Leland on GitHub

Features:

• Shapes: rectangule, hexagonal (‘circle’), freeform (‘free’)
• Variable hex sizes
• shape() to calculate distance in hexes
• highlight a hex
• set a border on a hex
• color a hex
• add text to a hex
• I swear it used to allow setting a background picture, but I don’t see that functionality so maybe I dreamed it or lost it when I misplaced this code for four years.

Known Issues

The code has ugly styling (tabs, odd spacing, no optional braces) – sorry, I was young(er) and stupid(er).

There’s a fair amount of temporal coupling in there – functions that you can’t call before other functions, etc. I hadn’t heard of the command pattern or closures yet.

There’s a bug in the ‘circle’ shape (that the following code exercises):

 
<?php
 
require 'class_hex_image.php';
 
$radius = 3;
$map = new Hex_image;
$map->set_color('bg', 255, 255, 255);
$map->set_l(20);
$map->set_shape('circle', $radius);
$map->start();
for($x = 1; $x <= $map->xsize; $x++) {
    for($y = 1; $y <= $map->ysize; $y++) {
        $map->text($x, $y, 'black', $map->steps($x, $y, $radius, $radius));
        // nice for getting a feel for coordinates
        //$map->text($x, $y, 'black', "$x,$y");
    }
}
 
header('Content-Type: image.png');
$map->finish();       // calls imagepng()
 
?>

Future

One of the guys in #bbg on irc,freenode.net is building a browser-based game with a hex map and I remembered this code was squirreled away somewhere on my hard drive. I have no plans to fix, improve, or in any way maintain this code. I figure I may as well release it so someone can do something with it.

License

I release this code to the public domain. You may use it for any purpose with or without attribution. It would be polite to mention my name and let me know you come up with, but it’s not at all required.

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

Verbs

The fundamental difference between games and most other media is interactivity. When I want to understand a game, one step is to list all of the verbs available to the players. For example, the verbs in Super Mario Brothers are:

• Start 1/2 player game
• Walk left/right
• Run left/right
• Duck (when big)
• Jump
• Stomp enemy
• Kick shell
• Break brick
• Open question block
• Go down pipe
• Throw fireball
• Touch Axe

I was thinking of this because I played the browser-based trading card game Warstorm and I was astounded when I realized what the available verbs are on the site (ignoring the account management common to any site with user accounts):

• Edit a deck (“squad”)
• Auction a card
• Trade cards with a player
• Chat
• Challenge an individual player to a duel
• Enter tournament or league (tourney with restricted rule)
• Redeem loyalty points (given for interaction/marketing) for cards
• Buy Challenge Coins (premium currency)
• Play a duel

The first six verbs are common to any trading card game. The last item is the interesting one: play. It looks like I didn’t descend into the same level of detail I did for Mario, but I did.

The player selects which of their decks they’d like to use and the duel proceeds like War. The computer turns up the top card of each deck, applies their effects, and repeats. The only thing the player can do is fast-forward to the end to find out if they won or lost.

I was floored when I realized this, I thought the site was hollow. It’s all about a card game but there’s no game at its heart. It reminded me of gambling in that nearly every verb you invoke involves paying, but unlike gambling there’s no chance you’ll ever get any money back.

I babbled about this to my friends for a few days, trying to make sense of it. Eventually I realized I hadn’t seen where the game was hiding.

Decision Timing

In real-time games (rugby, StarCraft) players are constantly able to take action (maybe with asymmetrical actions, like the separate roles of offense and defense in American football). In turn-based games (Chess, Scrabble, Civilization) players alternate who is allowed to act.

Magic: The Gathering had clever game mechanics that gave players new actions in a preparatory phase called “deckbuilding” prior to playing cards (incidentally inventing a business model). The players make decisions about what actions they want available to them in the matchups.

