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I design a game for Penny Arcade

October 10th, 2007 (Visited 3557 times) Tags:

Well, sort of.

So there I was, at the San Diego ComicCon, sidling past the Penny Arcade table on my way to say hi to Scott Kurtz at the PvP Online booth, when suddenly this Tycho person grabbed me and pulled me aside to rant and rave. He had an idea, he said. A crazy idea.

I should have known. Another wannabe game designer. But hey, this one has this semi-popular website and regularly trashes developers he doesnâ€™t like. I had to stand still and listen, or risk professional doom.

Basically, he said, he had this idea for a construction game. â€œLike, SimCity?â€ I said. No, like with dumptrucks and demolition balls and cranes and architects with blueprints and everything. Like, real construction, Bob-the-Builder style.

And he wanted it as an MMO.

Great, I said, humoring him. Iâ€™m working on this thing called Metaplace, and you can make it yourself, andâ€¦

â€œNo, noâ€¦â€ he said. â€œI want you to write up a design article. For the site. Like, a guest spot.â€

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37 Responses to “I design a game for Penny Arcade”

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Raph’s Website » Monday Mailbag: constructive fallout wrote on October 15th, 2007 at 6:40 pm:

[...] a lot of the mail I have gotten recently relates to the quickie design outline I did for Penny Arcade… a few of them were pretty interesting, so I am just reprinting them here. Â Dear Raph, I am [...]

MMOWTF.com - MMORPG News (Shamelessly Reblogged) wrote on October 16th, 2007 at 3:29 am:

Quite a lot of the mail I have gotten recently relates tothe quickie design outline I did for Penny Arcadeâ€¦ a few of them were pretty interesting, so I am just reprinting them here. Â Dear Raph, I am a huge fan of the SimCity series (worried about the loss of technical details in the new Socities) and read your words on Penny-arcade.com. PLEASE BUILD

Adam's Friends wrote on October 16th, 2007 at 8:46 am:

MMO 3.0? wrote on October 16th, 2007 at 10:55 am:

[...] did whip together an interesting design idea that sounds like it could be made in Metaplace. It’s a multiplayer industrial building game [...]

Lag-O-Rama wrote on October 19th, 2007 at 4:00 pm:

. However, they do refer to Raph as having “once sagely observed”, so they can’t be all bad.So Raph Koster walks into a conference…(stop me if you’ve heard this one before), get buttonholed by Tycho from Penny Arcade,writes a columnon a wacky idea which someone actually creates a design for (awesome job, Peter!), which leads us to the one…the only…Drywall Minigame! (Now, what have you accomplished today?) Halflife Source is reporting that Red Planet LLC is in talks with a

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: PC Gaming’s Beadiest Eyes » Blog Archive » Craning Level wrote on November 28th, 2007 at 6:02 am:

[...] could have mentioned that Raph Koster recently wrote a guest editorial on Penny Arcade featuring a game-design for a construction game. Interestingly, the follow-up [...]

Reader Comments

Argent Stonecutter said on October 10th, 2007 at 7:05 am:
Back when the Amiga came out I was going to do a kind of construction game called “Steady Eddie”, where you were this robot that had to catch girders and build a building as they were falling… but after our first game wiped out (it had problems, for sure, but having the publisher screw up the reproduction, have to recall the game, miss christmas, then go out of business a little while later (our first hint was calling up the bloke doing the PC port to follow up on some email and finding out from him that the PC port had been cancelled) made me think that we might have made a mistake going with the first publisher that came along) I decided writing software for controlling real industrial hardware was a more reliable job and never got past some sketchy artwork.

Anyway, reading your article brought back memories of all the cool stuff we thought of putting in there and but that would never fit into a 7 MHz 68000 or a 1.7 MB floppy. So…

There’s a commerce game there too, you can post your surplus for sale, buy the surplus from other players, sell stuff, have a whole niche there for the building-supplies guy. Maybe you’ll get people working that niche, maybe not. You can bid on jobs, then subcontract them to other players… maybe link it in with some kind of real-estate mogul game.

Don’t forget the dark side. You could have a whole black-and-white style meta-game there. You can get kickbacks, you can deliberately use substandard materials with a chance of getting caught, and then decide whether to try bribing the building inspector to slide by this time, swipe stuff from other players sites, become a fence, could end up with a whole organized crime sub-game evolving.

