Back then I was freshly unemployed, a little concerned about finding a job, and fully expecting to be working on my first indie game, alone, for a while. Now I’m once again gainfully employed, at a great company, working on a great game, with a group of the most hard-working, talented people I know, people who together have decades of titles, centuries of experience in the industry, and the attitude to get the game out the door and into people’s hands. For this I count myself as extremely lucky, and I am very grateful.

Despite the day job, however, I’m still working on a few side projects – one of which is progressing solidly. I can’t say much more about it yet, but I’m pretty excited to see it slowly morphing from a vaguely-defined idea into a fully playable game. I’ll be posting more about it soon.

2010 has been a heck of a year, and I expect 2011 is going to blow it right out of the water.

May your ideas be fresh, and your projects fruitful. Happy 2011!

In the time since, I’ve been making plans for what I hope to achieve between now and my next bout of gainful employment. There’s a lot of different things I want to do, from writing, to working on art, to game development, and some catching up on my back catalog of games (I totally got Folklore for a steal a couple of weeks back).

I also went on a bit of a WoW binge, if only to get it out of my system early. My Death Knight had been sitting at level 73 or 74 for months, so I finally brushed him off and got him to 80. Ding, wewt, and all that. It loses some lustre after the first few times, and this is the 6th level 80 I have, so meh. Since my other 3 level 70+ characters are all paired up with ones the missus has, and the missus is busy playing other games right now, getting the DK to 80 was the only clear-cut goal I had left. Now that that’s out of the way, I can forget about WoW until, say, a month before Cataclysm, at which point I’ll probably go back and play with a vengeance to get that Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement I’m still missing.

In other gaming news, I’ve also been playing Hydorah. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an old-school inspired side-scrolling shooter, with heavy inspiration drawn from Gradius to R-Type to Castlevania. The graphics are deliciously retro, there are branching paths, assorted weapons, power-ups, secrets, and other such old-school shmup goodness. In many ways, it’s very similar to what I’m hoping to do with Oneirius, hearkening back to the games that originated what is now known as the shoot ‘em up genre, while at the same exploring the possibilities of its design space. Note: Locomalito’s site seems to be down, very likely due to their server exploding from the unexpected spike in bandwidth use. I think I saw them post on Twitter that there was a download mirror somewhere.

So, with my newlyfound free time, I hope to be posting on here more often, updating my deviant art with some new work, and hopefully finishing and publishing some games.

Got to go back to Spain to visit the family. It was nice to go back, it was nicer to be able to show my wife around my hometown, and it was nicest of all to see and hang out with my family an old friends.

I made some progress in my indie game development endeavours, the first product of which can be found here. It’s still a work in progress, but hey, check it out, give me feedback.

I was at GDC earlier this month, doing some coverage for The MMO Gamer. I’ve been working on writing out the stuff I covered, but RL has conspired against me again and again. Stuff should start appearing on there next week.

Speaking of The MMO Gamer, I was on their podcast last week, talking about GDC and MMOs. If you’re interested in the subject matter, do give us a listen.

Back to writing.

In other news, the spousal entity and I will be travelling to Spain over Christmas to go visit my family. It’s been over 4 years now since I moved to the States, so it’ll be nice to go back and see everyone. While I don’t expect to get much work done game-wise, I’ll be taking the laptop with GM installed on it, so perhaps something will come out of this small vacation. If nothing else, I’m sure I’ll get some gaming and some writing done, which will be good too.

I should probably have the time and inclination to write a post over Christmas break, unless I fall comatose from eating copious amounts of my mother’s delicious food. If there’s one thing I’ve missed, it’s the huge family meals she prepares on special occasions, like, say, Christmas.

Firstly, I got a new job, and now I’m working as a QA Tester at Gazillion. It’s a good job, and I’m enjoying it and learning many things every day.

Also in game development news, I’ve been learning to use Game Maker 7, and I’ve started working on my first game. It’s a little on the ambitious side for a first game, but I’m working on it dilligently. I’m keeping a devlog for it here. It’s still in the early stages, and most of my time right now is spent on spriting and other art assets, but I’m working on it. I will probably create a section here on the blog about it too and post updates on progress, so stay tuned.

In other game-related news, a while back Blizzard had a contest to submit names for Uniques (particularly rare and powerful items) for the upcoming Diablo III. The 5 names that are making into the game are: The Tormenter, Telranden’s Hand, Ruinstoke, Xephirian Amulet,and  Band of Hollow Whispers… As you might have figured out by now, Ruinstoke was my submission, so woot!