Warstorm is designed so that all of the actions are up-front, there is no phase of the game besides deckbuilding. It didn’t feel to me like a game because no game mechanic involves direct interaction with the opponent, I didn’t see that I could ever make and change a decision in response to my opponent’s actions (unless we played multiple duels, I suppose). I didn’t even see the game because it was too different from what I was expecting.

But it made me wonder how business concerns drove the game design of Warstorm, a game where there’s little to do besides pay more money.

Business Concerns

When I turned my attention back to Athenge, I saw that my game design implied a lot of business decisions. I like games that require a lot of thought and analysis. I look at the most popular Facebook games and only see pastimes, idle toys requiring action with little thought, minimal direct competition, and even rarer losses. Oh, and tens of millions of players.

Warstorm reminded me that my taste in games is not common. Athenge will be a complex game, lots of instructions and options. It’ll take a lot of time for me, a lone developer, to build. Plus money to buy art, and more resources in marketing to find its non-mainstream audience. There’s risk to anything I choose to build, but Athenge looks to be more risk than it’s worth when I look at the current crop of simple, successful games. I could cut it down more and more, let these business concerns change my game’s design, but I’d rather let them replace my game’s design.

Instead of starting the programming of Athenge now, I’m continuing to improve the successful NearbyGamers and starting on a simpler, much more accessible game I’ve been tinkering with the design of for eighteen months. (Though it’s simple enough that’ll sound ridiculous when you see it, that’s fodder for another blog post). I still plan to build Athenge, but I think it must wait until I’m solidly in the black, until I’m not risking quite so much.

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

Talking about Ikariam reminded me about technology trees because it has a particularly big and complex one. When I was playing I created a graph showing how to unlock everything so that everyone in my guild could quickly develop as we needed.

In the diagram below, pink rectangles are buildings, green parallelograms are actions, solid blue circles are ships, red hexagons are military units (with their costs), and the empty circles are technology achievements (color indicating which of four tracks). It sounds really complicated and is overwhelming at first look, but it serves as reference for any player with a little experience.

It’s worth noting that this is long out-of-date; updates to the game have extensively added, rearranged, and repriced things. I created it with graphviz‘s dot utility. It’s a great tool for easily making the directed graphs that show up over and over in computer science. (And read Anathem, it’s a captivating novel that, yes, prominently features directed acyclic graphs.)

OK, that’s all the “Yay, technology trees are keen!” that I can manage.

The Purpose of Technology Trees

They do have some uses. The first three are heavily intertwined:

First, tech trees linearly organize options over time. If a new player could choose from the start whether they wanted to produce smooth-bore or rifled barrels for their soldiers, they’d have to be a suicidal masochist to choose the former. Usually the later technology uses different, a higher quantity of, or more precious resources (like going from bronze swords to steel swords), but often the improved option is such an large improvement that it’s not a real choice which to use. A tech tree makes it possible to present these things in a linear fashion to players to make the game more rational and learnable.

Tech trees also act as gates on content consumption. Until you’ve reached a particular level of development, you can’t use the warp drive and are confined to exploring your solar system. This makes sure that players don’t skim over expensively hand-scripted characters and hand-designed locations (though most PBBGs procedurally generate content). Gating also ensures that players will have opportunities to recognize all the options presented by content — to continue the example, it’d be easy to overlook your mineral-rich asteroid belt if you could immediately cruise off to the stars, and you might end up hamstrung by lack of iron or the knowledge of where to find it and how to mine it. Gating keeps players from being overwhelmed by options and content until they’ve had some time to read help files and make some new friends they can ask questions of.

The third function of a technology tree is to greatly increase the power scale of players. MMORPGs have infamously large power scales: you go from barely triumphing over garden slugs to slaying gods in a casual manner befitting Richard Dawkins. The game Settlers of Catan has a smaller power scale: you start collecting resources from two towns and could grow to five towns and four cities. Chess has a flat or declining power scale.

