Civilisation V on sale this weekend only for USD $48.67

In Australia.

We have dollar parity with the US, but for some reason this news doesn't appear to have reached 2K Games.

Good game

I've just been interviewed by ABC2's Good Game. Thanks to Ben Abraham for the shout out.

More details to come.

Angband Experimental Fiction

I shared this via Google, but it really is good enough to justify its own post.

"Angband, or His 55 Desires" is an experimental fiction piece by Mike Meginnis.

My Pyro Life (part two)

Valve has a habit of deleting old posts from the TF2 forums, so I'm preserving a thread I started here for posterity. You can see the original thread here.

Reliability vs. Opportunity

A mistake a lot of people make when talking about weapon balance is the difference between reliability vs. opportunity, and these are concepts which apply particularly to Pyros. An opportunistic weapon is 'Last week I was in situation x with weapon y and I did z to get a kill.'. A reliable weapon is 'Every time I get into situation x with weapon y and I do z to get a kill.' I'm wary that a lot of balance discussions around the pyro degenerate into lists of 'no he can't do this' vs. 'yes he can'. What I want to hear are arguments of the form 'yes he can every time', not just yes he can.

An example: A Pyro is a reliable spy checker, because he can set alight a spy every time with his flamethrower, even if that Spy is cloaked or invisible. A Pyro is an opportunistic rocket reflector, because he cannot reflect rockets every time. But note you can modify this statement to say 'A Pyro is a reliable reflector of long range rockets, because he can reflect rockets fired from a distance every time'. So it is possible that situational use can turn an opportunistic weapon into a reliable weapon (e.g. airblasts for environmental kills on the bottom bridge of Double Cross). The problem with situational use is that it makes weapons map dependent.

Hitscan weapons are intrinsically more reliable than projectile weapons, because they only take into account player skill - whereas a projectile weapon is dependent on predictive factors which are only partially under the control of the player. Note that this is not always the case: assuming perfect accuracy, the Soldier's Rocket Launcher is reliable at inflicting some damage up to x HU away from the soldier for an enemy moving at 100% speed: the limiting factor is the speed of the rocket times the width of an enemies's hitbox / the target's maximum movement speed (300 HU per second). The Soldier is also able to convert near misses into reliable damage by bouncing enemies into a predictable kinetic path, which he can follow up with one or more additional rockets for reliable damage.

Juggling enemies is a clear example where skill can be used to escalate the payoff of a particular weapon in a reliable fashion. The Sniper Rifle is another example: by aiming for a smaller, harder to hit target, the Sniper can triple the damage this already reliable hit scan weapon can produce. The additional damage that the Sniper Rifle does with a headshot doesn't make the Sniper rifle more reliable, but it is a payoff for increasing your skill level with that weapon, and through increased skill you can make headshots more reliably.

The Pyro feels underpowered and frustrating, because many of the Pyro weapons are opportunistic not reliable, and I've tried to with the testable side grades file to modify the designs to make them more reliable.

Quote:

Pyro starts with 200 health instead of 175 health. Degreaser -25 health

Valve have tried buffing the health of the Pyro previously, with the +50 health bonus for using the Backburner. I'm suggesting a less severe buff, but increasing the survival rate of the Pyro - particularly the Backburner Pyro - is high on my list of requirements. Since I'm balancing these changes against the Degreaser - Shotgun - Axtinguisher Pyro, the complement to increasing the Pyro health is nerfing this bonus on the Degreaser. It also helps distinguish the Flamethrower from the Degreaser more clearly (more health & afterburn against faster weapon switches).

My main motivation for the 200 hp is that complex, and at the moment overly one-sided, balance between the Soldier and Pyro. At the moment, the Soldier dominates with rockets, and without the Degreaser, the Soldier will have the initiative on switching to Shotgun. To compensate, I feel that the Pyro must clearly dominate Shotgun vs. Shotgun. With 175 hp, this is too close to call, with your superiority speed and maneuverability, balanced against the Soldier's superior hit points. Yes, the Soldier will have lost hp rocket jumping, but you will have lost some by being edged or with mistimed reflects. Starting with 200 hp is an attempt to push the Pyro towards dominating this phase of the encounter.

