To Sail the High Seas

Today, I’m excited to announce (what is this, a press release? lol) that I’m embarking on a new adventure as Senior Game Designer at Ubisoft Singapore!

I am forever thankful for the opportunity Mighty Bear Games gave me, and for all the great people I had the privilege of working with (and learning from!) there over the past five years, but now it’s time for me to set sail into uncharted waters full of pirate ships, skulls and possibly also some bones!

Time to buy myself an eyepatch, and also a parrot costume for my cat. So she can sit on my shoulder and squawk. Yarr!

I design, therefore I am

About Game Design, Imposter Syndrome and Soul-searching

Through most of my professional life, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I was not good enough, that I didn’t know what I was doing, and that sooner or later someone would expose me for what I really was – a fraud. Imposter Syndrome hit me hard both when I was a designer at Funcom and when I later went on my own indie adventure.

That situation was not much different when, around four years and seven months ago, I accepted an offer to join a relatively fresh startup studio in Singapore as a game designer, after they initially caught my attention by developing a casual MMORPG on mobile called World of Legends, which would become the first mobile game I ever worked on.

At the time, Mighty Bear Games had somewhere between 12-15 employees. and I was immediately thrown in at the deep end on day one, when I was tasked to take over the reins of the game’s economy and combat design/balancing from the other designer on the team, who had started planning his early retirement from the industry just before I joined!

I still have nightmares about the Excel-sheets I took over, which could only have been created by some mad genius Excel wizard; numerous humongous, interlinked documents with sections that had to be manually updated and exported to CVS files, before being imported into the game’s data server through a careful process and in a very particular order. Modifying one document would have cascading effects to half a dozen others, some of which could take upwards of 5 minutes to load up as a result. Thanks, BK <3

Anyway, it kept me busy, and I learned a lot about Excel in a short amount of time as a result. World of Legends itself eventually made it to global launch on both Android and iOS, but was unfortunately shut down not long after because the number of players coming in, and the revenue those players generated, was not enough to justify continued development of the game.

However, the studio gained lots of valuable experience in the process (and learned first-hand that making MMORPGs is hard), and we moved on to the next projects with boundless zest:

Games I worked on at MBG

Since joining Mighty Bear that fateful day back in 2018, I’ve written game feature designs, scripted AI logic, balanced combat systems and game economies, pitched designs for new games and even done some level design. I’ve contributed across multiple teams in the creation of an MMORPG, two games for Apple Arcade (Battle Royale + Arena Brawler), a Match-3 Adventure, a Merge-game and – most recently – another Battle Royale game in the Web3 space.

Thanks to the opportunity Mighty Bear Games gave me I’ve gained a ton of designer XP and have leveled up my design skills multiple times over, but more importantly, I now feel like I finally know who I am and what I can do.

As a result, I no longer internalize the self-doubt and fear that haunted me for so long, and though there might still be a small lingering remnant of that all-too-familiar feeling of inadequacy lurking somewhere deep in the shadows of my soul, I can now look back at everything I’ve experienced and accomplished and feel confident that I could go into any team and contribute in meaningful ways, regardless of where I go or what game I work on next.

Going forward, I’m eager to continue growing as a game designer and excited to apply the skills and lessons I learn along the way to create new gaming experiences that can stand the test of time!

Lessons learned by working at Funcom for five years

I have an upcoming jubilee of sorts in a few months, at which point I can celebrate having endured life in the game development industry for five (measly) years. This cause for celebration is somewhat diminished by the fact that Funcom announced earlier this month that they are restructuring and consolidating offices – which means that I, along with the majority of the other developers at Funcom’s Montreal office, are being let go. For my part this means that I have at most two and a half month left before my official last day at FC, and having started working for FC in late March 2008, this means I might just about pass the five-year mark (yay!) before I’m officially out of a job (nay!).

Throughout these last soon-to-be five years I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working with a diverse bunch of awesome people (and I hope that I’ll be able to work with some of them again in the future!) on two different MMORPG projects, and I would not change that for the world, but what exactly have I learned after this time spent working in the game development industry? Which of the preconceived assumptions and expectations I brought with me have held up, and which have been thoroughly shattered? What knowledge have I acquired that I can bring with me where-ever I go next?