The final use I’ve seen is as a sink. High-level players often have more resources than they know what to do with, so they lose the fun of hard choices (like equipment in Tactics Ogre). Technological advancements that provide quantitative improvements (that is, shave some percent off of sailing time as opposed to unlock the ability to build steamboats) act as sinks that excess resources can be poured down. This works especially well when the advancements are expensive, ineffective, and public so that players get bragging rights rather than becoming invincible powerhouses.

Technology Trees Usually Suck

Most persistent browser-based games take those first three purposes and crank the dials all the way up. Players use technology trees to go from pointed sticks to nova bombs, from a small space to the most fertile or productive places possible.

The biggest problem with trees is that they act as ratchets. Once you’ve learned The Pulley you always know it and can’t lose it. That’s fine in a game of bounded duration like Civilization or StarCraft, after an hour or few the game is over your research disappears. You don’t start your second game of Civilization back in the stone age knowing how to produce nuclear weapons. But PBBGs are open-ended, a player has a technology until they quit playing entirely (probably being driven to it by someone farther along).

So players get the height of an even bigger power scale to drop rocks on each other from, and if they don’t have a sink for their extra resources they’ll probably shower them onto a guildmate to ratchet themselves up with.

One StarCraft mechanic often shows up with horrible consequences. In StarCraft, there are a number of enhancements that give special powers to units (such as the ability to burrow into the ground or turn invisible) that mean a defender who hasn’t researched the countermeasure cannot attack those units at all. This works in a 40-minute game where the defender gains access to the countermeasure around the same time the attacker gains the power, but in a PBBG new players may be dropped in next door to someone who has played for months and the countermeasure may be weeks away. Awful!

Designers often don’t recognize how special technology is. A player might gift their resources, raze their buildings, move their cities, fire their workers, discharge their soldiers, quit their guild… but they’ll still have their technology. The advancements available rarely reflect that permanence.

Redesigning Technology

One of the joys of long games like MMORPGs and PBBGs is that they give players the opportunity to eventually try everything the game has to offer. Well, unless the player has to make an irreversible decision like character class, then they create alternate characters or logins and decry the grind back up through the tree.

Looking at StarCraft again, I’ve combined two mechanics to design an improved technology mechanic for my game. First, limit permanent technological advancements to the expensive but low-productivity sinks mentioned above. In StarCraft you produce advancements by constructing certain buildings or spending resources at them, like a Spire to be able to build flying units. If you lose the building, you lose the advancement and can’t build more flyers. The other mechanic is “supply points”, a cap on the number of units you can control at once. Certain buildings and units raise the point cap, and most units count for 1-2 points toward the cap. It’s not a resource you can bank, spend, or trade, it’s solely a limit to the number of units you can recruit. It prevents armies from growing too quickly in the beginning of the game and growing too large in the end of the game.

Combining these two ideas, players could build research buildings to unlock different abilities and advancements. They can’t unlock everything because the cap on research buildings is lower than the number of abilities. Abilities stop being an oddity and are better integrated into the rest of the game mechanics — do you spend your money setting up a gasoline engine plant or buy more horses? Players choose where to specialize based on their opportunities and personalities and can raze and rebuild buildings to change their selection.

This is the eighth and final of a six post series on game design, weighing in at a surprising 6,200 words (I didn’t originally plan on these two tangents, but let’s all toast Douglas Adams while I’m about it). I’ve noticed I’ve picked up some new readers, so let me again let me say I really appreciate feedback. I’m going to return to my regular babbling about whatever shiny thing captures my attention — which is to reiterate that you should feel free to comment, email, or IM because that’s where I tend to pick up topics from.

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

Kongai is a very different from all the previous games. It’s an online two-player collectible card game. You build a deck of three to five characters (with, optionally, one item each) and defeat your opponents’ characters.