Finally, the whole mess with the Healthcare reform wrangling makes me very angry. Since I rant about it constantly on Twitter, I’m not going to say anything more on the subject, until I blow a whole post dedicated to the subject.

More soon.

I’m looking forward to doing more writing once I’ve settled in. I also have a few things going on on the side. So it’s busy busy busy all the way. Still, I’m not complaining. I’ve been working for this for a long time now, and I’m grateful for the payoff.

More soon.

Of course, you could always download the demo directly from Moonpod, whether you have Steam or not, or even buy it directly from them.

Citizen Kane is a feat of cinematographic mastery, but there are many games out there that use visuals, game mechanics, and narrative elements successfully.

Star Trek, on the other hand, while perhaps not as technically impressive, has cultural and future relevance. Each of the serials, from the first one in the 1960′s, explores themes and situations which echoed events of our world which were relevant at the time. The money quote, from Roddenberry himself, is:

“[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network.“

Another good one is:

Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive, almost radical political agenda reflective of the emerging sexualized counter-culture of the youth movement. However, his efforts were largely thwarted by the network’s concerns over marketability. Star Trek showed mankind what it might develop into, if only it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence.

Much of the current discussion on videogames focuses on finding the medium’s own voice with which to tell engaging stories, tying the mechanics of the game to the themes and plot. And while I agree that this is important, I believe it is also increasingly important to move away from the teenage power fantasies of violent domination of faceless enemies, and look for new stories to tell. To continue with the TV references, AAA titles seem to have fallen into the same rut as the A-team, where the formula of the game/show follows a formulaic pattern, with only the slightest variations in settings and situations to differentiate one episode from the next. To use another Wikipedia quote:

“[...]a recognizable and steady episode structure. In describing the ratings drop that occurred during the show’s fourth season, reviewer Gold Burt points to this structure as being a leading cause for the decreased popularity “because the same basic plot had been used over and over again for the past four seasons with the same predictable outcome.“

The major reason why I believe we should aspire to the Star Trek of videogames is that with videogames we can do more than just show people what the future could be like, we can put them there, let them see the sights, interact with the people, and experience what could be. We can craft all manner of utopian and dystopian alternate realities, and craft our games around these ‘what if?’ scenarios. The Fallout series is a great example in that the setting shows us what could have happened if we hadn’t reigned in nuclear escalation, if diplomatic relations between the nuclear superpowers had broken down and spiralled into, to use another quote, all-out thermonuclear Heck.

Apart from being relevant in the subject matter and themes it covers, Star Trek, as illustrated in the two quotes above, also faced similar problems to those we now face as game developers: funding and censorship.

Censorship is perhaps the thorniest of the two. While it would be great to develop a game with poignant social commentary on all manner of relevant issues – unless we are very careful, or apply massive doses of saccharine -  to subjects like sexuality, gender violence, bigotry and other current social woes, our game will be whacked over the head with the AO rating, which tends to be the equivalent of  a death sentence in the current day and age. There are ways of circumventing the retail ostracising of such a game, but unless major download services like Steam and the like welcome such titles chances are such a game will see limited distribution, commercial failure, and set us back quite a number of years. The other issue, funding, is an equally formidable obstacle. With the global economy in it’s current, sorry state, is it possible to obtain funding for what is essentially a title aimed at a vapourous ‘mature’ audience that may or may not be offended by the content matter?

Despite these obstacles, I feel that to be socially relevant, and gain mainstream acceptance, we need to put the space marines and the big guns back in the toy box, and delve into the conflicts that we as average Janes and Joes have to face on an everyday basis. Conflict, the main engine of narrative and games, takes many forms. It is these forms as they appear to use on the streets of our cities that we must harness in order to appeal to those we share them with.

The game that allows us to overcome these two obstacles will, in my mind, as big a milestone for videogames as Citizen Kane was to movies.

The Loreweaver is a seeker of knowledge, a scholar of ancient languages and cultures, and is deeply interested in unearthing the history of the world. From a design standpoint, implementing the profession fulfills the following goals:

1. It is aimed at lore enthusiasts, those players who want to know more about the story of the world. One of the products of the profession is exactly that, in-game books dealing with history, mythology, culture and other such subjects.

2. As a crafting profession, it does not require exploring the world, killing monsters, or finding gear for progression.

3. It is a new way of delivering narrative to players.

4. It is an experiment in player-created content, after a fashion.

The main mechanic of the profession is, like other crafting skills, acquiring materials and combining them into finished product. In this case, materials are snippets of lore. These can be obtained in a variety of fashions:

Studying:  The player can use their study skill on any in-game book or text-scroll item in the game. I will refer to these as Sources. The actual process of studying a Source could involve a word- or letter-based minigame, with the player’s score dictating what is gained from the studying. Sources could be level-coded, such that some can be studied sooner, while others require a minimum skill level to study successfully. Alternately, each source could only be studied once, or once every X amount of time. This would have to be designed and balanced to suit the Vision(tm) for the game.