I’ve played with the idea of writing a post along these lines in the past year or so, but what I’ve found out is that it’s not easy to summarize several years worth of experience in a simple blog post. Instead, I will try to focus on some of the more obvious lessons I have learned, the ones I can point at and say “that might have been useful to know/realize the value of when I first started”. Some – or maybe all – of them are perhaps obvious enough that they’re hardly worth mentioning, but then again – everything is obvious is hindsight.
Continue reading “Lessons learned by working at Funcom for five years”

Character resets and permanent death

Zubon posted over at Kill Ten Rats about resetting characters (examples given: Torchlight, Kingdom of Loathing) being preferable to resetting worlds (examples given: Torchlight II, Borderlands 1 and 2) when reaching the end of a game. The former entails resetting (or retiring+re-creating) a character to scratch and giving it some boost or other (stats, skill-points, items, gold) to give it a flying start, while for the latter you reset the game-world and increase difficulty to match the current status of the character.

While an interesting topic of discussion on it’s own, this got me thinking.

Resets in virtual worlds

Character resets in games like the ones mentioned above is nothing new – it has been done in MUDs and BBS door-games (like Legend of the Red Dragon) for decades already, after all. It would still be novel in a modern virtual world, however, and personally I would love to see a virtual world where the following mechanics are combined:

  1. Optional or forced retirement of characters that have reached a certain threshold (character lifespan, fame, fortune, epic achievements)
  2. Permanent death(!)
  3. Restarting after either of the above events as a heir of the original character with some form of inheritance/boost (stats, more powerful than usual heirloom item, title, etc)

Continue reading “Character resets and permanent death”

The best MMO content is no content at all

Syncaine put up an interesting post about content in MMOs, and how there’s too much focus on one-off (single-player) content as opposed to reusable (multi-player) content. He got that partially right; there is too much focus on one-off content, and on content being intended for single-players in a multi-player environment.

Developer-created content is expensive

The production costs are astronomical for content-driven development, both prior to actually launching the game (which then puts a huge pressure on the game becoming a “box office hit” immediately after launch to recoup as much of the development cost as possible, and after launch – when the developers must fight a never-ending battle to make enough content to keep the hordes of content-greedy players at bay. The players will always consume this content faster than the developers can develop it, and it becomes a battle of attrition to see who tires first – the developers of churning out more quality content or the players of waiting for the next batch for consumption.

However, the answer to the issue that Syncaine raised is not to modify this process to produce re-usable, generic content – or to make grouping “harder” or “less streamlined”. The solution lies in systems-driven design and systems-driven gameplay. Given the right type of systems, the right set of tools and the right amount of freedom, the players can themselves generate content that has the potential to be infinitely more interesting to them than playing through yet another story X created by developer Y. That is not to say that there is no room for developer-created content, but if the consumption of this content becomes the primary focus of the game, the battle has already been lost; the players will expect more of the same and be upset when they run out of such content to consume.

This is not the content you are looking for

I want to make what I feel is an important distinction here, which I don’t see a lot of other people making. I see a clear distinction between player-created content and player-generated content. The former I see as being about giving the players the tools to create their own dungeons, missions, quest NPCs etcetera – which can then be experienced by other players. Since the players are, collectively, more creative and prone to experimentation than a small group of developers will necessarily have to be (due to budget/milestone-constraints), chances are good that somewhere among the flood of content that will be produced by the players (a good chunk of which will be related to giant, flying penises), there will be some real gems, perhaps even some unforgettable master-pieces.

However this is treating the symptom of the problem and not the cause. Outsourcing the work of content-creation from the developers to the players in this manner is not the solution.

Player-generated content

Instead of outsourcing content-creation through player-created content, I wish to see more developers embracing the promotion of player-generated content. I don’t mean content in the traditional MMO sense here, but instead the gameplay that emerges as players utilize the tools built into systems-driven virtual worlds to drive both their characters and said worlds forward. Or sideways. Wherever. I realize that this sounds a bit vague, but bear with me and I will continue on to say that the next logical step we need to take in MMORPG development is to embrace the concept of virtual worlds more closely.

The potential for player-generated content in virtual worlds is… out of this world. To unlock this potential, those virtual worlds require systems.  Not just systems that drive combat, but systems for crafting, systems for exploring, systems for inventing stuff, systems for politicking, systems that promote socializing, systems that promote creativity, systems that provide options, choices – systems that make alternative lives possible. The more of these systems that are in place and the more of them that are interconnected in some way or other with other systems, the more opportunities there will be for emergent gameplay to occur. Sometimes this gameplay will go down paths that the developers might not want it to, but this fact should be embraced, not shunned. Instead of restrictions, freedom. Freedom to make the choices that matter to the player – the choices that makes the journey their character is on their own journey.

This reinforces the bond they have with their character and increases their feeling of ownership, not just of said character, but also of the world the character lives in, promoting a pattern of thought that goes… “This is my character. This is my story. This is my world. This is my home.”

