Altered Alterations

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.

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!