Abstract lectures on the design of game mechanics sandbox projects from the creator of Life is Feudal
In February, a one-day lecture session on the gaming industry was held at the Higher School of Business Informatics, HSE, open to everyone. Teachers of the Gaming Internet Projects Management program and invited experts shared their experiences with the guests. We offer to your attention a summary and video from the lecture of Bitbox CEO and technical director, creator of the popular game Life is Feudal: Your Own, Vladimir Piskunov .
Life is Feudal - a series of domestic computer games in the medieval setting, developed by Bitbox Ltd. Based on their own projects - Life is Feudal: Your Own and Life is Feudal: MMO, Bitbox Ltd expands the franchise, acting as a publisher for other games, such as Forest Village from the developer MindIllusion. Life is Feudal is a sandbox game and it is about this genre that will be discussed in the lecture.
Sandbox is a sandbox. When people far from the industry ask what sandbox games are, I give a simple example from the games we all played in childhood. There is a plastic Chinese castle with turrets and gates, multicolored. You can lower or raise the gate, put the soldiers there and everything. It can be said, ordinary corridor games: shooters, quests - it does not matter. Even if they have any branches, they are static.
')
Sandbox is a constructor from which you can do anything. This is a fantasy based gameplay. This has both pros and cons.
Plus: the gameplay is virtually unlimited. You can make yourself the gameplay that you want.
Minus: not everyone is ready to play like that. Many people want to relax, not to include fantasy, they want to be led.
The next degree of sandboxing is a multiplayer sandbox. When to all the above mechanics, regardless of their degree, multiplayer interaction is added.
You have a lot of people whom you do not put in any framework. For example, you do not create a guild horde alliance, artificially driving people into this framework. People are free to participate in the guild life or not to participate, join the guild, which consists of 1000 people or 10. These guilds have completely free relations between themselves: they can declare wars to each other and end them, build alliances, lead espionage and so on. Freedom of political relations creates metagaming, and hardcore players like it very much.
Minecraft is a hit game and 100% sandbox.
Dwarf fortress
Garry's mod
Arma 3
Life is Feudal to some extent similar to this game, since we have a melee simulator. Arma 3 is a shooter, but, suddenly, also with a lot of sandbox mechanics: technology, landscape change, city change, gameplay, detailed detailing and mod support.
1. Freedom to the players! If you want to make a good sandbox game, the more you give them freedom, the more they will like it. This is clearly not the largest audience. But the niche is good, so, I think, if you sell 100,000 copies for $ 30 in the first month, you are unlikely to be upset.
Examples of how players modify Life is Feudal. If we forbade them something, all this would not exist, which means there would be less fun and the game would be less sandboxed.
2. Feel free to direct. Freedom is good, but if there are some guidelines, you will only be grateful for that. That is, you should not force players to go along a certain corridor, but if they see a free field, they will not know where to go. And if there are a couple of paths on this field, they will gently guide the player to help him orient. For example, in our system we provoke a cooperative game: the system is made so that players with great difficulty can do the game process completely independently, we encourage them to meet other players and be friends with them. And the players like it: I know that many play with families, big friendly companies, distributing roles among themselves.
3. We also have a karma system. We do not welcome gank and pvp for no reason. That is, if there is an official war or there is a certain enemy, then you can kill him without losing karma. But if you just kill a person running next to you, then you get a minus to karma. With low karma, a character loses points of skill points when dying, it hurts and hurts.
4. Do not forget about Role Play. In sandbox games, this is very important, because when creating your own mechanics, your own gameplay, the player cannot leave a certain lora / background. If he built a house, he immediately begins to fantasize about who he is and what he is doing here. Here the role play begins and, depending on the player, he can be thought out up to the tenth generation of all his relatives, or be a brief story that he tells other players, and they also welcome this. The more mechanics you have for role play, the more opportunities for character customization you make, the more players will like it.
In the screenshot, the point is that there is a bug in the game that you can carry a spear through the wall and vdar them.
5. Do not leave holes. Anything that can be broken will be broken! The more mechanics you have that go out of the corridor and the combinations of what can work with, the more bugs you can have. It’s impossible to protect oneself from everyone at once, but it needs to be planned. It is also very important to respond to feedback from the players and fix everything as quickly as possible.
6. Balance is important. But immersion and / or realism are often more important! This conclusion I made from my own experience. I made a well-balanced system of skills, where there were metaclasses. There were metaclasses, the progression of one skill after another. For example, to pump a bow, you had to study throwing, then leather armor, then pump a crossbow, and only then a bow. The players constantly asked “Why?”. This was necessary in order to balance the class and the counterclass. As a result, we left this system and did something more logical and understandable for the players.