Another approach suggested recently was giving the Pyro innate explosive resistance. I've toyed with this idea before, but decided you want to encourage Soldiers to try to kill you with an opportunistic rocket, precisely so that you can get the chance to use reflects. If every Soldier switches to Shotgun when they see you, you will lose this, in favour of a Shotgun fight you are less likely to win than with the hp buff I've proposed.

Quote:

Backburner On kill: Guaranteed criticals for 3 seconds +100% ammunition consumption

My first reaction to editing the items_games.txt was giving the Backburner back the air blast, but increasing the ammunition cost. I'm not alone in suggesting this, but testing with the Airburner pointed out one significant flaw with this design: you rarely run out of ammunition, because you rarely live long enough if you're on the front line air blasting back rockets. The other flaw is that the weapons merge into each other: the Flamethrower Pyro already plays like a gimped Degreaser Pyro, without giving the Backburner the only ability which distinguishes him.

Is it possible to make an intelligent play style for the Backburner? I think it is, and a mention in the Heavy forums of kill chaining using the KGB suggested the above change. The difference between a regular Backburner pyro and the buffed Backburner I've suggested, is how a beginning Pyro approaches the ambush. A regular BB relies on the opportunity of someone facing the wrong way when they approach, falling back on spamming the group so everyone is alight and the afterburn has some effect while they respawn. This buffed BB helps you focus on getting the next kill; because as soon as you do, you can reliably kill chain through the rest of the nearby enemies. In terms of balance, 3 seconds of guaranteed criticals is no more powerful than silent backstabs, and in a Medic - Heavy pair, the overhealed Heavy still has enough time to turn and kill you before you can take him out with the criticals the dead Medic gives you.

The +100% ammunition consumption is designed to discourage W+M1, and make the Backburner Pyro actually run the risk of running out of ammunition. But didn't I just state that ammunition consumption didn't apply to Backburner Pyros? It does with the critical buff. You will find you run the real risk of having to switch to your secondary, because you actually are capable of killing a cluster of multiple enemies in quick succession using your primary without getting killed in return.

Quote:

Flare Gun +50% burn damage. Minicrits become crits which means you crit against burning targets at all ranges.

My initial concept of buffing the base flare gun damage worked really well, with one important exception. I buffed the flare gun to 66% additonal damage, that is 50 base damage, 67 minicrit damage, 150 critical damage, and it didn't feel at all overpowering. You get flare hits on targets at long range infrequently enough that the critical damage feels like an appropriate reward, and the increase in spike damage from 90 hp to 150 isn't that noticeable because the vanilla flare gun takes out most of the low hp classes with that hit anyway - it is only soldiers and heavies who are at higher risk from the high base damage flare gun. More importantly, you start to get to useful DPS territory in the short and medium range, and the minicrit becomes a more meaningful spike, but mostly because the base damage is that much higher.

But there is one significant problem with a flare gun that does 50 hp base damage: it is feels too effective against sentries. But why? A 50 hp flare is less effective than a 90 hp rocket, and Soldiers can fire rockets more frequently and less accurately to take sentries out. But bumping the flare gun base damage brings the flaregun to within 30% of the effectiveness of rockets. [Edit: Removed text about ramp down. As several people have pointed out below, buildings are unaffected by rampdown].

Instead, I've tried to make the Flare gun at least justifiable, by bumping the afterburn damage and allowing crits against burning targets to apply at all ranges, so it is a useful alternative to a puff and sting axtinguisher or shotgun attack, while having longer range utility.

Quote:

Homewrecker +40% sentry damage resistance

What is so noticeable about this homewrecker buff, is that it is not actually as useful as it looks. Sure, you get effectively as many hit points against sentries as a heavy - the problem is that you don't have the damage output of a heavy at anything except point blank range, so taking down a sentry nest is much harder. The homewrecker buff is therefore to try to give you a bit more survivability in a situation where you end up with engineers aggressively using minisentries, or to rush a poorly positioned level 2/3 sentry and come off not quite as badly as you would otherwise have done.

tl;dr

These are design notes. They are notes about design for people who like reading.