Each turn you have two choices to make and the results are resolved simultaneously rather than in the more common “I go, then you go” fashion. Range is first: you can leave your character where they are or spend energy trying to get to the near or far range. If you leave your character, the range is whatever your opponent sets. If you both try to set it to something different it doesn’t change. Some abilities work only at near or far, some both. The energy you spend to change range is the same energy used to activate abilities, so there are immediately some tough decisions to make about where and whether to spend your resources and guessing what your opponent will choose.

Second, you each choose an action. You can use one of your characters’ four abilities (mostly attacks, though a quarter or so heal or give status ailments), switch your character out for another (dodging any attack), intercept your opponents’ switch (preventing it and dealing significant damage), or rest your character to recover extra energy for the next turn.

It’s one of those simple-but-deep games because of the simultaneous turns. You don’t flail away at your opponent, you have to outthink them. Kongai’s designer, David Sirlin, has written a bit about the process of designing Kongai and how it’s all about the skill he calls yomi, the ability to predict your opponent’s moves and keep yours unpredictable.

This, in a nutshell, is why I gripe about multiplayer games being primarily about deckbuilding like Tactics Ogre. You only get one try to guess your opponent’s plan. If you guessed wrong, you play a (possibly quite long) battle that you can probably only lose. Only then do you get a chance to change your build to have new tactics to try again. Tactics Ogre isn’t much fun because there’s little back-and-forth between the players, battles are just about lining up and smashing as hard as you can (or, worse, about “leveling up” the power of your characters).

Deckbuilding isn’t intrinsically wrong, it’s fun in Kongai and in Magic: The Gathering even more of the game is deckbuilding and it still works well. Many strategy games like Civilization and StarCraft intertwine the building and using phases. You scout your opponent and deceive their scouts to decide your build and sabotage theirs.

Sirlin’s written an awesome book called Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion about how players should approach competitive games to succeed at tournament-level play (it’s also available free online). His pushes players to understand games as they are designed rather than as they may stylistically appear to play. Basketball can be won by playing the court and constantly harassing other players, not by executing a practiced attack or defending the zone (the Traveller example is even more powerful). I also recommend reading Sirlin’s entire blog, it’s similar in content to his book but from the perspective of the game designer trying to plan and balance a complex game that elite players will do their best to break over thousands of hours of dedicated play.

I was thinking about my game’s design and how to prevent it from becoming a slugfest when I thought of Kongai and read Sirlin. The best strategy in any farming game like Ikariam is to find the weakest player and raid them repeatedly. The best strategy in WeeWar is to steal an opponents’ nearest base and the positive feedback loop generated by bases being a zero-sum resource means you’re almost guaranteed a win. Tactics Ogre is a slugfest because there are no meaningful options, the best move on any turn is to move to the weakest opponent and hit them as hard as possible. The constant refrain here is that you never care what your opponent is doing; nothing they do actually influences your moves because you don’t have significant decisions to make.

Counter-Strike is a highly successful tournament game because players are constantly shifting tactics in the real-time battle. X-Com is the only single-player game on this list, but it would have a good shot at translating to multiplayer because it deals with managing limited resources and knowledge in response to your opponents’ actions.

These are the games that had the biggest influence on my design, though there are certainly others like Syndicate, Eve Online, and muds that have had an effect. I seem to have a habit of working on my design, seeing flaws, adopting from other games to refactor my design, and repeating. I’ve been really happy with my current plans for an unprecedented several months, so I’m moving into playtesting to start getting real-world feedback on how well gameplay works. I’ve got one more game design blog post scheduled on technology trees and otherwise will be returning to my regular babbling about whatever shiny thing captures my attention — which is to reiterate that you should feel free to comment, email, or IM because that’s where I tend to pick up topics from.

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

So I thought I’d solved everything and was moving along on my design. Players control 1 or 2 secret agents on an isometric map. Turns simply alternate rather than being based on how much you did last turn. Almost all weapons are ranged and powerful enough to kill in one or two shots. Hm. So why would you ever risk getting into someone’s line of fire, should I add fog of war so the player only knows what their agents can see? I guess I could add stances so characters could hide behind terrain, and maybe 3D to make positioning important…

Doubts crept in. Could a game this complex be playable? Wouldn’t the user interface be overwhelming? I took my notes and went to chat with a game designer.

