It’s been a long time- I don’t even know where to start, so we’ll do this in a categorized rather than chronological order…

The Demo: My last blog was posted a day before my birthday, on September 19th, and during that time, I’ve accrued a team of very talented and dedicated guys and girls who are putting equally nice artwork into the game. Using contacts that I made at Austin GDC, I’m also able to bring motion-capture animation into the game through Mixamo. Having met a really good concept artist in Austin, I was also able to create and distribute a thousand fliers at VGXPO in Philly three weeks ago, bringing in a modest bump in web traffic. This effort will be replicated for the various Comic Cons that roll through New York next year, each one bringing in thousands of people (as opposed to VGXPO which brought in maybe one or two thousand in total).

At the same time, I’ve moved the database to a test server- an XP machine that sits on my desktop and does nothing else, except maybe drip liquid coolant onto the RAID array now and then (that reminds me, I need a CPU fan). We’ve had team members from as far away as Ireland log into the game and test while, ironically, one of our guys just 50 blocks south of me in Brooklyn wasn’t able to get on. This allowed me to crush a bunch of bugs that popped up only under online conditions.

Next, we’ve started moving the behavioral AI into the game and testing that, which continues today. We have the beginnings of a rotating overhead mini-map (not ready as a resource yet), and we’ve almost solved the mouselook-and-select-objects issues that dog many people (that is also not yet ready as a resource- it’s kind of spongy right now). Drag and drop functionality is back in and we’ll be adding some crafting recipes and materials this week coming up, and mission generation is also coming online.

And finally… Outsourcing. Because of the time-crunch and the failure to get as many 3D artists as I would have liked, I’ve resorted to outsourcing some tasks. It’s not because I have deep pockets, but because the demo tasks need to get done. In any event, I have some advice for would-be outsourcing/contracting people reading this: Don’t promise anything you don’t know how to deliver. I’m not about to mention names, because mistakes become past mistakes quickly and though I wound up canning the contractor, it doesn’t mean their work doesn’t get better. In fact, the modeling and texturing was done very well, but the client doesn’t need to hear about your internal problems. Be a black box for me, would you? Thanks.

So, we’re in the final two-week-stretch here, and I’m starting to work from about 9am to about 1am every night, with a few hours dedicated to my girlfriend most nights, but otherwise huddled over the laptop beating my head against walls until they crumble. And far from technical, I need to work on budgets and project timelines for the prospective publisher as well- they do like to know how much money and time a project will cost them. If any of you wannabe MMO creators out there hate business, then you better learn to love it, and fast, too.

AI: What can I say? Interrogative is no more. In fact, it is more. Having started to morph from a feature for the MMO into something that can be used generically for games, into something that I’m intending to throw at the Turing Test competition, and even beyond (shhhh), the name Interrogative is no longer proper. Hierarchical opinion-based knowledge representation systems using generalized pre-compiled dialog along with dynamically-created dialog with interrogative and natural language processing front-ends is no longer what Interrogative is or was. It’s not even tested yet, but the theories are there, and having run it past a number of industry heavies, I can confidently say that I’m on the right track with my experiments.

At the lower level of things, Interrogative is alive and well in Epic Frontiers, and we have about a dozen new conversation keywords and dialog sets to throw into the system for testing. After that, proper changes will be made to support the Infidel opinion-based architecture we want to implement, which will allow the game to support the players changing the minds of AI, as well as AI reactions to players and other AI who do not share their own opinions (hence the name Infidel, which means “non-believer” and can be applied to anyone who does not share your belief in whatever subject you feel passionately about).

With all this AI tech springing to mind, I’m thinking about spinning off a company to hold all that technology, so that I can continue to develop it without interference from video game contracts and such…

GameX Summit: Well, the last conference I attended for the year was just great! Met up with Dave Mark, Mike Worth, and many others and had a great time. For a first-time summit, the mistakes were minor, and the recovery from them pretty swift.

Unfortunately for me, the students that showed up were almost all design students, and not artists, as I was hoping, for recruitment sake. That said, I also met a lot more people interested in AI, and attended a couple of mind-blowing sessions by people such as Clint Hocking, Dave Mark and Kevin Dill, Damian Isla, and Mike Worth, whose audio session simply rocked.

The only real downside to the conference was getting lost. I don’t know what it is about the Pennsylvania hillside, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t wind up in the Valley Forge National Park at 11:30pm one night staring at over twenty deer in my headlights. And it wasn’t that “ZOMG what kind of car is that” stare, but the “dude, this park belongs to us after dark” stare… Interesting area. But the food out there is pretty good.

