Altered Alterations

I spent some good time this week fixing bugs nobody but me has ever seen. Whoopee. There’s quite a few things with basic implementations now, so introduction of major new features is starting to slow down a bit, and I’m starting to watch for massively wrong behaviour (the bugs I was fixing this week primarily wrong) and start to think about what this is going to feel like when people are actually playing it one day. How fast should the games run? What will the most powerful strategies be? How dreadfully awful are my initial balances and settings?

Game speed is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. So far I’ve settled on 1 game year per real-life hour, and have been happy with that simplicity. Ticks are probably going to stay at 15-minute intervals (as opposed to Asylum’s 1-hour intervals), making for a season every 15 minutes.

From early on I planned for Faith games to last about twice as long as Asylum games, making for a 10 to 15 week game. While I’d sort of rather the game go more than 2500 years, I figured it would vary depending on if you were in a Blitz game or a slow game or whatever, which would be fine.

The question is, do people want to play 3 month games? My plan was always for Faith to be twice as good, and assumed that would mean it could keep people interested for twice as long. If despite the richer gameplay, 2 months ends up being the ideal game length, then that sucks a bit because that’s only 1500 years - some religions have been around for 4000 years in real life. I could just double things so that there’s a year every half hour, and only have Winter and Summer seasons, but it’s not as easy to figure out what’s going on then… I just don’t like it as much.

I’m not the only one thinking about game tick speeds at 1:30am, am I?

Sorry about the Bill Nye reference, I couldn’t resist (did you hear he has a new show?) Anyway, my last exam is tomorrow, and Faith development is resuming. Now that there’s at least something on every game page (events, report, law, beings, places, artifacts, and relations) I can focus on making it not suck! While the sucking is pretty pervasive right now, it’s made slightly less so by the introduction of science.

Science is a key part of the game that models the changing of the world in which faiths exist. Each faith has their own science score, and the more advanced science is, the more it affects the goings-on of your faith. Now, you may think, “hey, science, that sounds pretty sweet, my faith will encourage that.” However, while science may free your followers from the idiocy of lead pipes or awe them with the glory of post-it notes, it has a dark side.

I’m not talking about the invention of bad cell-phone ring tones here, no. Even more sinister is the difficulties religions have when science comes along and contradicts them. If your religion says that the world is held up by a rhino held up by an elephant held up by a manatee, then when astronomers come along and claim otherwise, there’ll be hell to pay. Metaphorically that is. On the other hand, people want to know how the world is held up, or what happens if you go off that quote obvious edge there in the distance. A careful balance must be met.

Science has other effects as well. As science becomes stronger, people in general become more skeptical of everything. Religion is more or less by definition impossible to prove, something that science scoffs at. You’ll find as science progresses, people will be less impressed by your holy artifacts and more materialistically inclined to join the religion that features non-stop hula dancing.

Finally, the world needs to end eventually, and it’s common knowledge that science will at least be partially responsible for that. Exactly how that goes down is still under wraps for now though.

Now that April Fool’s has passed, I figured I should make a thorough post about how things are really going. Just to be clear, yes Faith will be released before 2009, and no, it will not be in 3D - and absolutely no, it will not support Internet Explorer 2.

The features continue to pile up, though of course they’re still in rough, ultra-buggy forms that make rude sounds when you touch them. As with any game, there’ll be a significant amount of time between when most of the features are ready, and when it’s balanced enough that it’s not totally unplayable.

I saw a great example of this yesterday. Übersoldat (one of the two people who have Faith access) did a bit of innocent testing on the new Places of Worship features, and how they tie in with your Beings (gods, heroes, etc). However, he created more Places than I had before, and combined with the fertility god he’d set up, it caused his faith to explode in size. No, like, explode. He gained literally quintillions of followers in the span of a couple days. Of course we laughed at this and just reset his faith to scratch, but I imagine it’d bug a lot of people if they actually spent some time creating Beings and Places and setting up a faith, only to find it being blown away to scratch on a regular basis due to dumb bugs. Actually, being able to get quintillions of followers isn’t a very high priority bug at the moment, if that tells you anything.

Speaking of quintillions of followers, a couple people have asked why Faith is generating a lot more buzz from people than Asylum did. I think that’s an easy question - before Asylum, we had a lot less visitors, and certainly a lot less visitors who played online games. Also, I think keeping people informed with this blog has been keeping both them and me more excited about the game.

Another question I’ve gotten is about screenshots. The problem with screenshots is that for the moment they’d be pretty lame. That is, it takes a lot of time to make a page really work, look, and feel the right way. Since each page is probably going to change a lot from talking to people and testing, I’m leaving most of the interface until later. In Asylum, the Advisors interface changed about 9 times during testing. That said, I’ll continue posting little tidbits that I think are sweet.

What is sweet is the Holy Artifacts feature. Artifacts give you various game bonuses, and can be collected, stolen, found randomly, and (I hope) even auctioned off. The cool thing is, Faith was designed so something like an artifact can affect any game variable, meaning I could have like 50 different artifacts running around, some making your people more obedient, some helping you build fancier temples… should be fun, if not needing a fair bit of testing.

Speaking of testing, my best guess for when I’ll run the first test game (probably starting with maybe the top-5 Karma users) is still just by the end of the year. I’ll know a lot more about close we are in another month or two, since I’m in the middle of exams now. This summer I’m planning to finish the basic features that I’ve designed so far, as well as the meta-game features.

(Skip this paragraph if you find geekiness unpleasant.) Meta game features include administration tools that allow me to do things I can’t do in Asylum like easily start new games, track versions, have multiple copies of the source running at the same time, automatic tracking of code changes, and all sorts of other fun stuff. What that means is that you guys will be able to see stuff like “Version 45 - Posted 2 hours ago. 24 lines of code changed. Changes include: …” Speaking of which, my little tracker page tells me that 359 lines of code have changed since my last (serious) post about development a week or so ago. Not too shabby. Wouldn’t that be so sweet to see how many lines of code are changing in real time? Even better, I could tell you what source files they’ve changed in! And maybe some database statistics too. I think I hear some arrowroot cookies calling.

Anyway, I have three final exams, two assignments, and a major essay due in the next week, so you won’t hear much from me for a little while. Have fun!

Due to popular demand, a full 3D mode has been added to the Engineering Faith plan. The web-based, text-based gameplay will remain the same, but will be augmented with a 3-dimensional view of all the people in your faith. You’ll be able to watch them dance, pray, convert, and even reproduce new followers. Also due to popular demand, Faith will be supporting all versions of Internet Explorer from 2 to 6. While working around IE 6’s bugs is a tough challenge, I thought, why just go half the way.

On an somewhat related note, I think I’ve pinned down the release date for public beta as late spring, 2009. While that might be over-ambitious, I want to set an aggressive schedule to keep myself on my toes. If all goes well, I’ll finish Faith before the internet is replaced with something better!