I think a lot of the sub-games will want to be skippable. Don’t want fish farmers and sales bots, set up some kinda market so you don’t have to actually talk to AI customers (unless you want to haunt the market and wheel and deal with other players for subcontracting) and you can hire other players or AIs (sorta AIs, since they won’t need to actually simulate playing the sub-game, they can just skip to the final product) to do sub-games you don’t like (and if it turns out a subgame ends up being skipped almost all the time, you change it up or take it out). That way you don’t have to worry too much about whether some sub-game will turn people off.
Square said on October 10th, 2007 at 7:23 am:
I just wanted to say your article was amazing. I, for one, am glad that you didn’t go down the other aisle!
Sarah said on October 10th, 2007 at 7:50 am:
As I read I got the feeling that many of the menial tasks like drywalling and painting could be done in a puzzle format. Much the same that Puzzle Pirates was able to turn the arduous task of bilging and turning it into something passably fun.

Anyway, my idea for the drywalling was shape-fitting. You’d be given various shapes of drywall, mostly standard squares and rectangles, and you’d be tasked with filling in a grid of empty space with the various pieces. You would have obstacles like light switches and power outlets to build around and you might end up having to find a way to piece in unusual tetris-like shapes because the kid cutting your drywall is half-blind or something. Just an idea.

Painting would be just that. You’d have an interface not unlike MS paint. Various tools, spraypaint, brushes of different sizes, rollers, all that crap. Then you’d have to mix the colors to within a tolerable degree of the desired color and apply it to the wall. You’d have to decide what brushes and such to use for maximum effect and you’d also have to have a steady hand to do the detail and trim work properly.

I ‘unno, you just got me thinking.
Michael W. said on October 10th, 2007 at 8:22 am:
I don’t know why you would question whether that game could be fun or not…

In EVE you can build a space station. A long process requiring extreme cordnation with people of differnt skill sets and playstyles. It’s also one of the most enjoyable aspects of that game imo.

People, seem to like crafting…think of Tycho’s game as “Large Scale Team Crafting”.
Nicky said on October 10th, 2007 at 8:36 am:
A building MMO can be fun, looking at A Tale in the Dessert, there seems to be a market (though small) for it as well.
Mishlai said on October 10th, 2007 at 9:25 am:
Thanks for being a good sport in todays article. I’d actually love to see more of this sort of thing, I think players would be willing to sandbox with you on the design ideas. Read: free labor & inspiration.
T. Carl said on October 10th, 2007 at 9:32 am:
Have to say well written and well thought out (at least for how quickly I’m sure you wrote the article). I’ve read both your blog and PA seperately for quite some time and it was fairly amusing this morning to have them cross-the-streams.

I think that you would end up more with a Company setup (”raiding guild”) that would get the bigger projects from large bids (did you see that as a player run or server run device? you were ambiguous), but that raiding guild would end up subcontracting out elements of the plan (the grinding and trash mob killing) to smaller guilds who may be specialized in one thing (electricians guild), rather than neccesarilly having it all in house. Though of course thats a player ecology evolution not neccesarilly something forced in game (though it would need to be accounted for).

Its so crazy, it might just work. Between EVE and The Flight Sim MMO referenced on Monday, I’m sure theres a group of people out there who would play the hell out of it.
Andrew M. Kasper said on October 10th, 2007 at 9:50 am:
Raph:

That was pretty good. You should be a game designer!

Oh, wait…
Bc said on October 10th, 2007 at 10:21 am:
So I have to say I am a bit stunned. As an engineering student, construction worker AND gamer you have won my heart. I doubt you have an actual demographic of people like me but I have to say besides the detail of the construction world, you have hit what seems like an amazing game design, right on the head. Kudos to you.
Ilsoap said on October 10th, 2007 at 10:28 am:
I could definitely see that doing well… at least on paper. In reality, I’d be amazed if a complicated building would even get finished, if people have the ability to demolish other people’s stuff.
Nicademus said on October 10th, 2007 at 11:06 am:
You make that game and I’ll buy it. Christ, anywhere I could pre-order maybe?

Bring back ol skool dry walling! These care bears have ruined it with their puzzle pirate talk! Mudding and sanding used to take skill dammit!
Zwei said on October 10th, 2007 at 2:08 pm:
Honestly I’d buy it too. And I typically grow tired of MMOs quickly. But I can see real life applications of this game such as architectural design and technical knowledge gained, which could be taught in a fun and exciting manner.
Paulo Fernandes said on October 10th, 2007 at 3:00 pm:
I’d have to say that I rarely find interest in MMOs and this one sounded fun. Maybe it’s because so many games out there are so far from real life. Regardless, I was impressed that you were able to whip that off in 3 hours. I suppose the fact that you thought it was horrible and I thought it was amazing is the reason that you do what you do, and I do what I do.
Nursegirl said on October 10th, 2007 at 3:19 pm:
Wow. From that 2500 word article, I understand more about game development than a lifetime of playing games have given me. Thanks so much for the window into your world.

