IainPeregrine granted us a couple more days to work on the project. It would have been neat if I could have pulled off a surprise upset, but it seems I'm still not able to get myself to complete even the few meager "not dones" on yesterday's checklist.

After playing a bit of a certain beta of a game that resembles EVE Online, I was able to put my finger on what was missing in my game. First, the player's role is too small. Second, there was no real point in playing.

Problem 1: The Player's Role Is Too Small

To illustrate what I mean, lets take two stories:

1. The first story is a story where a man is digging a hole, finding rocks, and putting them in a pile. This is the complete scope of the story, we neither detail why he's digging a hole, or what he thinks about it.
2. The second story is a civil war. We detail why the two sides are involved in conflict. We detail some individual people who have taken part in this civil war. We go through painstaking efforts to get the reader to care about the actors of this story. In one scene, it is mentioned a man is digging a hole in an idle aside.

In this EVE Online-like game, I created a character geared towards becoming a research and development-capable merchant because I wanted to participate in the robust virtual economy that the game boasted. I was quickly invited into a corporation and found out the only thing they needed my character for was to mine ore. For everything else, they had people who did it better than me. In fact, refining the ore into usable minerals was outsourced to another corporation completely.

I wanted be to a mover and a shaker, not a nobody! Even if I were to go independent, I had no hope of competing against entire corporations of players. I was stuck in story #1, the ditch digger, when I wanted to be in story #2, a major force in the war. My assigned role was to dig ditches as a raw material producer so other people could tell their stories. Digging ditches is boring, the purpose of a game is to entertain, but this game design seems unaware of this.

That the individual player's scope is too small is the core reason why I don't play EVE Online, and probably why many people multi-box it. It would be a significantly more interesting game if I was able to have a larger influence. Perhaps if was able to command several ships at once, or if it were possible to roll up a character whose skills were genuinely useful from the start.

My GSDC'10 project suffered a similar problem. In the end, you're digging holes and bringing ore back to your base. That's the role you're assigned, without any greater appreciation for anything else that may be going on. In such a narrow scope, there's no real significance to bothering: it's not fun; it's work.

Problem 2: There's No Real Point In Playing

You might ask why it is that I develop in BYOND instead of Flash or Game Maker, and the answer is this: at its heart, BYOND is a multi-user dungeon. What BYOND can do that many other platforms cannot is create a multiplayer space where things happen. While BYOND can do far more than only this, this MUD-like property alone makes it interesting in my mind.

What Leftley developed in Lode Wars was a good game, but it ultimately suffered from a problem in that neither Leftley nor its players really understood what the point of playing was, and it ended development with an unanswered problem of how to provide incentives for people to work with their team instead of working for their own best interests.

In modeling what would ultimately become Mech Game Framework off of Lode Wars, I painted myself in the very same corner. I thought I could transcend this by changing the way the incentives were balanced, the problem was deeper: that the persistent-world integrity was breached when the world reset every 30-60 minutes, and there was no point but to accrue power for accruing power's sake.

My Real Mission

Let me level with you: while accruing power for accruing power's sake works for a certain age demographic, I am way older than that demographic. I am completely burned out from the idea of grinding, but it seems professional game developers only want to make games for the earlier age demographic.

That is a problem with the game development world that I am here to solve or fail solving. Consequently, I need to remember I'm only here to create persistent worlds. What's more, worlds that go beyond the typical MMORPG's vapid scope of accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.

The GSDC reminded me that getting something done is just not my prerogative. It's not a total waste, I might leverage this Mech Game Framework in a future project - maybe a persistent world Crescent Hawks Inception? Meanwhile, I return to Planetbreakers somewhat reassured and reeducated.