Creating an Open, Living World

Ambition Online strives to be more than just a game, we intend for the world to be as open and interactible as possible, with NPCs that have their own schedules, needs, and desires. Creating such a world will be a huge undertaking, but a task that can be completed over time, with results at each iteration. For example (this is just off the top of my head):

Phase 1

Each NPC will have a daytime location, and a night time location. During the day, an NPC could be at work, or for enemies, out hunting/wandering. Then at night, the NPC would be sitting at home at a predetermined location.

Phase 2

NPCs will have more than just day/night locations, but also morning, afternoon, evening, night. This way the NPC could be at work morning and afternoon, go to the local pub for the evening, and go home at night. This will also allow the game to put the NPCs in their beds at night to sleep. All the times for these events could vary per NPC, so it doesn't feel like the lunch alarm went off and the robots do their tasks.

Phase 3

Days of the week could be added, giving variation in schedules per in-game day. In addition to that, perhaps random tasks could be added, like getting a drink, going out to lunch, potty breaks, etc.

Phase 4

Each NPC could be given needs and desires. This would be similar to The Sims, and the NPC would handle everything it needs to on its own. At first, this system will be pretty robotic, but could eventually turn into a dynamic life simulation involving friend and family NPCs, and perhaps even players.

. . .

Well, there you have it. Clearly, we are not calling this game Ambition for no reason. Some of these phases could take years to implement, but even at Phase 2, we have surpassed the majority of games out there in terms of a dynamic world.

Major Shift in Platform

Greetings, readers! It has been quite a long time since my last post. For personal reasons among other business, I have taken a break from heavy development of Ambition Online, but alas, as usual, I have returned. And since my absence, not much has changed in the industry as far as MMOs are concerned, but things in Ambition have taken a major shift. This shift comes from watching my own behavior with games, and my assumptions that there are others out there that follow my same patterns. Mostly, it's that I don't really enjoy sitting at my computer and playing games anymore. Maybe it's that I have an uncomfortable chair and only a makeshift office with no real space for my computer to go, but I really just want to sit back and relax on my couch when I play these days.

I am a huge fan of the old console games. In fact, during my break from Ambition, I starting diving into NES game development and all that entailed. I actually got pretty close to making something real, but in the end, I decided that all the effort would be lost in the end to a small group of fanatic developers and nobody else would really care, and why should they? Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about today! What I want to say is that I really like the old console experience, and I can still remember the good times I had playing on the NES and SNES with my brothers. What I'd like to do is be able to recreate that kind of feeling in people when playing my game.

I started out developing a console game, similar to my prototype game A Feeble Saga, and was really starting to enjoy the way it was turning out. I got the game running on my OUYA and felt pretty good about it. However, as I always do when making other games, I realized that I do not have the time to offer what is needed to produce a quality experience with a game like that. Things like compelling story, or lots of content, were things I don't have the manpower or even desire to accomplish. So I thought to myself, what can I do to make this a compelling experience for the users, without me having to create something I wouldn't have to go too far out of my abilities as a developer to create. My solution simply came down to making an open, player-driven world, like Ambition Online.

Now, I can still make the game I wanted, be able to play it the way I want, and also make something that makes sense for my abilities as a programmer. And with some goals in mind, I have some ideas on where to start back up in Ambition development and get something playable released in the coming months. I plan to continue updating this blog on my progress, though surely I will forget, or simply be too tired to write anything.

Pre-Alpha Milestone Complete!

Finally, a major milestone has been reached. This milestone includes the foundation of the client/server architecture and allows testers to finally get in and feel the game, not that there is much of one yet. Currently, here is our feature list:

• Create an account
• Log into the game with encrypted password
• Create characters (male only for now)
• Customize look using hair, face, hair color, facial hair
• Log a character into the world
• Run around in the world
• Manage an inventory of items in a bag with unlimited slots, only restricted by the weight your character can carry
• Equip items to your character and see texture changes to your character based on what you equip
• Equip a weapon and see the weapon in your hand
• Interact with world objects, currently only a treasure chest that allows you to use its inventory, probably one of the most complicated object interactions necessary in the game.
• All clients see the same things, including when other players move and equip things
• The server and client's clocks are synchronized, and so the path you take, and see others take will be identical on all clients!