My Pyro Life (part one)

Valve has a habit of deleting old posts from the TF2 forums, so I'm preserving a thread I started here for posterity. You can see the original thread here.

I'm a pub player, not a pro and one of those folks who are in love with the Pyro. I main Engineer/Spy/Pyro with a side of Medic, but of all of them, the Pyro is the most fun to play when I'm doing well...

How I play the pyro and how successfully depends on which map. The Pyro feels balanced on the Arena and KOTH maps where the smaller spaces that play to the strength of the Pyro and increased deadliness of afterburn - even with all the afterburn removal effects in play. Here I'll go Degreaser-Shotgun-Axtinguisher for the most part, and Degreaser-Shotgun-Powerjack if I'm feeling like a change.

The Pyro is great fun only on CTF and CP maps with lots of verticals or opportunities for environmental kills: Double Cross, Eqypt, Badlands. Maps like Well and Granary are playable, provided I'm getting my shotgun kills and reflects right, but I need to be playing with a pretty relaxed pub crowd before I'll consider it. I'll definitely skip Pyro on Well and Granary if there is any competent enemy engineering going on.

Yukon is a special case, as is Watchtower. These are the only maps where I'll switch to Flare Gun - because of the long gently curving corridors and slopes and lack of sniper nests - and I'll stay at mid range and use reflects to counter soldiers and work on picking targets off with flares.

On AD, PL, PLR maps, where there is a defined front to the game, playing a Pyro gets much more complicated. I've got three choices on these maps. Firstly, I can keep the Degreaser-Shotgun combo, stay near the front and harass and reflect. This is generally unsatisfying, because I'll achieve little, and tend to die in the spam. The other option, short of changing class, is to switch to Backburner-Shotgun-Homewrecker. This is an interesting combination: because it paradoxically forces you to hang back when the front is static or being pushed forward or back. You can't be effective on the front lines with a Backburner - you'll just die, so instead I hang back and spam shotgun and get lucky with the odd de-sap if an enemy spy manages to take out a friendly engineer.

What I'm waiting for is the front to either hit an ambush spot such as exiting the tunnel on Badwater, where the Backburner comes into play, or for the front to "break down": where we've either killed enough players (on defense) that most of them are heading back from respawn, or we've just captured a point and more paths have opened up (on attack). Whether the Backburner is more useful than the Degreaser in these open situations is debatable, but if I end up behind the enemy front after its reformed, then it is highly effective.

A key indicator on whether the Backburner can be useful is if you have more enemy heavies than soldiers on an AD, PL, PLR map. A heavy will kill you in 'open play' if you have the BB: his spin up time will finish you off before you can burn him with the flamethrower, unless you can hit him point blank from behind, but on these maps his attention should be on killing your compatriots in front of him, not you sneaking up behind him.

The Degreaser Pyro is IMO balanced with the map caveats I've given - you just won't get kills with your primary weapon, except for environmental kills, with the odd reflection thrown in. At the moment, there is no point switching to Flamethrower, and the loss of the airblast you get with the Backburner makes this weapon feel a lot more one dimensional and only suits certain maps or defensive positions as I've discussed.

Since the Polycount pack, I've also switched back to the Shotgun after an extended period of using the Flare Gun, and much like an ex-smoker, I feel the need to point out how inferior the Flare Gun is in almost all situations. The best possible situation to use the Flaregun - where you are consistently hitting burning opponents at long range with a shot every 2 seconds - does a maximum of 51 DPS including afterburn - that is, 20% worse than the short to medium range DPS of any other weapon except the L'Etranger. Sure, damage ramp down means you are doing more damage at this range than most other weapons and you'll end up occasionally getting lucky 2 shot kills on the 125 hp and 150 hp classes, but there is a class for fighting at long range which can one shot any of these classes a lot more reliably, and you give up the ability to be at all effective for the 2.3 seconds you need to rush a target from the edge of medium range to flame thrower distance (assuming they don't move).

