First of all, sorry for the HUGE delay but the last months of work on Little Jurassic People were quite hectic, and after a very much needed holiday and some other stuff, I’m finally ready to finish this.

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.