Pushing Forward

I took a break from Ambition to narrow things down and work on something small that I could actually finish in the next few months. However, after working on it for a month or two I realized that it was not where my heart was, and so it was not very productive for me. Anyway, I am back now, and have decided to push forward with this project and get something very playable in the next few months. Let me update you with the things I have been working on the last several weeks.

Movement Revision

After coming back from my little break, there have been a few things that have been stalling the design of the game. One of which was the movement of your character. Previously, the way you move around the game was mainly with the mouse, where you click in on the screen and the character will move towards the cursor. This scheme was modeled after Ultima Online, which is the main inspiration of the design of Ambition. There were a few things that threw me off with this model:

1. UO utilized double-clicking for using things, which I refuse to add
2. It is awkward to move up to an object with the mouse, then have to move the mouse next to the object and click on it.
3. This one is the most complex. The method uses Unity's Character Controller and physic collision calculations, which are both very slow, but that is not the main reason. The main reason is simply that the server would have to emulate this method for the enemy AI, and it was beginning to get too complicated for a one person dev team to work out.

So, in the end, the decision was made to pull the plug on this movement scheme and move onto something else. I chose to go with the most commonly used method, which is point and click. This method is extremely simple to use and almost as simple to implement. It also has the advantage of making mobile a possibility again.

Character Customization

There was a sale on a model pack I've been wanting for a while and it was 50% off, so I had no choice but to get it. This pack is called the Warrior and Commoner pack from Frogames. The idea was that they had a nice avatar system already and I could just get the Ambition prototype working using this as placeholder. Well, it works OK, but it is most definitely not a permanent solution. I am not looking for a morph-target solution or anything, just something that gets the job done with enough customization, like World of Warcraft. Another thing is, Unity does not have any way to quickly write to a texture, and so the updating of the avatar texture based on your clothing takes forever and feels a bit unresponsive.

Pushing Forward

I have decided to move forward with Ambition and go all out by creating accounts on all the major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This will push me to building up some content to put on those sites and create a following for the game.

Getting Back to Work

I'm not going to lie, I admit that Ambition has been a bit rough to work on as of late. A month after my last post, I landed a new job at React! Games and so I haven't been able to work on it as much. Lately, though, I have been thinking about this so much that I can't focus on much else unless I start working on it more.

Earlier in this blog, I mentioned that items could be placed and picked up, etc, but that system was extremely clunky and gave me so many issues that it had to be scrapped and reworked. It is pretty much done (again) but I haven't worked on it enough to complete the last three steps, which is: dropping items on the floor, picking them up from the floor, and having containers within containers.

This project has been hard for me to figure out what order to write systems, and so productivity has been relatively low. But, today I decided to sit down and at least write a list of the things I'd like to have for a completely playable Alpha build. Before, I mentioned I'd like to have a playable demo, but waiting for Alpha seems like a better idea now. Once this alpha build is complete, I would love to share it with the community and announce this blog to give everyone an idea of what I'm going for.

Anyway, I am going to get back to coding (after I make some dinner for the family), and when I do, my plan is to work on the gathering system, so maybe next time my character will be able to pick a flower!

Day and Night

After playing Minecraft for a bit, I realized that night time has been widely underused and neglected by games. The first few times playing Minecraft, night was a scary time for me. I would close myself in a tiny dirt cave and pray a skeleton didn't shoot me while I looked out the window in hopes of daylight. Anyway, my point is that night should be dangerous and exciting.

During day time, everything is relatively peaceful in "safe" zones. As long as you are paying attention, and not adventuring out alone in profitable hunting locations, you will most likely be just fine. Most things you need to do can be done around NPC and player camps where there are many people at any given time. Most of these locations will be "protected" by difficult NPCs and hopefully good aligned players. Even hunting mobs is less dangerous, because, my idea is that there will be very few roaming monsters during the day. If you enter their camp that is one thing, but as you're exploring, you won't run into too many monsters or dangerous animals. Also, the majority of NPC bounty hunters will hunt during the day, so you will likely never see a player opposite the alignment of the region.