7. Modification (mods) is also a fan! And at the same time, the modifications are:
There are many games that come out of mods. For example, DayZ, Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike. If your game has the ability to modify, this is a big plus.
The ability to succeed in indie games is a good and original game without a marketing budget, which takes its gameplay exactly, sandbox will help you a lot. Another advantage of sandbox over other games is the lack of huge costs for art. That is, as in the same LEGO : you made a dozen different cubes, and then the player himself will be able to build anything from them. A great example is Minecraft with a 16x16 texture and a hundred types of blocks from which players mold everything. Therefore, if you have only a good programmer and a good game designer, there is a chance to make a game that will go in, be popular and lift yourself up organically. Rimworld , which sold 175,000 copies in half a month, was made in one couple of years by one person. That is, this is a real opportunity to do something and release without a publisher and the outside.
We have made and released a successful game for 3 years without any experience. When we launched the early alpha, there were 13 of us. In 2010, I made a post on gamedev.ru, then I collected the backbone of the team. At that moment I spent part of my salary on motivational bonuses for the first employees. In the summer of 2011, we created a working demonstration of the concept of the game, featuring such game mechanics as real-time multiplayer, terraforming and the creation of objects. Later with this, I found a local investor through “acquaintances of acquaintances" and received $ 500,000 for 3 years. This amount we paid for the first 49 hours of sales.
If you want to personally attend the new open lectures on the gaming industry, then on April 1, we invite you to Sergei Zykov's open lecture on April Fool's Day in games . On April 17, training begins on our weekly program on the basics of game development, join us !
And on May 17 we will have a virtual reality conference with costume testing for full immersion in VR, reports all day long, sweepstakes, cosplay, showcases of VR projects in games, real estate, attractions and much more. Details and registration link .
Life is Feudal - a series of domestic computer games in the medieval setting, developed by Bitbox Ltd. Based on their own projects - Life is Feudal: Your Own and Life is Feudal: MMO, Bitbox Ltd expands the franchise, acting as a publisher for other games, such as Forest Village from the developer MindIllusion. Life is Feudal is a sandbox game and it is about this genre that will be discussed in the lecture.
What are sandbox games?
Sandbox is a sandbox. When people far from the industry ask what sandbox games are, I give a simple example from the games we all played in childhood. There is a plastic Chinese castle with turrets and gates, multicolored. You can lower or raise the gate, put the soldiers there and everything. It can be said, ordinary corridor games: shooters, quests - it does not matter. Even if they have any branches, they are static.
')
Sandbox is a constructor from which you can do anything. This is a fantasy based gameplay. This has both pros and cons.
Plus: the gameplay is virtually unlimited. You can make yourself the gameplay that you want.
Minus: not everyone is ready to play like that. Many people want to relax, not to include fantasy, they want to be led.
Degree sandboxing (the higher it is, the more it is in the game)
Multiplayer Sandbox
The next degree of sandboxing is a multiplayer sandbox. When to all the above mechanics, regardless of their degree, multiplayer interaction is added.
You have a lot of people whom you do not put in any framework. For example, you do not create a guild horde alliance, artificially driving people into this framework. People are free to participate in the guild life or not to participate, join the guild, which consists of 1000 people or 10. These guilds have completely free relations between themselves: they can declare wars to each other and end them, build alliances, lead espionage and so on. Freedom of political relations creates metagaming, and hardcore players like it very much.
Examples of sandbox games:
Minecraft is a hit game and 100% sandbox.
- At the moment, the standard 3D multiplayer sandbox games
- Full atomic sandbox with many modifications
- Acquired by Microsoft for $ 2.5 billion.
- When we started our game, I was more or less calm that there would be an audience for it, because Minecraft had already come out, and it was obvious that the sandbox had gone down with a bang.
Dwarf fortress
- Single player sandbox with the generation of the world, background, mythology, etc.
- The maximum level of gameplay detail at the moment
- Rimworld - partial clone sold 175,000 copies in a fortnight at $ 30
- Dwarf Fortress has been making 2 brothers for 10 years. They pay great attention to realism and detail. When someone hits your dwarf, this blow is calculated. Weapons can get into the armor, pierce it, the litter, skin, muscles and get stuck in the bones, and based on this damage is calculated, the wound, how long everything will heal, whether a blood trail will remain, whether the cat will lick this blood ... they generate prehistory, mythology, and so on.
Garry's mod
- Multiplayer physical sandbox
- Great gameplay and creativity
- Greater virality due to the possibility of “fooling around” (similar to Goat Simulator)
- 11+ million copies sold since 2006
- This game is to some extent a classic. I would call it a more “Stem” sandbox, because there you can make a retard smile in the face editor, hook a cow to a catapult and break it into a house and the like.
