ID:83002
 
Keywords: multi, player, single
I commented briefly about this on the BYOND developer forums, and I wanted to expand on the idea a little along with posting it where it'll be more visible. The question is, if BYOND is designed to support multi player natively, and this is perhaps its greatest strength as it doesn't have a whole lot to offer as far as single player games go than most other game development engines, then why bother making any single player BYOND games at all?

Here's the thing. Suppose you design a game. Your game just happens to be the most awesome game ever. But it only works with multiple players. So you host your game online and set it up like a spider web waiting for players to log in and get hooked. The problem is that people log in, look around, find no one to play with, and then log back out.

Now, suppose instead of designing your game for multi player, you designed your game for single player, but with multi player support. Now you host your game, and you find that people logging in get hooked on the single player aspects of the game. These may only be fun for a little while, but as long as it keeps the players engaged long enough for other players to show up, then the multi player aspects begin to be visible, and the players will continue to have fun playing the game with other players.

Poor me, no one to play with.

A lot of the BYOND games that I've seen are designed purely for multi player. There is simply nothing for the player to do unless there are other people to play with. No one plays these games. No one plays these games BECAUSE no one plays these games. If these games could keep players occupied while waiting for other players to show up, then suddenly there would be other people to play with.

Furthermore, when you allow people to play single player, you allow them to develop an interest in the game on their own, and this can result in the creation of small gaming communities. People getting together to talk about the game. If these games have multi player support as well, then these communities can serve as a means for people to get in touch and find other players, or perhaps set up hosting schedules.

The bottom line: build single player games! Even if what you truly want is a multi player game, giving it a strong single player aspect will help your game to get off the ground!
Which is why the multiplayer modes in Gears of War are so great. They have bots!

They're pretty smart too.

I'm not looking forward to adding bots to my own game. =(
Most of what you say here doesn't make sense. Even in MORPGs where a strong "solo" component can be important, designing an online game as a single player title from the ground up and then tacking on multiplayer is bad practice.

The real problem is that the audience for non-fangame games on BYOND has completely disappeared over the past couple years. Single-session action/strategy games like Proelium and Last Robot Standing never had trouble finding players back when there were people on BYOND actually interested in games without Naruto in the title.

It's nice that you personally enjoy using a multiplayer game creation system to create single player titles. That said, adding a single player component to every game on BYOND isn't going to change anything.
SilkWizard wrote:
The real problem is that the audience for non-fangame games on BYOND has completely disappeared over the past couple years. Single-session action/strategy games like Proelium and Last Robot Standing never had trouble finding players back when there were people on BYOND actually interested in games without Naruto in the title.

I'd have to agree. The best way to go is for people to advertise their original games to audiences outside BYOND, it should garner nice results.

It's nice that you personally enjoy using a multiplayer game creation system to create single player titles. That said, adding a single player component to every game on BYOND isn't going to change anything.

I don't know how you can foresee that, but personally, I think adding a singleplayer experience to a multiplayer game virtually gives you two games in one, if done right. And it'll herald more players your way. A good example of this is Final Fantasy Online.
When I get SotS II into a finished state it'll be eligible for this guild because I added NPCs driven by a pretty decent AI. They act as competent players and can provide pretty good competition. Without them, the game would only be a party game because you'd need multiple people to enjoy it.

What I've discovered as a result of building that AI is that while AI is not trivial to set up, it is highly rewarding. Once your NPCs have any kind of independent goal structure, they start to act real. Give them imperfect knowledge so they're forced to explore like anyone else, and they'll be running all over the map, breahting life into it. Incursion remains AI-less largely because it's a more difficult problem.

Frankly a lot of the fan games would benefit from this concept of giving NPCs life. So many of them are built around fighting each other that without fighting, there's only training. And generic RPGs would benefit as well, especially if the author intends to set up any kind of economy system where a glut of X item makes it practically worthless. An RPG with decent NPCs can be made self-balancing if the engine analyzes how lopsided the combat gets in certain situations, or does things to react to overpopulation of a given monster type or overabundance of, say, simple goblin shortswords.
I like the article Foomer. Interesting read. I agree, title screens should do SOMETHING for the people waiting for people to join....
I enjoyed your post and agree completely with it.