• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees
• 7. Warstorm

As I left off, I wanted to create a turn-based strategy game on the web with an interesting setting. I was pondering what sort of setting hadn’t been mined out and thought of Counter-Strike, by many measures the most popular online multiplayer game.

In Counter-Strike you are on a small squad (3-8 players, tournament size is 5) against another squad of players, one team terrorists and one team counter-terrorists. It’s a fast-paced first-person shooter (FPS) with deep tactical play as teams attempt to complete or prevent objectives like planting a bomb in a particular place on the map or escorting hostages to an exit point.

In most FPS games your character is heavily armored and can survive lots of punishment before dying. Counter-Strike defined itself by using real weapons that kill in a few or often one shot, so players have to have fast reflexes to succeed in a firefight and execute tactics well to ensure they’re in a firefight they can win. Or, better, aren’t in a firefight at all and have snuck up behind an oblivious enemy. I enjoy the way game calls upon a wide range of skills, but I don’t play it much myself because I’m not fast enough for the combat.

Setting is a funny thing: a person might have loved the Matrix but broadly assert “Oh, I don’t like sci-fi” and leave a game’s website at the first sight of a spaceship. Fantasy games are an overwhelming part of the market because potential players reliably don’t automatically disregard them and they open up a lot of design possibilities that a modern setting wouldn’t (eg. modern settings don’t have teleportation or healing spells, which are really handy for getting characters together and prepared to play).

Counter-Strike chose its setting and extracted mechanics from it to create an enduring game. When I considered the idea of a turn-based tactical game with counter-terrorists — no, better: secret agents — I realized it could solve a lot of my design problems as well.

Instead of slugest combat, most characters would use ranged weapons that could incapacitate or kill in a shot or two. The map isn’t just a pretty backdrop, picking lines of sight and areas of engagement is essential. Players can compete in deliberate missions instead of preying on each other. By maintaining a base of operations, players can have the long continuity that draws them back to the site with short gameplay sessions whenever they’d like to do more than wait a few hours for a trade boat to arrive.

I started designing in earnest. Next: the classic game X-Com surprises me from 15 years in the past.

Macroing: We are working to address it at its source, but until then we need to enforce our policies. Before we do that we will appeal to players not actually playing the game to log off rather than leaving their character in-game. This will allow more people to be able to enjoy Darkfall instead of unmanned characters taking up server space. If you’re skilling up by not playing the game as it was intended, you will be kicked and repeated offenses will result in a ban.

That last sentence really caught my attention because I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of learning to program. One of the most frustrating things new programmers have to learn is that it doesn’t matter what you want the computer to do, it matters what you tell the computer to do. The difference between the two is called “bugs”.

A computer game’s design shouldn’t be broken if the players have perfect aim, perfect recall, infinite patience for repetitive tasks, instant 24/7 availability, because those are all things they’ll get by using their computer fully. You can try to punish it (as Darkfall is doing), try to detect it (as World of Warcraft and CounterStrike do), try to build a community to police it (as LAN parties do), or try to ignore it (as most small multiplayer games do), but your design will be broken. (Adopting these constraints in the design of a tabletop game hurts as often as it aids, interestingly.)

This is fundamental to creating programs, games, markets, markets, rules, taxes, laws: the system works as you designed it, not as you intended it.

Careful testing can expose the gaps between intention and design, and this is where I find theoretical knowledge becomes practical. The more I read about state machines, parsing, multiplayer mechanics, networking, level design, feedback loops, sociology, database schemas, and a dozen other topics, the better I can predict and the faster I can recognize these problems.