Altered Alterations

One of the most important aspects of Faith is your followers’ Properties. These describe what your followers are like - are they healthy, militant, or fiercely loyal? Are they lazy, greedy, or just plain annoying? A lot of the game is centered around these things how you can affect them.

One of the things I’m currently working on is an icon to represent each one of these ten things. I want the icons to be more sensible than they were in Asylum (Integrity anybody?), but it’s hard. Wtf does loyalty look like? Oh hey, look, there’s some loyalty. Not so much.

I have somewhat sensible icons for most of the properties now, but I think Loyalty is the hardest (Animosity and Holiness are also particularly difficult). Chris jokingly suggested a dog - dogs being loyal animals. I laughed, then cried, then tried it.

Unfortunately, as you can see from the image at right, it’s hard to convey a dog (or anything!) at the tiny size I need for icons in a web-based game. It looks okay big though. That is, if you want an icon to measure how much your followers like terriers. I also have all the icons in cool-looking circles, which looks cool but makes the available space even smaller. But really - even if it did look good small, who’s going to remember that a tiny dog-esque (one of the esteemed testers thought it looked like a cow) blob means “loyalty”?

So, if you have any thoughts on what would better represent loyalty than a dog, I’m all ears. I’m more of a cat person anyway, but most cats aren’t even slightly loyal. Nor are cows, for that matter.

Development is going well, with a couple dozen improvements since I last posted. One of the senior developers from my work has joined testing, which is giving me yet another new perspective on the game. He and the other five testers are helping me refocus on the three weakest points in the game right now:

- Theme (wtf, that’s not very entertaining)
- Interface (wtf does this do?)
- Game balance (wtf, how’d he do that?)

It may seem odd that these are three of the most vital parts of a game, and yet are the weakest. While this was mostly planned, it makes for a fairly dull game. Annoyingly, these things need to be built around the game mechanics and features, so only now are they becoming the focus. One time I tried to balance a game that didn’t exist yet, but it didn’t work so well - wtf eh?

Testing is in the process of being ramped up, with a tester being added weekly instead of monthly. I’m almost done an invite system that will let me manage the addition of new testers. Invites are a common way to manage private betas, and I’m currently considering whether or not I’ll keep using the system indefinitely.

I mean, we could just crack Faith open at one point the way we did Asylum, and let a flood of users in (which caused chaos, confusion, and wtfing at Asylum public beta time when the player number tripled just like that.) It might just be better to slowly increase the number of invites I give out - from just 1 a week, to inviting everybody with moderate site Karma, to letting users invite even their grandmas and baby brothers. This would let the game ramp up smoothly, and make sure people like yourself (those noble souls waiting for Faith as opposed to those who stumble upon it later) get good spots in early games.

On a related note, I think at one point I’ll let people view the help files and in-progress games even if they don’t have an invite yet. That’d be nice and mean.

Anyway, I’ll let you think about that. I’ll also answer a couple questions I’ve been getting about Science. Science is not directed in Faith the way it is in, say, Civilization. People invent things, but they don’t necessarily help your religion! Also, the game ends around modern times right now, in some dazzling (or maybe mundane) way. And no, your can’t give your people four arms - wtf.

My vacation week and long weekend have given me enough free time to kick some Faith arse. I’ve made more improvements in the last week than I’ve made in most months. I know what you’re thinking - why on earth would you spend your first free time in ages doing “work”? Well, “working” on faith is sort of like “working” as a daring superhero fighting crime (preferably one that can shoot lasers in some form). If you survive, you realize it was pretty fun, and the world is a better place.

Holy Artifacts have gotten a big boost. Artifacts can now be put up for auction to other players, creating a market similar in some ways to the advisors system in Asylum - with more cool ways to get income and less messing around with hourly payrolls. I now have a control panel for updating and adding artifacts, which isn’t at all exciting to you, but sure tickles me pink. There’s currently two dozen, but I’d like there to be at least 50 when we get to Public Beta.