Me:

So, I’m making an isometric turn-based tactical combat game. And I’m not sure it’ll work because most characters in most turn-based strategy games can take many hits but that doesn’t match my urban combat setting.

Ammon:

That sounds a little familiar.

Me:

I don’t know any games like it. So I’m thinking I should really reduce the distance characters can move and do these other things so they don’t just run straight at each other, but that’s getting complex.

Ammon:

This sounds like X-Com.

Me:

Never heard of it

Ammon:

X-Com is single-player, you have a squad of 8-14 units. Units gain XP but 1-2 shots kill so any unit that survives a few missions is awesome.

Me:

Any enemies were the same size and shape as your units? Did they outnumber you?

Ammon:

Yep.

Me:

And most weapons are ranged? That works?

Ammon:

Yep.

Me:

Huh. I guess I’ll check it out sometime. So I’m trying to decide what a turn looks like. Move and attack vs. move or attack, mostly.

Ammon:

X-Com has action points you spend for moving, turning, changing stance. Different fire modes (snapshot, aimed shot, burst fire) take different amounts.

Me:

What’s the gameplay effect of turning? Are attacks against side/rear better? Is there fog of war?

Ammon:

Yep, fog of war is the primary effect. A shot from behind could be a kill and you’d never even know where it came from.

Me:

Hm. One thing I’m pondering is a ‘guard’ action. So an agent could do nothing on their turn but look out a door and nail someone who crosses by the doorway in one turn.

Ammon:

Yeah, X-Com has that.

Me:

Oh. Do any of these model audio? Like you could hear someone sneaking up on you? [Which means some kind of replay of enemy turns before you take yours.]

Ammon:

Yep, you can hear running footsteps, gunfire. Rockets are effective but attract a lot of attention.

Me:

And all that works? It’s not overwhelming?

Ammon:

The only problem was scaling the power curve. A major element was new technologies, which meant building a base, capturing alien equipment during battle, and spending money to research it. Which would attract the aliens’ attention, they’d come attack your base.

Me:

Huh. That was a big part of my game, building bunks to be able to have more characters but also making yourself a more tempting target for other players.

Ammon:

Yeah, base layout mattered a lot. When you defend against attacks, it’s on whatever floorplan you created. So if your barracks are too far from the entrance, aliens could trash your equipment and kill your scientists before you got there.

Me:

OK, stop talking about X-Com. I can already tell I need to play it because it includes every element I thought was original and spiffy and maybe even too complex.

The X-Com series of games was released in the 1990s. You can find the first couple games (#2, Terror From The Deep, is probably the overall best) on abandonware sites and run them under dosbox or easily pick up the port to modern PCs on Steam.

There’s not a lot of description that early conversation left out. When I played X-Com a few days later, I was awed that someone 15 years ago had created almost exactly the game I was inventing.

I pondered where to go from here. I had the confirmation that I could make as complex a game as I’d considered. But if the game has Been Done, can I learn from it instead of (inadvertently) cloning it?

I’ve always liked game designs with simple mechanics and few numbers. I don’t really like to count into double digits, let alone have 382 hitpoints and decide whether to buy an item that gives me a 6% boost. X-Com requires that players be meticulous about equipping units, sending enough ammo that they won’t run out but won’t overburden and slow them down. It seemed like too much deckbuilding, moving the interesting decisions out of the main gameplay and into the preparation. Battles were fairly repetitive once you learned the basic strategy of how to move under cover, search buildings, provide support fire, and balance your team.

I was still working on my design but wasn’t very sure of it until I thought about another game named Kongai.

• 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.

