Altered Alterations

It’s been too long since I posted an update here - not because I haven’t been working on Faith, but because I usually blog about Faith when I’m taking a little pause from work and want to think about where it is.

It’s currently Year 642 of the first alpha game (day 26.) There have been dozens of tweaks and adjustments to make the 3-player game playable from a balance perspective, and things are starting to become sane now. There are still hundreds of imbalances and issues, but a lot of massive holes have been filled - things like the ability to make infinite Beings of Worship without any ramifications, or spend money you don’t have on Places of Worship. Eep.

Now that a lot of the features I’d initially planned on adding are present (in some form or another), I’m trying to asess where the gaps are, so to speak. What is there not enough of? What’s missing?

Interaction is pretty poor, which isn’t surprising since Interfaith Relations is still missing some features. There aren’t enough things to spend your “money” on. The game doesn’t change enough as it progresses. Fortunately, I already have features planned to sort those issues out.

One recent interaction feature I added is Animosity. This keeps track of followers’ attitudes towards other faiths. Elephant Man, for example, spent a lot of effort sabotaging my temples, poisoning my water supply, and otherwise harassing my people. Now they hate his guts, and would be thrilled to mount a counterattack.

A couple people have asked me how large Faith games will be. My goal for Faith has been to be able to support a 100-player game, which I still think is possible. Like Asylum, games will vary in the number of people who can play in a game, etc.

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!

Events are now functioning well, among a number of other things. Places of Worship are running way better than they were with my last post, and a number of game infrastructure things have been improved. With exams coming up, I had a burning need to get some good, satisfying game programming out of the way.

I thing Faith’s events system is going to turn out well. In Asylum, you can either see all events, or clear all events completely. This is annoying for users who only want to keep select events, instead wading through a big mess. It’s also annoying for me since the server load of everybody loading every darn event each time they enter a game is just plain dumb. In Faith, events auto-disappear after a week or two, but if you want to save an event, you can just “pin” it so it won’t disappear. Also, each event will have a “magnitude”, meaning you can see “major events”, or maybe only “massive events”, or if you’re patient, “every sneeze or gust of wind”.

Places of Worship and regions (managed on the same page) got a nice taste of javascript today. I’m actually enjoying javascript programming now that I’m working in Firefox and am a lot older and wiser than when I first tried it out years ago. Basically it allows me to do interface things that let me show a lot of stuff on the page at once without being overwhelming AND without requiring a full page reload whenever you want to see a bit more info. It looks like it’ll be good for everyone - except maybe people using old, lame, browsers. You’ve been warned, Guy Who’s Using Netscape 4.

The last two weeks have been pretty good for Faith development. Primarily my time has been going into the “Places of Worship” page. This is where you build temples, send missions to other regions of the world, and deal with other regional issues. It’s actually quite an undertaking, since Engineering Faith actually takes place in a 2D space, as opposed to Political Asylum’s lumping of all politicians into one big area.

Right now the game has four continents, and depending on certain factors, you’ll end up on one when you start. Once your faith gets large, you can send missions to other continents, allowing you to have followers in other areas. It adds some interesting dynamics to the game.

Places of Worship are mostly working now as well. You can build big temples, small ones, lavish ones, modest ones, intimidating ones, cozy ones… it’s not bad. The annoying thing is, I won’t know how many of these game mechanics I’m setting up will need to be rewritten, until I’m closer to being done. In Political Asylum, I actually had a half dozen different systems for Advisors before the current system came into place. Each time somebody found an abusable flaw that made the entire thing unbalanced. Oh well - such is game development!

I’ve slain the evil fluctuations that were plaguing my dear faiths. Populations now behave in a nice, heartwarming way: they grow for a while, and then taper off until you do something to encourage their growth. Well, the graphs warm my heart anyway. For those of you who don’t get my jabbering about graphs, just believe me that it’s way better now.

There were quite a few problems causing this, actually. For one, I turned on too many things in the game before testing them all individually. For another, I had a cool idea for regulating population that while cool, was totally not the way populations really behave. Thirdly, I was making formulas without considering very much what the graphs/maths/calculus behind them was.

Another funny thing happened in Faith, which shows how it’s starting to have some character. I noticed that as time went on, my faiths were all getting pitifully low “economy” scores. My people were lazy bums! I took a look at the default laws and values in the game, and noticed something was missing that exists as part of most societies - “Hard work encouraged”. So I quickly added it into my admin panel, and economies started to go to normal.

I’ve been working on Faith in 15 and 20 minute blocks throughout the week whenever I’ve been studying or working for long enough for my vision to blur, or some such. The last week in Faith development has been almost entirely fixing bugs and adding things to troubleshoot this problem. I’ve gotten a lot better understanding of my creation though, having now watched more than 8000 simulated years of behaviour!

I was quite productive this weekend in both schoolwork and Engineering Faith. I have Beings of Worship working now, which means you can define the gods, heroes, and whatever else your people will worship. It took a fair while to get a system that crammed the massive variety of beings people might worship into a simple little discription. Some details need to be added (such as the concept of an evil being) but it’s going pretty well.

In addition, I did some testing to see exactly how all this stuff I’d set up was behaving. As it turns out, it’s behaving pretty psychotically. I set up a graph so you could see your faith’s progress over time, and took a look at how my three test accounts have been doing. My first account was doing quite normally. My second, and third though, had really bizarre spikes in their properties at regular intervals. The third also had a quite lame spike in population and subsequent plummet that can only be described as retarded.

I spent some time and tweaked some values, and it seems like the spike/drop behaviour is caused by my code for birth and death, and I have a feeling the weird downward-spike-and-resume behaviour is a bug in my graphing code. While I expected things to be behaving really weirdly (since I haven’t tested any of that stuff yet) it was amusing to actually see my bugs and graphed out like that. The game is complicated enough now that it’s starting to take a life of its own.

Now it gets serious.

Altering Time’s yearly makeover is done, and Engineering Faith is, as expected, the focus of 2005. “Faithful Engineering” has been launched, a full-fledged weblog to track the development progress. You can now expect fairly regular updates, which can be monitored through any RSS newsreader from my new news feed.

I will write here about progress, insights, and new ideas that go into the game. While I will continue to post in the Forum about it where appropriate, I will try to keep any new info here for everybody to see.

At the moment, I’m aiming for testing to begin by the end of the year. There’s no reason that can’t be accomplished - I’ve learned a lot in the last two years about web development and games, and I’m enjoying putting it to use.

Now back to coding!