Altered Alterations

It’s finally here! After a year and a half of planning, design, development, bugfixing, balancing, redesign, discussion, balancing, disorientation, discombobulation, dismantling, remantling, balancing, caffeine, panic, and the occasional beer, Engineering Faith is now in Beta Testing.

Before I go further, I want to give a huge thanks to my loyal Alpha testers. Andy_R, Chris, Elephant Man, Karen, Kate, Lola, mx, nitsua, Übersoldat, and Zeero all suffered versions of Faith that sucked many times more than it does now. Not only that, but each and every one of them made a serious effort to help me make it suck less, even when I insisted the game wasn’t too slow and that a random arrow was a great symbol for Convert. We’ll be having a Beta Party next month that I’ll give details for later, and I’ll be buying each one of them who can make it a drink.

So, what does Beta mean, really? It means new players will be invited at about 10 times the rate they have been previously. As I said in my last post, I’m going to start seriously tackling Help, Strategy Balance, Interface, and Player Management. So if you’re dying to test things out, try requesting an invite or ask somebody you know is playing and they might be able to invite you. At the moment people can only invite somebody who has registered on the site already, but that will change sooner or later.

So, thanks for all your patience, and I hope to see you in-game soon!

On my list of Beta blockers, there are only 2 bugs about game balance, 2 bugs about having both “stable” and a “testing” sets of code, and 2 bugs about the Beta invites themselves. While invites will not go out to everybody at once, a “Request an invite” box will appear here the day Beta starts.

That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of bugs. Holy crap there are a lot of bugs. But that’s okay - the people who get to Beta test but are turned off by the still-buggy nature of the game will be forgotten in the annals of history, while the rest will join the 10 brave Alpha testers in the good annals of history.

So, you ask, what kind of stuff is going to happen during Beta? Well, I’m glad you asked. That a was convenient question, actually, since I was planning on talking about that anyway, and now I can seem like I’m paying attention to the audience. You can expect…

Strategy Rebalances

Strategies that are so good that you’d be dumb to not do them need to be toned down. This always pisses off the smart players who find these “broken” strategies, since they’ll always take a hit when I fix things. Please though, help me get the balancing done as fast as possible, rather than secretly exploiting broken strategies. This is true to a lesser degree of sucky strategies - every game feature should have at least some usefulness.

Polish

The interface is quite rough right now, mostly due to focus in other places. Now that I have more people to get feedback from, I’ll be spending time making the pages easier to use and making things look better. So far I haven’t paid much attention to aesthetics.

Help

The help system is quite lame right now. It has at least as much info as Asylum’s lame system, but Faith is more complex than Asylum, and even seasoned Asylum players are getting confused. Not only will the help system be improved, but it will be integrated into the game in some places.

Player Management

With only 10 players, things are pretty manageable. But with 50, it’s a whole different game. Well, it’s the same game, technically… but that’s besides the point. Right now there are few features like game presignup, retiring, inactivity punishment, vacations, newb protection, cheat tracking, covenant features (aka parties), and so on. These will be implemented throughout the annals of beta.

Bugs

There’ll be bugs. Actually, I already have a database of known bugs. Rounding errors, weird layouts, lack of functioning in Internet Explorer, abusable strategies, and more will cause amusement and antics abound. Beta players should watch progress reports, report bugs they find, and hopefully not get too frustrated if a bug accidentally deletes their Holy 500 Pound Goldfish.

Anyway, Beta is going to be pretty fun. It might not be recorded in the annals of world history, but I’d figure at least the subannals. Or maybe just the online version of the subannals. In 6pt font.

One of the biggest bugs in Faith right now is that I am still doing very well in the alpha games. As some of you know, every time I write a game, I end up getting my ass kicked playing it once it’s done. So if I’m winning, something must be terribly wrong.

In order to get a real good idea of how imbalanced the game is, I want to crank up the number of people playing. That means one thing: beta’s coming! Keep in mind this won’t be an open public beta - it’ll be invite-based for the time being, sort of like GMail but with less disk space. At first I’ll invite high-karma site users like I have been, as well as fulfill requests for invites (a “Gimme an Invite” form will go up when Beta starts.) High-karma users will then get their own invites and be able to invite other people into the game too. This helps solve two problems - the possibility of the game growing too fast and breaking, and tracking people who are trying to create multiple accounts or otherwise cheat. I think I’d like to limit the growth rate to 15-20% each week, and invites are the way to do it.

Of course, certain things need to happen before I start inviting people in to a Beta. I’ve devised a list of Beta Blockers. Not beta-adrenergic blocking agents, the drugs used to treat heart problems… though they are things designed to avoid giving new players heart attacks, so they’re somewhat similar. Beta Blockers include things like a respect system, the ability to form teams of more than two people, change/version control, game presignup, improving some of the hardest-to-use interfaces, help improvements, abandoned faith cleanout, and fixing of some major imbalances found during alpha. These things will allow the game to deal with a larger number of players without bursting into flame.

I have a design question for you out there, though. Faith has a team-up function that’s somewhat like Parties were in Asylum, though different in some ways. I was planning on making it so changes are put to a vote - if most of the people in the team approve, it happens. You know, like inviting/allowing somebody new, kicking somebody out, and changing the team rules. This would allow cool hijinks to happen like the founder of the team to be kicked out. Possibly, the better you’re doing, the more your vote counts. Somebody said how they thought this was a bad idea, however, saying that the concept of being able to boss other players around was part of what made Parties in Asylum fun and worthwhile. What do you think?

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.