I suspect people love the the Flare Gun is that it feels really effective - a chunky plastic design, and satisfying animation and sound fx - but since switching, I get two to three times the kills with a Shotgun than with flares on most maps. In fact, I'm almost Shotgun primary, flicking to the Degreaser only if someone gets in flame thower range, or I need to do a reflect.

I particularly have a problem with the decision to have the Flare Gun do minicrits to burning opponents at short to medium range. There are only three situations where a minicrit on a burning opponent helps you: if the extra 11 hp damage will allow you to kill someone in the next 2 seconds, if every possible target up to 120 HU further away is on already fire, or every nonburning enemy is standing next to a Pyro who can airblast the flames off. In any other situation, you are better off setting a new target on fire for for a minimum of 12 HP afterburn damage over the flare gun reload time, instead of 11 HP from the minicrit.

The Axtinguisher with the Degreaser will win you fights, but I'm finding myself more drawn to the Powerjack at the moment, because of the opportunity you get to chain kills against lighter classes while not having to find health to recover from the inevitable damage you sustain in close combat. The Homewrecker again is strictly defensive, or where your Engineers are having problems with incoming spies.

tl; dr

I play Pyro, but there's only 1 effective primary, and 1 map limited primary; 1 effective secondary and 1 map limited secondary; 2 effective melee weapons and 1 map limited melee weapon. My instinct is to try to balance the less useful weapons up.

The key to balancing games is making a change and playing with that change, then revising based on feedback - a model of game design that Valve have mastered. We as a community should be copying that process and adopting it - there's no point filling the forums with unlocks and arguments about relative power levels without any proof one way or the other that the idea is good. And a DPS chart isn't proof - in game testing and server logs are.

Luckily it is relatively simple to modify the weapons - done here by editing the items_game.txt file - and testing the changes by playing in offline mode. This means we can start to have this kind of discussion without relying on Valve giving us access to an open beta. It is not possible to test every kind of suggestion this way - advanced movement being an excellent example - and I'm limiting myself to not changing any other file at this stage; just to see if the process is worth doing and whether people on this forum find it at all useful. If it is not useful, and no one else feels like contributing to this effort, then I've not wasted a huge amount of time.

Magicka

Just a quick couple of notes:

1. Much to my (lack of) surprise, a game where you can mix spells and hurt yourself with them plays really well.
2. Reading the reviews so far, it sounds like I may have been moonlighting on the development while I slept...

Release early, release often.

Unangband forked

Yesterday between 16:25 and 16:33. R-branch 2.51 kg. S-branch 2.34 kg. Mother and babies are all well.

[Edit: Apparently I was being too subtle...]

Designing a Magic System Redux - Part Four (Pick any two)

You are encouraged to read parts one, two and three of this article series, and are strongly encouraged to read the original Designing a Magic System series of articles if you have not already done so. It turns out I had this article sitting in draft for about six months, so some of the Team Fortress 2 figures are a little out of date.

One thing I've tried to play with in Unangband is alternative character development models to the standard RPG tropes: experience and levels. Not that you'd ever guess by playing the game which appears hugely focused on level increase through experience gained from killing monsters. But a high level character in any Angband variant is incredibly fragile without the equipment that they will have gained along the way, which makes Angband much more about the correct selection and management of discovered items in the inventory, than it is about level gain or monster slaying.

I've discussed previously the differences between skills and classes, and some of the general disadvantages of each approach. I've also gone into detail about how to design a magic system, and how it may be worthwhile looking at differing systems of progression, without going into detail about the implementation details.

I want to talk about these details here - taking two specific progression designs from Unangband and give you the reasoning behind each of them; with specific regard to making the choices interesting.

The weakness of a lot of progression systems is that the choices are uninteresting. Take how most RPG skill systems work: where you buy skills from one or more talent trees using a pool of points which increases the longer you play the game. The choices in most of these systems are not exclusive, and instead merely become an ordering decision, that is, if you buy skill A, you can always buy skill B later on, and there is no difference ultimately in whether you choose A first or B first, provided you get both.

