Weekend Design Challenge: Tools
For this challenge, we're going to go a bit meta. This weekend, imagine you're a designer on an MMO project during the planning stages. Your job is to suggest a tool (or a feature for a tool) that will make creating your project easier for you. You have to describe it well enough that the programming team can implement it for you.
My example after the jump.
One of the most basic tools is a level layout tool. A useful feature for that would be the ability to save sets of items to re-use. For example, the ability to save a table full of alchemical-looking equipment that can be put into different places in the world. The ability to define and use these defined collections would speed up a lot of development.
What's your idea? What tool would make your life easier?
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When I worked support, it was always great to be able to see a users computer as they worked, to give me an idea what the problem was. In this case, it was SMS tools called "Remote Assistance", and would let me unobtrusively watch a user as they would cause their specific error to occur.
Take that into the game world. I have worked as (voluntary) support on M59 (Guide and Bard) and on The Realm (yea, I'm old), and maybe others which age has caused me to forget. Sometimes when you're talking to people, it's never really clear what they're explaining. If you could get an unobtrusive viewpoint into the character, as if you were driving it, that would help solve some of those ambiguous bug reports. When I say "unobtrusive", there would have to be checks involved: you could only view, and only with the players permission.
Comment by Fred — 16 December, 2007 @ 2:40 PM
Between bouts of paying employment, I've been known to work on a tool for a browser-based MMO. I'm writing it in Rails, and it allows me to define relationships between skills, actions, buildings, tools, reagents, and products by clicking and dragging. In other words, I can create something called a Forge, declare that you need a Construction skill to build it, that it costs 40 wood and 20 metal, and that it produces shovels when actuated with 1 wood and 2 metal, and that shovels dig up metal at a building called a mine.... and so on, by clicking, dragging, and typing. I'd imagine this would make tweaking the final product really, really easy. If I ever got that far! :)
Comment by Bret — 16 December, 2007 @ 8:38 PM
I'd want a suite of tools to help GMs run live events. One that I actually got working in a basic form in NWN was a system where I had an Orc Lord NPC that would spawn an army in whatever region he was in. It was one NPC that when placed would check which region he was in, and then populate all of the spawn points in that region with groups of orcs chosen at random from a list. Every so often he would respawn fresh forces at any spawn points that had been cleared. What was great about it was how the lords and the regions were completely independent from one another. If you made a new region and put the properly labeled waypoints in it, then the existing NPC would work if spawned in there. If you made a new lord with a new army list, it would work in any of the existing regions. Regions could be defined independently of game zones too, if I remember right.
The practical upshot of this was the DM could spawn a single monster to trigger an orc army invasion on the fly, which would persist until said monster was eliminated.
Sadly all this work was lost when my NWN computer died... never even got it up and running with players.
So yeah, I'd want an event-in-a-can system to help with running live events.
Comment by Vargen — 17 December, 2007 @ 7:42 PM
Hmm. I'm of two minds on this one.
1) A robust encounter scripting system (not designer scripting, in that it has rules, but very full-featured) that allows you to key on "events" that happen during an encounter and make other things happen - for example, mob uses certain spells, mob calls for help, etc. This is used now for "boss" fights and raid encounters but it always seems like it's a custom job. I'd like to see something built in and extensible that can be used for any and all content. Plus for me if it handles mass npc-npc combat as well (I have fond memories of EQ's ring wars).
2) Logging. Logging, logging, and more logging. I've heard countless times from support types in commercial MMOs that the developers hand them a game with hardly anything in the way of logging, which cripples their ability to support customers for whom the game doesn't work quite right. Supportability should be a key internal deliverable for any MMO project. It just makes sense that you want your CSR's job to be easy (so you don't have to have a huge CSR staff and so that your customers are happy and keep playing).
Comment by David (Tal) — 17 December, 2007 @ 10:13 PM
While no amount of handy programs can make game development easier than having a team of staff that have a passion for gaming, I think the best tool would be an in-game support system. There are too many games that require you to do something stupid to report a simple bug in the map, or a player breaking the rules. When I think of games with good support systems, two come to mind:
1) Runescape. As bad as the game is, when it comes to rule abuse, all a witnessing player has to do is click a button, type the name of the abusive player and the developers/wizards will get a log of everything said in the last 60 seconds.
2) Fury. If you wanted to report a glitch in the map there are two great things that make this possible - a location command that tells you your exact position on the map and a screenshot tool built right into the support menu. This allows the developers to instantly pinpoint the location of the glitch and even see it via the screenshot. This eliminates any need to re-create the scenario themselves, and as the screenshot tool is built into the game, it prevents players from manipulating them before submission.
Comment by Auguste Sentinel — 18 December, 2007 @ 1:05 AM