That’s about it for the blog for now. The next blog will have more eye-candy

Production, ai ai, artificial intelligence, budgets, contracting, conversation, demo, mmo, mmorpg, morpg, npc, npc chat, npc conversation, orpg, outsourcing, paperwork, publishing, rpg

Michael Hartman just wrote up a fantastic blog about MMO elitism among communities. It was so good that a few rather “special” individuals showed up to trash him just for suggesting that the tired DikuMUD framework is, well… tired. I feel a bit of solidarity with him regarding this subject, since Epic Frontiers is trying to break out of the DikuMUD mold with features such as NPC conversation which requires a more delicate touch than just bashing an NPC or MOB over the head until gold and loot come flying out of its ass (oh come on, did you really think the bear had a coin purse it kept that money in?)…

So the subject of this blog, inspired by Muckbeast, is how Epic Frontiers may differ from other MMOs such as WoW and social features we’re working on in order to further improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our community…

In brief, the problem with MMO elitism is that it’s based on the fact that the design of the game segregates players from each other by level, in effect giving communities little choice but to reflect their gameplay in their social interactions. And because a high-level player is impacted by interacting with new players with stagnation, the communities of these games becomes stratified and negative towards players that attempt interacting with them and inducing “drag”.

Starting at Level 1, a new player can never hope to accompany a veteran Level 80 player on an adventure. But isn’t that the problem? Adventure means being in over your head…

The standard response is that those veteran Level 80 players don’t bother playing with noobs because they’re busy playing “End Game” content. But, why is there “End Game” content anyway? Could it be because the levelling system designed into present-day MMOs is insufficient to accurately represent a player over the intended lifespand of the game? These days, it takes a few weeks to level your character up to the max level in World of Warcraft, if you’re inclined to read through the many levelling guides posted on teh interwebs.

But then, if that is part of the problem, then how can Epic Frontiers try to minimize it? Glad you asked. There’s a few things we’ve done with the design to keep players interesting in the gameworld that will most likely help the community stay fresh (imagine sheets on a clothesline in a summer breeze):

• Firstly, we have no classes or levels, and all skills are raised upon use. And while the skills themselves have levels, the granularity of “skills” is such that characters can be highly specialized and varied.
• Owing to the skill-based nature of the game outlined above, we found that procedural content was a good tool to use in order to provide content that matches the kind of player you are. Or, put another way, it is simply impossible to handwrite quests for every combination of character you have, but we are putting technology in place that can deliver the same quality of questing across a broader spectrum of character types.
• In addition, we’ve deepend the crafting features and added a fast and unique NPC conversation system that also lends itself to the quest generation technology in a way that not only gives the player vast amounts of fresh content, but also delivers a much broader spetrum of gameplay. Now we can have quests of a social nature that involve NPCs at a level you haven’t seen before. This kind of thing naturally allows the player to slide into character and out of the temptation to act out (after all, the NPCs will remember your general personality at a more detailed level than just reputation).
• We’ve improved AI for the NPCs and based it on personality traits. Extending that, the NPCs will also be looking at the players in like fashion, and if the player acts like a moron, he will likely be remembered and treated as such. The NPC will remember what you’ve talked about, how it made them feel, and that influences further help or hinderance you receive from them. The world is much more consequential than the usual MMO, and we think that the players will more naturally align their attitudes with that kind of gameplay (that said, we know it’s not a perfect answer, because there is no perfect answer for the problem).
• Beyond game features themselves, we’re keen on integrating social features into the MMO that bring social networking tools into the hands of the players. This doesn’t mean tweens with MySpace pages invading the game, but character pages with social functions that help the players to play together, bond, communicate, and have fun without taking the focus away from the gameworld. These features of course come with the standard reporting tools on both the web-facing part of the game and extending into the game world itself, to help curb inappropriate behavior (racial/sexual harrassment, etc).

Again, this design is not foolproof, and the “funness” of the game comes first, but the design as we have it should enable high-level and low-level players as well as social- and combat-oriented players to not only coexist, but mingle freely. Because crafters can concentrate on crafting rather than grinding combat quests to gain XP, they can more easily fulfill their role in the world while those who wish to be pure combat are not required to choose a profession or secondary class (or even primary class, for that matter). And likewise, the skill-based system supports the Jack Of All Trades types that will inevitably emerge.

Mixed parties of veteran/new players with combat, crafting, and mixed characters are encouraged by the varied gameplay requirements, making a more adventurous and tolerant environment, and less of a game where high-level players are impacted negatively by interacting with new players and thus act negatively (or neutrally) to them.

Hopefully, our feature set will result in a better community than has been exhibited by other games at certain times (and the asshats who have inspired these blogs are certainly not representative of everyone who plays MMOs, or else we wouldn’t be bothering to develop them!), and I think that Mike is right on target with his blog. The subject of communities needs much more attention as more gamers migrate onto internet-based games, and frank exploration of the game designs that influence behavior is long overdue.

Uncategorized ai, community, dikumud, epic frontiers, Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, mud