This problem is exacerbated in when the cost of skills deeper in the tree escalates - the Civilisation series of games being a good example - because you can skip buying one of the more expensive skills to effectively 'catch up' on all the cheaper skills you elected not to purchase previously.

The effect in both instances is that the characters end up being homogeneous midway through their progression - and only start to differentiate themselves at the higher level skills, instead of through out the talent tree.

You may argue that a particular system has skills which work in synergy, so that it is always worth picking skill ABCD in sequence, instead of EFGH, because the skills combined are worth more than e.g. ABGH. But in that instance, you're actually presenting less choice to the player, because ABGH users will be beaten by ABCD or EFGH users, so that despite having 8 skills in this example, there are only two real choices.

You may also argue that a particular system has pre-requisites so that to get skill C requires that you have learned skills A and B, E requires A and C, and so on, so that the skills at the tips of the tree are entirely dependent on which skills you have chosen earlier. But by using pre-requisites, you're again restricting the range of possible choices to only be meaningful at the tips of the talent tree, as opposed to choices further up the trunk.

There are several ways to avoid this. The first is by either using slots or sockets, so that the player can only choose a set number of skills to equip out of the possible talent trees. The inventory system in Angband is an example of using 22 slots to carry all possible discovered items, and the equipment system an example of using sockets to carry a single weapon, shield, amulet, light source, 2 rings and so on. A particular socket may hold weak, middle or powerful skills, so that you are forced to pick only one of the set of possible skills of each grade.

Take Team Fortress 2 as an example. At the time of writing, the sniper has 2 possible primary weapons, 3 secondary weapons, and 2 melee weapons. Using only 7 weapons, we have 12 possible sniper combinations because of the division of weapons into these 3 exclusive buckets. And if we could choose 3 items to carry, from 7 items total, there would be (7x6x5)/3! = 35 choices in all. Whereas a talent tree of 7 skills from, for example, 100 Rogues, would have at most 3 branches of up to 3 depth. Assuming a similar 3 selection limit, and approximating the possible choices by using a combinations with repetition counting approach, there can only be (5x4x3)/3! = 10 choices.

In general, if you have lots of skills and don't allow the player a large number of selections, you are better choosing a slot or socket approach. If you do allow a large number of selections, relative to the total number of skills available, the analysis of choices available in the talent tree by using a combinations with repetition approach breaks down, and you are instead limited by the depth of each talent tree which at best behaves like the slot approach. The socket approach has degenerate cases where the talent tree behaves better, but in general is far easier to design.

The second way to avoid this is with a sliding window approach, which is what I use in Unangband for developing abilities for familiars. A sliding window allows you at best only a subset of choices at any particular time, and periodically the window slides, so that early choices are no longer available, and later choices become available. With familiars, you can choose a new ability every two levels, and every four levels the window slides 10 abilities further on into the list of possible abilities. Since the window is also 10 abilities big (but in general does not have to be the same size as the slide distance), effectively you can choose 2 abilities out of 10 different abilities every four levels. This gives you approximately (10*9)^12 choices over the course of the game, at the cost of designing 120 different familiar abilities and putting them in an approximate order of power.

(I would hate to have to design talent trees containing 120 skills to give the same variety of choice.)

I could, of course, provide far more choices by allowing the player to pick from any of the 120 familiar abilities every time they advanced two levels (the slot approach), but aside from the game balance issues of allowing some high level monster abilities from the start, there is the real consideration that the human mind is limited in its ability to comprehend more than a limited set of choices, and breaks down its rational decision making process if presented with too much choice at once.

This limit also suggests an upper bound for the number of available talent trees to choose from, as well as the number of slots or sockets and the number of choices to be presented per socket. A lot of this is avoided in Angband because you only encounter so many items at once, and must discard choices that you've no room for in your inventory or equipment.

First Age Angband RPG

For those Tolkien buffs out there, you may be interested in reading about Antoine's First Age RPG.

As far as RPG designs go, I love his choice of primary statistics.

