems and leveling mechanics. While these undoubtedly work and designers can start from an existing layer of mechanics and improve on them slightly, these gaming rules are a “relic” of traditional RPGs.
• It is a mean of creating content: creating game content usually consists of setting up enough new challenges/levels/problems to keep the player interested. While this is still true for grind-based games, having the player repeat the same action over and over just on incrementally harder enemies (stat-tweaking) is an easy and effective way to stretch the lasting appeal of the game. Also, think of tool, weapons, objects. There are just so any types of these and having “sword +5″ is an effective way of creating a variation of a base sword.
• It is an effective way to control content distribution and balancing: choosing a level-based progression allows the designer to control with a good degree of precision which contents are delivered to the players all along their evolution. Knowing that X area or Y object is from level 20 is equivalent to breaking up the experience in full fledged game levels. The volcano area is the level 30-39 for example, and so on.
• Using XP points/leveling/grinding is simpler to design (?): having every action taken by the player have an effect on one and only XP counter (I’m simplifying for clarity’s sake of course) is simpler than creating meaningful and coherent consequences to a bigger number of player actions. For example: a character completing a fetching quest or a combat quest is rewarded with the same kind of XP points. While this is practical for a designer, it is quite abstract.
• It’s addictive: I guess no designer will publicly tell you that, but that’s a big plus when you want to keep your player base coming back for more (or not leaving at all!). Game mechanics that prove addictive are a huge help towards providing the player with many playing hours despite providing minimal content.
• Leveling is a well-known system and thus provides a low entry barrier for new players: you want your game to be played by lots of gamers right? Many “casual” games tend to include a leveling system as occasional players have increasingly less problems dealing with it.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll explain why I think we should all look beyond this lvl/grinding thing and look for ways to induce a form of character progression that feels more natural to the media we’re developing for, and how that ties with Little Jurassic People.

Slow updates lately. Little Jurassic People development is going on nicely and we’re preparing for the last month of crunch work. More info soon!

Meanwhile, I’m discovering !

Enjoy, and don’t forget to check out the Little Jurassic People Devblog for up to date news about the project!

The little demo we showed contained:

• A test map for solo play
• A completely reworked player movement system
• The entire HUD (inventory, customisation, communication)
• Our pictographic communication system, working
• Tree shake and falling apples
• Quite a lot of art assets
• Bucket loads of bugs!

Overall response was really positive despite the game being, at the moment, little more than some tech demo with no real player experience built in yet. Of course, the visual design really helped grab the attention of all the by-standers.

My hope is that what we showed and what we said about our exciting work on the project has convinced some people (and often, their parents) to pursue a career in the gaming industry.

On a side note, I added some additional information to the GAME DESIGN page about Little Jurassic People and my function on the project…check it out.

In part 2 of this post, we’ll look at how Little Jurassic People’s communication system tries to bring the best out pictographic communication. Which tools we have designed to help speed up the message composing process and how all the pictos are accessible to the player.

LJP communication system is all about gameplay. Its main purpose is focusing on gameplay activities. Hopefully, players won’t meet in LJP to talk about the latest NFL match or whatever, they’re here to PLAY. That’s what our communication system is there for.

In LJP, communication is first and foremost a matter of proximity. Everything is geared toward sending and receiving messages regarding the players surroundings, the dinosaurs they see on the hill, the big jurassic fruit hanging from an even bigger tree, and so on…No general chat room to talk to your friends adventuring in other regions. After all, prehistoric humans weren’t able to phone their peers all around the world

But of course, additional communication and social tools (forum, in-game friend finder, etc.) will be accessible to the community to communicate outside the game.

The coding on the communication interface is by Kévin Sultan, the art by Charlie D’Halluin and additional coding by Brian Young.

1 – Communication mode

Accessed through the main interface (upper-right corner of the screen), the communication mode displays a specific interface (or HUD, Head-Up Display) to allow the players to communicate quickly. All the messages will be done composed in this mode, while messages from other players will be visible at alla times. Messages will be displayed on top of the character’s head, in a comics styled bubble.

As a shortcut, we’re investigating the possibility of players being able to shift between “normal mode” and “communication mode” through the mouse wheel.

2 – Two main communication tools

Players are able two switch instantly between two interfaces:

The T10: our T9-inspired automated message composing system. Following each pictogram selection, a list of contextual pictograms is presented to the player. This implies a specific syntax (see below) which the player will use to speed up communication and quickly access the pictos he needs. These will be presented according to usage patterns and according to various parameters (in which region the player is, which dino he’s communicating about…)

The Dictionary: this is what other games use. A big stuff-all-in dictionary. Ours has some categories to organize the content.

While the dictionary provides some pictos not found on the T10, but the T10 is what our communication system is all about.

NOTE: On the image, the dictionary is activated. When the T10 is in use, the dictionary catégories disappear.

3 – A syntax

The give structure to our T10 mechanism, we came up with a basic syntax:

ACTION –> OBJECT –> VARIOUS

The players can interrupt this syntax at each step and communicate from there, go back a level or chose another pictogram from the dictionary or from a small selection of pictos accessible at all times (punctuation, YES, NO, …)

The syntax gives structure to the communication in Little Jurassic People and helps speed up the communication process. Also, while being a preset syntax, each “step” of a message can be freely enriched by any other pictogram.

4 – Contextual in-world pictograms

To speed it up some more, we have a final mechanism that allows the players to directly communicate about something they see. By selecting an element in the game world (a tree, a dino, a tool…) some contextual pictograms appear around it (cut tree, get fruit, climb on tree). Click on these and they show up in the message. Simple! See a T-rex? Click it and select the picto equivalent of “Run as fast as you can from the big bad dino” and you’re set.

NOTE: These are NOT in the image. Image clicking on the 3D tree up ahead of the character and having  some pictos appear around it…

5 – Gameplay integration

As we’ve always wanted to push tribal and cultural exchange, pictograms will be one of the main means to convey that idea. Mountain tribe folks know all mammoth-related pictos but have no knowledge of those concerning sea dinosaurs. By traveling to distant countries, they’ll have the opportunity to learn new things to talk about!

6 – Future development

User generated pictos could be one of LJP future improvements. Despite needing a full time moderation process, this particular gameplay could be lots of fun! It doesn’t have to be directly tied to communication either. Player could draw custom pictograms on a cave wall as a mural painting!

This concludes our first overview of the our pictographic system. We’re sending out our first picto-tests to see what our testers think of our first batch of pictograms. We’ll keep your posted on the results!