The Holy Laws page has also been redone, letting you sort laws depending on what kinds of benefits they have to your people. You wouldn’t have seen this, but the old page had about 4.5 arseloads of text on it and it was too hard to find what you’re looking for.

Regions have also seen a huge overhaul. Or should they be Holy Regions? Anyway, they now vary in number between games, meaning I could set up a massive 12-region game or a tiny 2-region one. (I’ve set up a 2-region one since it’s appropriate for the tiny number of alpha testers.) A number of other improvements have been made, including balance so that the faith who has settled the most regions isn’t always the faith that has the most followers. Now it’s possible (in thoery) to kick somebody’s arse so hard that their followers retreat somewhere else.

I’ve added user pages (like in Asylum) so you can see who’s that arse is controlling “Annoyism”. I’ve also written some wiki software for the help system and started filling it with golden knowledge, most of which will end up being wildly inaccurate and fixed by other arses. I’ve added administration tools, fixed bugs, and even slept some!

So now what? Well, I’m going to add one or two alpha testers, and focus on balance, interaction, help, and arses. While it’s too early to say for sure, I’m starting to feel like a winter public beta is likely (shock and awe abound). Yes, I actually do plan on finishing. Arse arse arse.

One of the biggest complaints from the 4 alpha testers playing Faith right now is that there isn’t enough ways for them to interact. While I first argued that there was, it is actually a fair bit behind Asylum. At this point in development Asylum didn’t have much interaction either - parties, attacks, and scandals were all added during Beta. While there aren’t many players to interact with at this phase, I think I’ll go ahead and add some player interaction features, so they can become a bit more integral part of the game than they were in Asylum.

Of course there remains the problem of cheating. The more players can interact, the more weird and wonderful ways they’ll try to create multiple accounts and screw each other over. Luckily I have some good ideas of how to combat that.

An important milestone was reached today - I moved my todo list from my computer into the Bug System. My 50 most-wanted features and bugfixes for Faith are now laid out, and the testers can now start logging bugs. Some of the top-priority items include Holy Wars, Artifact Auctions, and to start a help system (which will be more extensive and more integrated into the game than Asylum’s.)

Anyway, I’m off for my summer vacation (three nights camping) and will be back on Thursday.

Places of Worship is now reassembled, and working all right. It’s going to need some polish and rethinking over time, but it’s a pretty decent system I think. I’d still like to provide more customization options for your places of worship (currently you have name, size, location, focus, awesomeness, and age.)

I recently made it so games can end, and one of the games that was running is approaching endgame. It’s neck and neck between myself (with 12000 followers) and Elephant Man (with 80000). I think I might lose.

I think I’ll soon be working on the Holy Wars system - I wanted to attack him with my gold stockpile, but the current system is very meager. I don’t want a whole war strategy system (Faith isn’t about war really) but I would like to get some sensible calculations in there for damage and such, maybe give you a couple different types of wars.

I’ve been pretty sick the last few days, which has conspired against me. Just as I was getting sick, I pulled apart the Places of Worship page, and realized the whole thing needs to be more complex than I’d thought.

It turns out that the idea of figuring out how many followers will visit a place of worship in a given time period isn’t simple! I have to take into account the place’s location, capacity, awesomeness, number of followers, community level of followers, and age of the place.

This isn’t very hard, except for one extra variable - how do other places of worship affect each others’ attendance? When I realized my calculations didn’t take that into account, I realized programming whilst sick really is a bad idea. Anyway, I’m working on a simpler design for the system that’ll take all that into account, and be understandable to players! Hopefully it’ll be reassembled by the end of the week.

Of the two new testers added to the game, one thinks it’s fun and the other thinks it’s quite rough. In reality, both are right. It’s fun for the first couple days because you can feel the potential, but there’s still quite a few things missing that Asylum had. Examples:

- Humour
- Bidding on something
- Interaction with players
- Teaming up
- Intuitive interfaces

While those things are planned, they’re a bit lower on the list than some of the core game mechanics I’m still completing. For example I added a new feature last week called Social Programs that allows you to do things like keep your people healthy and such.