I’m ready to buy it, once it’s cross platform!
Erik said on October 10th, 2007 at 3:48 pm:
That article has one great closing sentence.
And it describes games that already have a strong market, like trainz, by Auran. Only what 100-150,000 fans play it (use it as digital trainset maker) but they are super loyal.
I was talking last night to a project manager of an international design/construction company, and showed her some collaborative software and she became delirious over the possibilities. It wasn’t, I am afraid, Metaplace, but I’ll have a closer look at that too. The google features are definitely exciting.
Matt Fisher said on October 10th, 2007 at 6:54 pm:
Well, it’s a demonstration of the power, and the problems of the MMO genre.

It’s easy to come up with very exciting concepts. The number of potential ideas for MMOs is staggering - sometimes it seems like just about any task, taken to an MMO environment, becomes immensely appealing.

The problem is player retention for long enough to build the numbers to justify the millions of dollars in development costs. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited about metaplace: we’re going to get all these crazy ideas made real, in an environment where development is dirt cheap, within the realm of hobbyists, and retaining people for subscription fees is largely a non-issue.

More exciting is when people start using the “webby” features to really link these things together… what happens when the zombie MMO people make a linkup with the construction sim MMO people? I can’t wait!
Eolirin said on October 10th, 2007 at 8:41 pm:
Honestly, I thought that was a really compelling concept. Sarah mentions the use of puzzle type games for dealing with the potentially dull stuff that occurs on the micro-level with construction, and I was thinking of similar things when I was reading it. The mechanical aspects of real life construction can be pretty dull, so modelling them realistically would probably be a bit of a bad idea. No one’s really going to want to sit there and click on each nail in order to hammer it in. I had enough of that with UO’s crafting system (No offense) But, if the act of hammering plays more like a game of whack-a-mole, and you don’t need to spend hours doing it, then it could be pretty fun. You can factor in the macro level very easily simply by looking at how accurate the player was in completing the mini-game and/or how quickly they did it. Speed would reduce the costs that the Firm spends, and accuracy would increase the quality of the building. It would even be possible to set things up so that baring an exceptionally skilled player, there would HAVE to be trade offs involved in the completion of those mini-games. Do we sacrifice quality for cost by spending more time playing the mini-games or try to get through them as quickly as possible? Lots of potentially interesting decisions that can be made there.
Matt said on October 11th, 2007 at 12:13 am:
Fantastic post at PA. Makes me want to go and check out your games now.
Lobosolitario said on October 11th, 2007 at 1:46 am:
The fun in drywall is either A) in successfully coordinating with a second player or B) in the balancing act that is attempting to put up drywall on your own. And then there’s always the screwdriver / nailgun subgame
Lobosolitario said on October 11th, 2007 at 1:48 am:
Oh, and most of that “Fancy Italian marble” is actually Spanish marble, quarried, shipped over there, and resold as Italian. I live just down the road from the quarries.
Dr. Cat said on October 11th, 2007 at 12:52 pm:
This game is an extreme example of the design school of “Want more features? Look at how the real world works and add more of that”. I remember Richard heading down that path with Ultima VI, giving every item a unqiue weight, etc. Of course the most extreme example would be the Sims games, where simulating reality was the whole point. The Tycoon games are in there somewhere too - though the better ones pay a fair amount of attention to abstracting or glossing over the less fun details in favor of things that are more fun for the player to do.

I’ve never been big on this design school myself - I used to talk about how nobody wants their fantasy RPG to involve having to urinate, defecate, catch colds and flus and slowly recover from them, wash your characters clothes, trim their toenails, sew torn clothing or lost buttons, spend 1/3 of your playtime watching them sleep on your screen, etc. Sleeping in particular is generally fast-forwarded, and in many of the 1980s games that included food it was just a tedious element, rather than fun. (Nowadays food has apparently evolved into a form of healing potion.) My message in those days was, reality doesn’t provide a source of design ideas for automatic inclusion - it provides potential ideas, each of which must be evaluated and accepted or rejected depending on whether it ends up making the game more fun, or less fun. If it turns out painting is fun enough but drywalling isn’t, then drywalling must go. Or vice versa. The simulation of lots of tenant AIs seems in particular to be a lot of work, which the player might not interact with in enough depth to make it worth it for the slightly greater variation in results. Where a simpler set of automated building evaluation criteria spitting results at the player would probably do. Though on the other paw, the presence of tenant AIs gave me a slight temptation to think “If you’re making a game that requires huge amounts of research, art and programming resources, and generally tens of millions of development dollars anyway, why not drink more of the koolaid and go for a Landlord subgame too? Get all the tenants complaints and respond to them or don’t, spending money on fixing damage and even on renovations and improvements to hope you can raise tenant satisfaction, property values, and eventually charge higher rent - or play Slumlord and see what’s the minimum you can get by with spending while squeezing as much money as you can manage out of your flea-ridden deathtrap before it gets condemned or you get sued into oblivion.”