At night, the monsters come out, and most the bounty hunters go to sleep. It will be easier to hide and sneak at night, maybe even +50%, which can protect you, but most of the time it will protect the PKs. Somehow, skills should raise faster and rewards should be much higher, but the risks could be even higher. I realize that it doesn't make a lot of sense for the rewards to be higher at night, since, if you go searching at night for flowers in real life, you will not have as much success. But, this is a game, and I feel it is a good approach.

Night will last up to 4 hours within a 24 hour period (numbers would probably to change). And I know what you're thinking, "But it would suck to log in only to find it is night time if you just want to relax." Well, I agree, and I have thought about this quite a bit. My solution is simple, the player chooses when it is day and when it is night. There will essentially be two instances of the world, with a few things shared between. A player will only be able to switch to night mode one time in each real life day, and can only be in for 4 hours each day.

I really like the idea but, already, we run into a few complications.

• Q: If I chop down a tree at day time, will it grow back before night, or will it still be chopped down when I go to night mode? If the latter, what happens if a player chops down a tree at night, and I'm in day mode? Do I see the tree fall even though nobody is there to chop it down?
  
  A: Well, I don't really have a good answer for this. Part of me says it is okay that they are not shared between modes, but another part of me says they should just regrow twice per day. I am pretty sure UO's trees spawn in more often than that anyway.
  
• Q: Won't this turn into the Felucca and Trammel of UO? Why wouldn't everyone just stay in day mode?
  
  A: Well, I would really like for that not to be the case. There are a few things different with this system that may contribute to a different result. 1) Land ownership is shared between modes. 2) Rewards (loot drops) are higher at night. 3) Monsters don't really spawn during the day, so fighters will essentially be required to go to night mode at least every once and a while. 4) Caves and dungeons will not be affected by modes, it will always be "night" mode in them. 5) Probably the biggest: You can still get PK'ed during the day, particularly by covert blue PKs (you'd be their first murder). You can especially get pick-pocketed.

Well, that is all for tonight. I am still in favor of night mode, but the first issue is still getting to me. Perhaps it is enough to simply make dungeons and caves be the night mode. Of course I'd still have a night cycle, and maybe it could still be more dangerous at night without having the two instances of the world. It needs to be designed quite a bit more, and I need some feedback from other people.

Skills and Macroing

Creating a design that allows characters to have skills, but does not drive players to AFK macro has been a major goal for me. It is such a high priority, that removing skills altogether is still a consideration for the design. However, skills are still important to me, so I am going to try everything possible to keep them in the game.

To combat macroing, I have read about, and come up with a few ideas.

• CAPTCHA - I know what you're thinking, and I completely agree with you. How lame would it be for you to have to type in random characters every so often while you're mining or fishing? Although it would be terrible, there are a few games that employ this method. I just think we can do better.
• Player Policing - This involves a player going up to another and "tapping" on his shoulder. If the other player does not respond within a time-frame, then they must be macroing, so they are free game to kill. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this because I walk away from the computer a lot while I'm playing games, so sometimes I can't respond in time.
• Free-for-all PvP - While this may solve the problem in some cases, it is not ideal, because a lot of the time, even if you want to play a "realistic" sandbox MMO where you can do whatever you want, sometimes you just want to relax. I don't even know why I listed this, because it's not something I will consider doing, since I believe in safe zones.
• Interactivity/Minigames - This is the most promising idea I've come up with, though I'm sure it is not a new idea. It needs to be "fun", but not require a whole lot of thought or focus. For mining and lumberjacking, I was thinking of something like Fable II, where a slider bounces back and forth and you have to press the button at the right time. For herbalism maybe something like Thief III's lockpicking, where you have to twist and align roots to dig out. I'm not too worried about fishing or cooking since those will be secondary skills, but if the system was in, why not come up with something small? It would be nice to get anyone's feedback on this idea.
• Time-based - Just like EVE online, you set a skill to train, and wait, even while offline. This isn't a bad system, but I would prefer something a little more interactive. And why not just have both? Maybe you can set a skill to train before you log out and your character can study it while you're offline. Things like hunting, mining, fishing, etc could even collect a few resources or cash at the same time.