Also, the game can now actually end! This happens at a certain (predefined) level of scientific progress. You’ll be able to influence how long a game lasts by encouraging or discouraging science among your people.

Somebody asked about a paragraph-style description of your Faith. This is aready in the game, though somewhat simple. Mine right now says: “Faithism II is a movement with 10,375 followers that is difficult to follow. Corruption is a small problem, and followers are growing slowly. Other religions are neutral towards them, and their most recent technological advance is Firearms.”

Our move went well, and we should have proper internet tomorrow. My first task, I think, will be implementing my redesign of the Places of Worship page. Should be good.

Things are coming along well, constantly working towards my next personal goal - when it’s good enough to be called “a game”.

You see, Engineering Faith has quite a few features now, and it’s continually improving, but there there’s a certain magical point that it’s not quite at yet. For me to consider it to be “a game”, it has to:

- Have multiple viable strategies
- Keep the players engaged through its course, and
- There must be a way to win.

The strategies are starting to take shape. In order for there to be multiple strategies, there has to not be one strategy that is obviously superior. While that sounds easy, it’s actually extremely hard. In Asylum for ages, Advisors were so good, that it was dumb to not focus on them. Over the next month I’ll be focusing more on balancing features, trying to figure out which strategies are overpowering and which are too lame.

There isn’t enough to do yet, but I think I’ll be able to solve a lot of that shortly. I’ve implemented some of the ways to spend big money (sending missions, starting wars, commissioning expeditions) but am working on a system that’s something like Asylum’s Technologies feature that will let players use their disposable income for the good of their faith.

You still can’t win yet. Believe it or not, that’s not a big deal at all - not very much of players’ time is spent doing it. I’ll probably throw endgame into the mix in the next couple weeks.

As for actually being fun… well I’ll worry about that once it’s a game. You guys don’t care if it’s fun, do you?

This weekend I had some epiphanies, and was very productive on Faith. I started with a total reorganization of how the database works, which will make work a lot easier in the future. I went on to implement multiple games and game over states, which were pretty easy after those changes.

I got Holy Wars working, albeit in a very simple fashion that will need many levels of refinement. It’s a start though! One cool thing is that it actually takes into account how much your people like the opponent you’ve proposed, and how much they’re willing to fight back.

Science now has a number of technological effects, such as the invention of firearms, printing presses, and such. Unlike other games, not all of these effects are good for you! Some technologies might make your followers more disorderly or make them more skeptical of your traditions.

I’ve also made a whole host of other fixes and improvements. Now that the 2nd alpha game has reached its 2000th year, I figured it was time for a restart and declared it over, starting a new game. While the game is still extremely rough (there isn’t even a normal way for the game to end yet!) it makes me happy to make progress like this. Right now I only have two other people in the game, but will be adding a third and maybe a fourth for this next round. Should be interesting!

Things have been moving really fast in my work and personal lives, and slow here on Altering Time. While some of the tricks I’m working on at work are sure to make their way into Faith, both my home and work locations are moving (coincidentally) at the end of the month, eating up my free time.

Faith has been slow this month, since I became discouraged with it a couple weeks ago. I was implementing Holy Wars, and realized that my whole Regions system was going to make the feature way more complicated than I’d intended. I’d wanted for you to basically be able to launch a war without having to worry much about the where or how, and see the results. However, since you and your enemy have followers with different properties in different regions, I have to take that into account, spread losses between different regions, probably have an interface for which regions attack and are attacked, which means I probably should show you other information about those regions, and so on.

This sent me into a whole thought pattern of wondering if Regions were worth all the work, and how much they really added to the game. Then I got into wondering if the way I’d done Regions was even the right way, and if instead of having 4 regions there should be an arbitrary number (maybe 1 region for every 10 players in the game.) Confusion, dismay, and destitution ensued.

Anyway, Chris, one of my 3 current testers, will have internet once again when we move on the 1st, so he’ll resume his Faith-bashing rants. I get more productive when people in real life talk to me about the game.