Anyway there’s clearly an audience for intensely simulationist play, though it’s not my cup of tea as a designer or as a player. (I looked at Sim City when it came out, perceived it as “all being about playing with stuff endlessly with no Win condition specified, and I prefer to achieve a game’s clearly stated goal and win”, and I didn’t buy it.) With sufficient quantity and accuracy of detail, it could potentially provide early training for people who end up going into the construction industry - or just raise public awareness of issues involved in whether that new skyscraper should be built or not. I think Sim City has colored a lot of people’s perceptions in public discourse on transportation, pollution, urban sprawl, etc. Of course the danger there is that inaccuracies in the model, which are inevitable, will slant how people’s political thoughts are modified in one direction or another. I’ve heard that Will Wright had a strong bias towards believing that commuter trains and other forms of public transportation are extremely good, and his models reflect this. They certainly ARE good, but if he makes them more so than they are in real life, it can transfer his bias to his audience without them even realizing the model they were playing painted an overly rosy picture. I did read a work of near-future science fiction at some point where the “Sim City” type games had grown into a “simulate a whole nation or world”, still with comparable amounts of detail, and it was something everybody had tinkered with while they were young and considered to be pretty educational. I wish I could remember the title or author. Of course as presented in that book, there sounded like an unwieldy amount of detail. The main lesson I took away from the Unix version of Empire I played for a while is “don’t give players this much stuff to manage, unless you’re designing a game for people who have no life and want the game to fill the role of one”. The only way to keep that game manageable was to avoid ever expanding beyond a very small number of squares of land. (Though many Unix geeks wrote scripts to do a lot of automated upkeep tasks to manage a large empire.)

Anyway I just wanted to point out that at the other end of the scale of construction games are things like Sid Sackon’s excellent game Acquire. Where building a chain of hotels is represented by marking an increasing number of connected squares on a grid as part of the chain, and the more squares it has, the more it’s worth. Sort of the polar opposite to your design - and way too simple to sustain MMO play for any length of time. It is of, of course, for the genre of “play a game to conclusion in one sitting”, and if you like it enough to want more of that same kind of fun, you play out another complete episode from start to finish the next time.

Still, I think there’s more of a place for that sort of gameplay than we’re giving proper attention to in the MMO marketplace, which has focused on a very particular niche. I know I don’t need to tell you that, and I applaud the new directions you’re currently heading in. The mainstream of gaming is card games, one-sitting family board games, the surprisingly large number of people playing quick casual online or downloadable games, sports games, gambling, etc. Most humans want gaming they can finish, go do something else with their life, then come back and play a single standalone session of the game again. In the US market we have Magic Online, maybe a few things like Neopets and Webkins, hitting this market from a massive perspective. (The many mulitplayer casual cardgame sites tend to ignore any kind of massive social framework, throwing random people together in random groups of 2-6 and ignore everyone else after that.) I wish I knew more about some of the Korean games like the online bomberman clones, tennis, kart racing, etc.

Construction, I grant you, cries out to have at least one monolithic title that evolves over long periods, so you can look at what happens with a luxury high-rise when you have lots of players working on it for a long time. But my sensibilities call out to ask, if someone were to sink another three hours into doing an alternative construction MMO design… What would you make for the players who cry out “Why are all the current construction MMOs so hardcore? I don’t want to grind all weekend to level up my drywalling skills, my best friend and I want to log on for 2 hours, make an entire skyscraper from scratch and make it look pretty, then log off and watch movies on pay per view. Where is the casual building construction MMO for us?”
Kyan said on October 11th, 2007 at 5:17 pm:
I love the creativy absolutely oozing from that piece — not simply from the write-up, but Tycho as well and the general feedback from everyone else. It really gives an inspiring vision of what Metaplace could become.
Raph said on October 11th, 2007 at 10:22 pm:
So, Cat, I guess you can design the non-hardcore construction game!
thing2k said on October 12th, 2007 at 12:54 am:
Just come from penny arcade, must say that was a great post. The more I read, the more I felt I want to play this, and hope someone will create it.