The Quest for Quests: Part Nine (Interlude)

You may want to start this series with part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven or eight.

I'm going to take another brief pause in this somewhat interrupted article series to point out a dark tower on the horizon, wreathed in storm clouds, through which wretched things take wing. That is our ultimate destination: the tower of the end game. Before it, we must pass through two great lands: the first, a pile of haphazardly placed blocks of rock and earth, through which water and lava and sand spill, fall and lap; the second, the rolling hills and forests and villages filled with warring medieval kingdoms. You know these places as Dwarf Fortress (or perhaps Minecraft), and Mount & Blade, and both have 'solved' many of the problems of quests that I have highlighted so far.

(The perceptive of you may notice the glint of recent flash of steel, from a hardy duo trapped somewhere in the wilderness before you).

Within a few minutes of playing Mount & Blade, I could feel the tingle in my fingertips of a game that does everything right that I've been writing towards with this series. Trading system instead of fetch quests. Check. Constantly changing world governed by an underlying set of rules that changes the environment while you play. Check. A faction system instead of quest givers. Check. Metagame (conquer the kingdom) which sits above the primary game (Pirates! plus first person sword fighting). Emergent complexity, whatever that means. Check.

So should I lay down my quill and let this quest rest?

Luckily not, because as one apt Rock Paper Shotgun so evocatively writes:

Regardless you do need some fixed content, otherwise everything ends up like the repetitive and dull wandering of Mount and Blade’s mid game.

That is because Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress and Mount & Blade are all missing that one essential landmark of any great game: that dark tower of the endgame which you can see in the distance. I use the tower as a metaphor, but one of the greatest games, Half-Life 2, makes it literal, a beacon that you can see from almost anywhere inside and out City 17. Your endgame must cut through the moment like a dark stained blade, poisoning every decision the player makes with the final flaw 'what are the consequences'?

For many games, the path to the endgame is easy: Angband has stairs which lead only up to retreat, or down to advance, Mario is always moving to the right. The fight before the finish must be the crescendo. Games with fixed quest content end almost fitfully, because you have consumed all that they can deliver. Dwarf Fortress at least has that dull blade of finality 'Your dwarves have dug too deep.' that mercifully finishes off a fortress that groans with the fat of success, as opposed to the glorious bright eyed failures fallen before it.

The end game ironically is for the most part a given. The pieces you have moved into place, the choices and sacrifices that have built up to it usually come down to a single decision point or few and the best designed puzzle games leave resolution of success or failure to the last possible moment with all sides (in a multiplayer game) in contention as long as possible. Where the end game shines is not in the stalemate avoiding final dance, but in how its shadow is cast on mid game.

The mid game is where you are forced to implement your plans of how to win. In game where you are not faced by the infinite lego set of Minecraft, not everything is possible. There are time constraints, resource constraints, skill constraints, mutually exclusive decisions which force you to take a but not b, a battery of tests which wear down what resources you have available, wastage where your toil amounts to nothing, a slippery slope towards inevitability, set backs outside of your control, gateways through which you can pass one way only, entropy, a rising tide that pulls you in one direction, checkpoints which require minimum standards of you, irreversible decisions, stalemates, fatigue, failure states which trap you into restarting, or worse: mulligans, treadmills, grinds, false economies, exploits which encourage bad behaviour, fool's gold, mudflation, Garfield cards, bad designer prisons and gear reversals.

(To avoid linking to TV tropes and losing you, I'm forced to invent my own private lingo to lose you instead. A Garfield card is something that has the same cost as a clearly more useful item - therefore essentially useless. Reference is Magic: the Gathering's designer Richard Garfield who uses this technique. While I have disparaged it previously, I suspect, like many hill climbing algorithms, sometimes you need to move through low value points represented by Garfield cards to get to higher peaks. A bad designer prison is a part of the game where the rules are suddenly and artificially limited. Think of bosses who are immune to abilities you have used previously, for no good reason. A gear reversal is that point in the game where you are stripped of all equipment.)