You can’t get a better retention device than that.

About the Laws of Online World Design – Part IV

This is the fourth installment in a series of posts I’ll be making about Raph Koster‘s The Laws of Online World Design, as explained in this introductory post. I will start at the top of the list, and work my way down until I’ve poked and prodded every law in the list, not skipping any unless I really feel like it, or unless I should happen to be distracted by a pretty butterfly or something. Which is exactly what happened after I wrote Part III of this series in July 2009!

In this long awaited (right?) Part IV of the series, I’ll concentrate on the following law:

  • Macroing, botting, and automation

Continue reading “About the Laws of Online World Design – Part IV”

Ownership is Key

A study (published yesterday) from the University at Buffalo School of Management, which followed 173 players who were part of a large MMORPG community to figure out strategies in which to increase player loyalty/retention, concluded with what everyone who has actively played Ultima Online and/or Star Wars Galaxies (and/or MUDs) have known for (a) decade(s) or longer:

“It [the study] examined whether two different game-playing strategies were successful in producing loyal players.
One strategy found that giving players more control and ownership of their character increased loyalty. The second strategy showed that gamers who played cooperatively and worked with other gamers in “guilds” built loyalty and social identity.

“To build a player’s feeling of ownership towards its character, game makers should provide equal opportunities for any character to win a battle,” says Sanders. “They should also build more selective or elaborate chat rooms and guild features to help players socialize.”

It doesn’t take a brain-surgeon to figure out that this isn’t rocket-science:

  • Ownership is, has been and will continue to be a key ingredient to player retention.

Sources: The Escapist, University at Buffalo

Teleportation in MMORPGs – or – How Instant Gratification Killed the Dream of Virtual Worlds

Instant matter-disintegration-and-reintegration

Teleportation: The ability to instantly transfer matter from one location to another without actually ever moving in the space between those two locations. Scientists have been chasing this dream for decades, and Science-Fiction writers and/or movie directors have been using it as a plot-device and/or a generic method of transportation for even longer.

In the context of MMORPGs, it is more and more often used as a way of letting players quickly “return to base” after having done some random quest in a far-off area of the game, instead of forcing them to spend what is seen as unnecessary time and effort fighting their way back the way they came. Usually it comes disguised as some sort of “fast-travel ability”, but whether it’s described as a map you use to find your way quickly (LotRO), as a special traveling ability using your knowledge of the “hidden paths between here and there” (AoC) or as magical spell that instantly transports you (World of Warcraft), the effect is exactly the same – you instantly teleport from one location in the game-world to another.

Another common feature comes in the form of fast-travel to specific parts of the game-world by the use of “space shuttles” (SWG), “wagoneers” (AoC) or just plain ol’ magic portals (UO, WoW).

In some games, you can also summon teammates to your location by magical spells, or to the entrance of a dungeon by the use of magical “meeting stones”, or open magical portals of your own which other players can step through to travel half way across the world. And as added in the most recent World of Warcraft-patch, the ability for members in a group to instantly teleport to the entrance of any specific dungeon, and when leaving said dungeon later on, being teleported directly back to one’s original location.

All of this is very handy, of course; it makes content instantly accessible to the players, makes it less of a hassle to team up with random players for a dungeon-rump, and ensures that you can meet up with your friends and guild-mates at short notice.

Continue reading “Teleportation in MMORPGs – or – How Instant Gratification Killed the Dream of Virtual Worlds”

About the Laws of Online World Design – Part III

This is the third installment in a series of posts I’ll be making about The Laws of Online World Design, as explained in this introductory post. I will start at the top of the list, and work my way down until I’ve poked and prodded every law in the list, not skipping any unless I really feel like it. In this, Part III of the series, I’ll concentrate on the following law:

  • Persistence means it never goes away

Continue reading “About the Laws of Online World Design – Part III”

About the Laws of Online World Design – Part II

This is the second installment in a series of posts I’ll be making about The Laws of Online World Design, as explained in this introductory post. I will start at the top of the list, and work my way down until I’ve poked and prodded every law in the list, not skipping any unless I really feel like it. In this, Part II of the series, I’ll concentrate on the following law:
Modes of expression

This is the second installment in a series of posts I’ll be making about The Laws of Online World Design, as explained in this introductory post. I will start at the top of the list, and work my way down until I’ve poked and prodded every law in the list, not skipping any unless I really feel like it. In this, Part II of the series, I’ll concentrate on the following law:

  • Modes of expression

Continue reading “About the Laws of Online World Design – Part II”