[...] 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 [...]

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

[...] 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.  Dear Raph, I am [...]

[...] 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.  Dear Raph, I am [...]

Would Metaplace be able to handle something like this?

Why wouldn’t it?

So, Cat, I guess you can design the non-hardcore construction game!

…and then Cat could build it with Metaplace! ;p

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?”

But really, it’s about keeping the customers happy. You see, each thing that you put in the building – 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.