Studying a source, apart from granting some amount of experience, would also yield a ‘note’. Notes are the essential loreweaving materials. Some sources might yield more and/or better quality notes. Notes would then be used to compile ‘Theories’. I haven’t ironed out the exact process, but in World of Warcraft, for example, the player would learn Theory recipes from the trainer, and combine specific types and amounts of notes to craft theories, gaining skill points in the process. For a different game, however, I would devise a system where a source can yield notes with different ‘subjects’ from various categories, and a ‘value’. A note might have the subjects ‘Humans’ and a value ’3′. ‘Trolls 5′, ‘History 2′, ‘Language 4′ and so forth would all be possible. The player would then to try to combine a number of notes to accumulate a certain value in one subject to formulate a theory on that subject. The system could either simply produce a Theory with whatever combined value on all the notes is highest, or it could have a weighted probability of producing a Theory for any of the subjects found on the notes.

For example:

If the player combined 4 notes with a total ‘Troll’ value of 20 in the hopes of forming a Troll Theory, but the notes added up to a ‘Language’ value of 22, the resulting theory would be either:
1) a Language Theory (first scenario) or
2) (22+20=42) 22/40 chance of being a language theory, and 20/42 chance of being a Troll Theory.

Alternately, for a much more complex system, subjects could be divided into Categories. Categories would include things like Races, Disciplines, and so forth. The system would then parse the values for different categories, decide what combinations of categories are possible from the subjects of the note, and eventually produce a very narrowly defined subject for the Theory. In the above example, Troll would belong to the ‘Races’ category, and Language would belong to the ‘Disciplines’ or ‘Culture’ category. If those were all the subjects on the notes, the resulting theory would be on Troll Language.

The values of the subjects are also important, as the higher the particular scores, the more Advanced the resulting Theory would be.

Exploration: Certain locations throughout the world, namely those steeped in history, but any would work, would be sources of books, scrolls, tablets, paintings, and other such items that the Loreweaver could use to obtain notes. These could appear as ground spawns in said locations, a book on a shelf inside an old abandoned monastery, for example. Loreweavers could theoretically go out into the world and look for these items, but adventurers would likely find them throughout their travels,. If the designer wants to encourage loreweavers to go out and explore the world rubbings, explained below, can also be used.

Purchase: As I said, adventurers would find these items, and could theoretically sell them to vendors for a meager sum (they are essentially vendor trash to non-loreweavers), or to Loreweavers for considerably more. Alternately, some vendors could be implemented in the game that keep track of how many of these items have been sold to vendors in their city in the last 15 minutes, and update an inventory populated with random items from a list every so often. This inventory could be unique for each loreweaver (a form of vendor inventory phasing) or all loreweavers could be buying from the same limited inventory. Alternately, with vendors like those in Everquest, loreweavers could spend a lot of their time hunting through vendor inventories trying to find their much needed source of notes. Whichever system is used should be conducive to Loreweavers having a consistent, convenient source of materials, without actually having to go out and get them themselves.

Once the Loreweaver has enough notes, they combine them to create a theory. Theories are basically that, hypotheses the Loreweaver arrives at from studying source material and compiling notes. They are also where the ‘experimental player-created content’ comes in.

Theories need to be proved. As such, they require either more information, or actually going on a field trip to study the subject matter.

As such, when a theory is formulated, the Loreweaver would receive two items: One would be a commission, and the other the actual Hypothesis of the theory.

In WoW terms, the commission would take the form of a ‘This item begins a Quest’ item that can be traded. The Loreweaver can click on the commission and see what exactly needs to get done in order to complete the quest. They can then either choose to do the quest themselves, accepting the quest, or call out in city-wide chat or a trade channel that they have a commission to go do X. Alternately, they could very well take the quest, and then offer to share it with people, in order to get more than one person to accept the quest.

The quest itself would involve travelling somewhere associated with the subject matter of the theory, and either interacting with an object (getting a rubbing). The interaction with the object would complete the initial quest, and yield the rubbing as a reward. Rubbings are similar to notes, in that they are materials for Loreweaving, and little else (unless the game is also using inspirations). So, the adventurer completes the quest, gets a small experience reward, and now has an item they can sell to the Loreweaver, or turn in to them for the previously negotiated price. Delivery via in-game mail would also be possible, with the possibility of using C.O.D. to ensure payment. If the original Loreweaver no longer needs it, chances are some other Loreweaver might. If not, it can still be vendored.