Arma 3
- Multiplayer Military Sandbox
- Absolutization realistic
- Significant focus on modification (from the Arma series went DayZ)
- Since 2013, 1.6 million copies have been sold (price $ 60- $ 40)
Life is Feudal to some extent similar to this game, since we have a melee simulator. Arma 3 is a shooter, but, suddenly, also with a lot of sandbox mechanics: technology, landscape change, city change, gameplay, detailed detailing and mod support.
The main axioms of game design sandbox games:
1. Freedom to the players! If you want to make a good sandbox game, the more you give them freedom, the more they will like it. This is clearly not the largest audience. But the niche is good, so, I think, if you sell 100,000 copies for $ 30 in the first month, you are unlikely to be upset.
Examples of how players modify Life is Feudal. If we forbade them something, all this would not exist, which means there would be less fun and the game would be less sandboxed.
2. Feel free to direct. Freedom is good, but if there are some guidelines, you will only be grateful for that. That is, you should not force players to go along a certain corridor, but if they see a free field, they will not know where to go. And if there are a couple of paths on this field, they will gently guide the player to help him orient. For example, in our system we provoke a cooperative game: the system is made so that players with great difficulty can do the game process completely independently, we encourage them to meet other players and be friends with them. And the players like it: I know that many play with families, big friendly companies, distributing roles among themselves.
3. We also have a karma system. We do not welcome gank and pvp for no reason. That is, if there is an official war or there is a certain enemy, then you can kill him without losing karma. But if you just kill a person running next to you, then you get a minus to karma. With low karma, a character loses points of skill points when dying, it hurts and hurts.
4. Do not forget about Role Play. In sandbox games, this is very important, because when creating your own mechanics, your own gameplay, the player cannot leave a certain lora / background. If he built a house, he immediately begins to fantasize about who he is and what he is doing here. Here the role play begins and, depending on the player, he can be thought out up to the tenth generation of all his relatives, or be a brief story that he tells other players, and they also welcome this. The more mechanics you have for role play, the more opportunities for character customization you make, the more players will like it.
In the screenshot, the point is that there is a bug in the game that you can carry a spear through the wall and vdar them.
5. Do not leave holes. Anything that can be broken will be broken! The more mechanics you have that go out of the corridor and the combinations of what can work with, the more bugs you can have. It’s impossible to protect oneself from everyone at once, but it needs to be planned. It is also very important to respond to feedback from the players and fix everything as quickly as possible.
6. Balance is important. But immersion and / or realism are often more important! This conclusion I made from my own experience. I made a well-balanced system of skills, where there were metaclasses. There were metaclasses, the progression of one skill after another. For example, to pump a bow, you had to study throwing, then leather armor, then pump a crossbow, and only then a bow. The players constantly asked “Why?”. This was necessary in order to balance the class and the counterclass. As a result, we left this system and did something more logical and understandable for the players.
7. Modification (mods) is also a fan! And at the same time, the modifications are:
- Additional level of sandboxing at the meta level
- Your game development direction
- Creating an alternative gameplay that suits the players.
There are many games that come out of mods. For example, DayZ, Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike. If your game has the ability to modify, this is a big plus.
The ability to succeed in indie games is a good and original game without a marketing budget, which takes its gameplay exactly, sandbox will help you a lot. Another advantage of sandbox over other games is the lack of huge costs for art. That is, as in the same LEGO : you made a dozen different cubes, and then the player himself will be able to build anything from them. A great example is Minecraft with a 16x16 texture and a hundred types of blocks from which players mold everything. Therefore, if you have only a good programmer and a good game designer, there is a chance to make a game that will go in, be popular and lift yourself up organically. Rimworld , which sold 175,000 copies in half a month, was made in one couple of years by one person. That is, this is a real opportunity to do something and release without a publisher and the outside.
We have made and released a successful game for 3 years without any experience. When we launched the early alpha, there were 13 of us. In 2010, I made a post on gamedev.ru, then I collected the backbone of the team. At that moment I spent part of my salary on motivational bonuses for the first employees. In the summer of 2011, we created a working demonstration of the concept of the game, featuring such game mechanics as real-time multiplayer, terraforming and the creation of objects. Later with this, I found a local investor through “acquaintances of acquaintances" and received $ 500,000 for 3 years. This amount we paid for the first 49 hours of sales.
You can see the full version of Vladimir’s speech and answers to the questions of the hall following its results in the video of the lecture:
If you want to personally attend the new open lectures on the gaming industry, then on April 1, we invite you to Sergei Zykov's open lecture on April Fool's Day in games . On April 17, training begins on our weekly program on the basics of game development, join us !
And on May 17 we will have a virtual reality conference with costume testing for full immersion in VR, reports all day long, sweepstakes, cosplay, showcases of VR projects in games, real estate, attractions and much more. Details and registration link .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/325278/
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