Without an endgame, most of these are meaningless. To take one example: Chess defines a stalemate as a series of repeated moves and clearly enforces them. A series of repeated moves in Minecraft could be you admiring the same view each morning. You can 'do-over' a building by cutting down another mountain one valley along, but in chess, your mulligans are misconduct.

To be clear: I'm valuing what you might consider a certain kind of game, a certain kind of way of playing games, and a certain kind of player (more than 800,000 of them at last count) will never take issue with Minecraft's unlimited sandbox world. But games without endgames are much more limiting in terms of the types of play they support, and much more limiting in the types of players they satisfy, for all that they promise no limits.

To see why, consider a variant of Minecraft, which has an endgame: to build the highest tower of any player anywhere in the world, and new building block type governed by more sophisticated physics system which requires the player master it to build high above the clouds. Moreover, the ingredients required to build this tower are collected and limited by interaction with a linear narrative, but where you can get enough resources for sandbox play 'readily' if not right at the start (A certain part of the narrative may consist of tutorials to highlight techniques and physics interactions you may not have considered). We'll call this variant World of Goo.

World of Goo lets you participate in sandbox play as much as you desire, as well as more narrative driven play that Minecraft lacks, and which some people express a preference for which never could be fulfilled by Minecraft. In addition, a third type of player plays competitively, min-maxing their way through the narrative and resource acquisition phases to acquire as much of this tower building resource as possible. Another type of competitive player comes up with unique tower building techniques which require less pieces, or excels in specialist league maps, which try to build the towers with the most unique properties using a fixed number of resources.

There is one key decision that this hypothetical World of Goo makes that loses some potential players who are well-served by Minecraft: it limits the total amount of goo available. But the players it loses are only noncompetitive tower builders, who want to build towers over a certain height 'easily'. You could address this by making an unlimited tower building resource available that is distinct for goo, for which players can buy, or grind over time: call this resource hats. I'm not sure if the tower of hats model is the right approach, but it clearly is a popular direction to take.

All other builder types are well catered for by the sandbox that thought experiment World of Goo makes available, because only goo for towers is limited. And competitive tower builders are under served by Minecraft. In particular, Minecraft doesn't cater at all for (for want of a better term) Chinese mother tower builders - to paraphrase the linked article, tower builders whose limits can only be reached by rising to the rigors of strict competitive environments.

My argument is that Chinese mother tower builders are the reason your games need goo and endgame, not just bl0cks and sandboxes. The designers of many games could not possible anticipate the depth to which some games could be played whether they be Chess or Starcraft, and an endless sandbox cannot alone offer compelling enough a reason for a competitive community to emerge to explore these depths. There is one caveat: if the game has a big enough an audience, all things are possible. Team Fortress 2 has surf maps, Star Craft has maps with unlimited resources and Defence of the Ancients, Civilisation IV a menagerie of mods. But all of these examples have a strong end game component, and clearly defined goals, even if they have mutated beyond the intent of the original designers.

(Magnasanti being the artistic vision of one man shredding a game with concrete depth charges).

Forumutterings

There's been some recent argument against and for forums as a medium of exchange between developers and their communities.

I decided against forums (in a tied poll) specifically for Unangband, on the basis there is already a well developed Angband forum community and I didn't want to splinter that base. I'd similarly not have the time committment for moderating an Ascii Dreams forum, but feel free to comment, or head over to Temple of the Roguelike for general roguelike development forum-ness.

I do have some thoughts on the issue, based solely on my recent experience trying to shepherd some changes through the TF2 beta process, but I'll leave these for another time. Instead, I'll offer up the best response I've seen to some of the needless rage and anger on community forums, from Chris King, the lead designer of Victoria 2:

You know I had to go and look at the Civfanatics forum to see how they were taking this new and my God there are some bitter people there. My favourite was as long as Jon stays away from Paradox I’ll be happy. With that in mind I would like to make the following public offer.

Jon, if you are reading this and if you do have some free time, would like to be our special guest programmer on the Hearts of Iron 3 patch?

Source.

Mysterious quality

Anyone care to speculate on the mysterious indie roguelike mentioned at number #7 for the year?

And who J.L. is?