The actual quest itself doesn’t need to end there, however. The original quest could very well just be the beginning of a quest chain, or it might have a chance of triggering a quest, or it might give a follow-up selected from a list of quests. Whatever is feasible and the designers feel they can get away with.

Once the Loreweaver has their rubbing, and other associated materials (all of which are listed in the handy hypothesis scroll’s tooltip), the player can either right click the Hypothesis – it would be a ‘Use: combine this item and X, Y, Z to create A’. – or throw it all together in their research satchel (one of the Loreweaving professional tools) and hit combine. The results would be either a proven hypothesis, a refuted hypothesis, or an unproven hypothesis. The unproven hypothesis would return the loreweaver to the questi-giving stage of the process, and yield experience and notes, and possibly another hypothesis/quest to give out. The refuted hypothesis would also grant experience, and more notes than the unproven hypothesis, but would not yield another hypothesis. Finally, the proven hypothesis would be the most desirable result, since the loreweaver could combine it with some writing materials and implements to create an actual in-game book. This book could then be studied for more notes. There might even be different qualities of books, with some only being a few pages long and not very in-depth, all the way to detailed accounts of events, cultures, languages, etc. There could even be terrible books that were obvious fabrications, or wildly inaccurate. Even these would have some merit, if only for entertainment value.

I’ll add more to this later, but for now, that’s what I have.  I have a couple more ideas in this same vein that I will put into writing soon(ish).

As a way of establishing a basis for my thoughts, here’s a little information about my playing habits in WoW:

I currently have the maximum number of characters allowed (50) scattered across a good dozen servers. I play mostly alliance characters, on PvE servers, but I have player all the racial and death knight newbie areas, and all races to at least level 20. On my main server, I have 10 alliance characters, 3 80′s, 4 70+, and three lowbies. I have one of each class (including death knight), at least one of each race, and all professions maxed or just about.

I interact with the world around me. I mourn the passing of NPCs. I intercept and kill predators that are trying to eat domesticated sheep and chickens. I /salute Thrall when I am in his presence, even as an Alliance character. I /knelt before Varyan Wrynn when he made his triumphant return to Stormwind. I will randomly emote my feelings to NPCs that I’m interacting with. To all intents and purposes, while I’m in the game, I’m in the game world. I don’t roleplay, but I respect those who do. I PvP in battlegrounds, and when I’m with a group of people pursuing an objective, but I don’t believe in ganking, and I don’t care to live constantly looking over my shoulder, worried that someone is going to poke a claymore through my spleen.

I read all the quest text, the first time. Since I play 10 different characters, that averages out to about 33% of the time up until level 80, 20% of the time up to level 74, and just about 10% at level 33 (my lowest level characters). That’s one thing I don’t know if Blizzard’s metrics take into account, players blitzing through content on alts. I’m not sure what the numbers are, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who suffers from altitis, although I’m probably among the ‘chronically endangered’ by the disease.

Personally, I enjoy in-game lore. I care about the NPCs and their plights. I will avenge innocent NPCs that get slaughtered by evil meanies (don’t get me started on the Oracles questline in Sholazar Basin, I must have single-handedly slaughtered thousands of undead there). I don’t mind fetching some guy’s abandoned wood, thinning out pest populations, exploring ruins, retrieving artifacts, or any other menial task (I do object to some of the more mind-numbing quests). I like killing stuff. I like quests that send me to kill 100 blibbles. In fact, I prefer them to quests that send me to pick up one flower in zone A, two zones south from the starting point, hand it in to the wild fae maiden in zone b, on the diametrically opposed end of the continent from zone b, and then come back with the maiden’s words of love back where I started. If it wasn’t for my epic flying mount, I would despise that last quest, but would probably do it anyway if the shinies were shinier enough than what I was currently wearing.

All of that said, I agree with Tesh in that  most of these so-called quests are basically doing other people’s work for them. The aforementioned wood collecting is not a quest, it is menial labour. I have nothing against menial labour, if it will net me a little coin, some experience, reputation, and/or a follow-up. I do object to it being called a Quest.

Hence, my first line in the sand: Differentiate Quests, from tasks, favours, errands, requests for aid, bounty hunts, missions, random acts of kindness, and temporary emergency conscription. I will concede that tasks, etc, can be gateways to Quests, as a means of gaining reputation, proving one’s worth, and all the other rotes.