Just my opinion

thing2k
Argent Stonecutter said on October 12th, 2007 at 5:09 am:
“Where is the casual building construction MMO for us?”

Second Life.
Tess said on October 12th, 2007 at 10:29 am:
But really, itâ€™s about keeping the customers happy. You see, each thing that you put in the building â€“ be it unpainted drywall, really nice stippled leather wall coverings, tacky plastic shades or teak flooring, will be invisibly generating fields of data.

This bit reminds me a lot of the interior decorating game design I was toying with, at one point.
Peter S. said on October 13th, 2007 at 8:37 pm:
After reading this article on Penny Arcade, I sent the following to Tycho. In lieu of tracking down an e-mail address for Raph as well, I’m copying what I wrote to him here. Please forgive me for playing amateur game developer, but dammit, Raph’s an extremely inspiring man. Ahem:

Dear Tycho,

I just finished reading Raph Koster’s guest post (As Seen In Modern Lair). He said he didn’t know how to make drywall fun. I kid you not, inspiration struck me. My dad was in construction. I had a visual right away.

I know how to make a fun drywall minigame.

The game would, at its core, be a speed memory game. The players will be shown a section of the building’s wall when it’s still just a frame. There will be a button for slapping up the section of drywall. They can take as long studying the frame as they want, but once they hit the button the sheet of drywall goes up (hiding the frame) and the mouse (or Wiimote, why not?) starts controlling a nailgun.

The player then needs to nail up the drywall. The best visual I can describe would be kinda like Pac-Man in reverse: nails need to follow where the frame was, spaced evenly at some specific interval (like every 6″ of game-space, perhaps), and be as close to the center of the studs as possible, so think about trying to draw in the dots on a Pac-Man board accurately after someone turns the screen off. Given doors, windows, and other features (plumbing?), some walls will be less complex and some more. If some details of the frame escape the player while they’re nailing, they can use a Stud Finder to give them a quick peek through part of the drywall, but doing so would obviously slow them down (and maybe it costs a little bit extra, or has only so much battery life, etc.). Players are timed, and the timer starts *when they first see the wall frame*.

Players are rated on Accuracy (how evenly spaced and centered were the nails?) and Speed (how quick did you do it?). Mistakes such as missing a stud entirely are costly, and too many will mean having to pull the sheet of drywall down and starting over (at the cost of a fresh sheet, of course). For high enough Accuracy, the wall might get a bonus to stability or be easier to paint or wallpaper. Faster jobs cost less money. Oh, and let’s toss in that players can buy an upgrade for their nail gun that will estimate how many nails it would take to perfectly nail up the drywall, giving them a rough idea while they’re working of how well they’re doing.

With this, players have a variety of ways to attack the (admittedly simple) game and two metrics to compete on. How would a player that does all the vertical studs first, then all the horizontal, then any odd bits fare against someone who starts in the top left corner and works their way to the bottom right (or someone who does the outer perimeter then works their way in)? What’s a good tradeoff between time spent studying the frame and time spent nailing? Who has had to discard the largest number of drywall sheets on the current project? Shall we take extra time (and spend extra money) on all the walls to make sure we get all the accuracy bonuses we can?

Whoa, suddenly there really is a difference between shoddy and quick labor, and high quality that costs a bit more. Plus, a contractor could now honestly say “Well, that section of drywall in the bathroom was a bit trickier to put up than we had thought…”. All that, just with Anti-Pac-Man.

I really hope you read this, if for no other reason than the extremely slim chance I might one day get to say I helped (in some small way!) to develop a game with Raph Koster and Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade.

Hope you at least find the above amusing,

Peter S.

P.S. Overall, what does it say when the first thing that came to my mind after reading Raph’s whole post was “Wouldn’t that turn out kinda like Puzzle Pirates on land?”
Morgan Ramsay said on October 14th, 2007 at 4:06 pm:
So, Cat, I guess you can design the non-hardcore construction game!

…and then Cat could build it with Metaplace! ;p
Ferum said on October 15th, 2007 at 1:33 pm:
In all seriousness, I think that making (or attempting to make this game) would be alot of fun. Would Metaplace be able to handle something like this?
Morgan Ramsay said on October 15th, 2007 at 4:24 pm:
Would Metaplace be able to handle something like this?

Why wouldn’t it?
Ferum said on October 16th, 2007 at 12:43 pm:
I don’t know. I don’t really have a handle on how powerful it is.