To me, it’s not just a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of scope. Personally, I would see Quests as the ‘group-required’ stuff in WoW, and tasks as the single player stuff. I would also differentiate in the scope of the rewards. Quests would award meaningful gear upgrades, large amounts of experience, reputation, etc. Tasks would award smaller amounts of experience, and either gold or reputation . In fact, I would love to see a game where I can choose to forego monetary rewards in exchange for a reputation boosts: the character performs the deed out of their sense of duty, honour, or kindness, and thus they are exalted in the eyes of those who requested their assistance. This would tie in nicely with what I said about tasks leading to Quests. If a number of Quests required a minimum reputation to acquire, and there were more minor reputations one could work on, all the better. Even more so, if a number of the tasks are repeatable, for smaller rewards than the first time they are completed. And even more so if there are a number of different repeatable quests that one can do in each town to build reputation, to mix things up a bit.

What makes a Quest different from any of the other terms I used above? Simple: If it requires I kill a single, named or ‘unique’ enemy, or several formidable ones, or obtain a single object of above-average importance, or  an assortment of materials that combine into something greater than the sum of the parts, or beseech the aid of a being of power orders of magnitude greater than my own at the time, it is a Quest. If it involves killing many lowly enemies, obtaining components for something that can be crafted routinely, or several mundane items, or deliver a message to someone only slightly more important than me at the time, it is a task.

The thing about quests, for a chronic sufferer of altitis as myself, is that they lost their sheen after a the first couple of times you do them. By the time I was doing Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord for the fourth and fifth time (I was alternating a warrior and mage), I found myself killing way more monsters than were immediately necessary to complete a quest. On my mage especially, I would be running around from place to place to complete my checklists, and I would stop every few dozen steps to AoE down a pack of monsters. Even on my warrior I was grinding mobs about as much as I was questing, simply because the quests had lost their sheen somewhat. It didn’t help that at the time I had a maxed tailor (cheap, decent quality mage gear) and blacksmith (ditto for warrior), hence completing quests was only coming ahead of grinding on the basis of repuatation rewards. Some of the quests I was still looking forward to doing, namely the ones that required more than killing monsters or collecting items, like the vehicle riding quests.

Another thing about quests, which has been mentioned elsewhere, is the segregation they cause. If I happen to be on the same quests as you, we can group, and go do the quest, then either we see if we have more quests or part ways. One thing I’ve noticed about WoW is that I haven’t formed any relationships as strong as I did playing Everquests, and even those pale when compared to the friendships I still have with people I met while interacting on the pre-release forums of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I do tend to solo in WoW, but I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect.

In fact, call me weird, but I have fond memories of grouping in Everquest, just grinding mobs and talking to people between bouts of meditating. Part of me feels that the group quests in WoW only serve to emphasise the problem: if you happen to find enough people of the right classes to do the quests, great, you are treated to either a short period of excitement, or a horrible experience of waiting for people to gather, people dropping out to do other stuff, and/or wiping on what should probably not be a huge deal. If you don’t succeed at finding a group to complete the quest, you get stumped in your progression through the questlines of the zone, and either have to move on and come back later, wait for your friends to show up to help, or abandon the quest and miss out on that part of the game experience.

Which segues nicely into story.

As I said above, I like the stories developers weave into their worlds. If I see something that stands out in the game, I look around to see if I can figure out why it’s there. If there is quest to be read, I will read it, the first time. On the second and third times, if it’s still fresh in my mind, I’ll just click through it. I might read it again if I remember the quest text being interesting, funny, or otherwise memorable – an aside here to mention that I have a pretty good memory for in-game quests and such if I’m actively playing the game – but chances are, if it’s yet another fetch quest or verb number noun quest, I’ll just click through it and go on my merry way.

That said, I do like in-game lore. I especially like what WoW did with the books strewn throughout the world. And not just the important books that tell the world’s history and legends. I thought the steamy romance novels were clever and funny. I read people’s diary’s, or try to. I think story, of all scopes, does more to bring the world to life, as do little NPC interaction scripts, wolves killing squirrels, critters, and things that are there just because. When I’m doing a quest with a story behind it, I live the story, and don’t worry about the fact that thousands of others have done it already, and I don’t feel like the hero any less.

So, as it relates to quests, I like that Quests have stories, and that quests have stories. It’s all part of bringing the world together into a cohesive whole. Even if they are simple, small stories of labourers driven away and missed shipment deadlines, they are the stories of the people who we, as heroes, are there to protect. And we all have to start our Questlines somewhere.