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

Tactics Ogre was released on the PlayStation in 1997. You are a young member of a repressed ethnic minority. Your first mission is to bust the leader of your rebellion out of jail. When you do, he points out that your people need some fresh motivation if they’re going to have a chance. So he instructs you to destroy a town and frame your enemies. Do your stain your hands for the greater good or split from the rebellion by refusing? (In which case he does it and frames you as an agent of the empire.) The branching storyline is refreshingly adult, most games would have a deus ex machina sweep in to save the town rather than include the complexity of a quixotically misguided leader committing an atrocity (assuming they could bring themselves to begin a plot based on ethnic oppression).

You lead a team of warriors into turn-based battles against similar groups of enemies. On each turn you can move all of your characters a few spaces around the game board and execute an attack or spell. The genre is called tactical role-playing games and there have been around two dozen successful games released.

One of the unusual things Tactics Ogre does that works well is the limited customization for each character: each character can equip four items at a time and has a class that determines which weapons, armor, and spells they can use. You field eight characters at a time, so more options (for example, World of Warcraft equips characters with 19 equipment slots!) would quickly become overwhelming. You’ll constantly wish you could equip just one more item, but that’s a sign that the decision is meaningful.

The downside to combat is that it’s basically a slugfest. The only significant effect of terrain is that archers have increased range and damage when shooting from a height. On most maps the two armies run straight at each other and stand around trading blows until someone drops. There’s a beautiful map that’s largely useless.

After playing it and similar games (the same team created the more popular Final Fantasy Tactics) I was tempted to make a tactical game of my own but didn’t see what I could create that would be new and interesting.

Years later I saw games like Ikariam and WeeWar and realized I could build one on the web. I’ve found a few online, but they’re even worse slugfests. All the interesting decisions have been taken out combat and dropped earlier, to the character customization. If you don’t enjoy that setup (the equivalent of “deckbuilding” in trading card games) there’s little left to enjoy. And they’re all so repetitively set in generic magical fantasy worlds. I started thinking seriously about how to design a browser-based tactical game and wanted to find a new setting.

Next: Counter-Strike.

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

I mentioned I have a rant about how I think of most browser-based games as belonging to genre called “farming games”. The defining characteristic is that they are about farming other players or being farmed until you quit in disgust.

You build a city or an empire and you usually can do exactly two things with other players: trade resources or fight. To fight you build some military units and point them to sack some other player. A few hours later, if they overcome the defenses, they cart back some loot for you. The game’s leaderboard ranks by how many resources you’ve gathered (or some derivative like number of upgrades purchased), so the more loot you haul in the better.

When you’re collecting resources and upgrading your cities there’s a positive feedback loop at work: you can build a bigger sawmill, hire more children to mine, reach a faster warp factor on your starships, all so you can bring in more resources. Games often address this by making upgrade costs grow multiplicatively or exponentially while the returns increase linearly, but usually the rate of return grows faster than the rate costs increase. If that last sentence made your eyes glaze over, think of compound interest: the more you have, the faster you earn more. The rich get richer.

So every additional resource helps, especially early on. Players have a strong incentive to attack each other for a bit of loot. Well, not each other — you might lose the resources you invested in your army. Players have a strong incentive to farm the weakest available players, which is roughly synonymous with the newest players.

Farming is the act of treating another player as a resource farm. By sending wave after wave, the attacker guarantees the defender won’t have the resources to build defenses and, if they try, will only be able to finish a small percentage that will be snuffed out before it grows to effectiveness. The defender will never get out from under an attacker’s thumb, they’re reduced to passively generating extra resources the attacker uses to grow even faster. The word farm is not hyperbole.

Players grow in power over time, there’s little skill involved. Players have to schedule their upgrades well (eg. make sure to harvest crops before building a refinery that would employ new workers who would otherwise starve), but the dominant factor is exponential growth over time (applying this situation to capitalist economies is left as an exercise for the reader and college freshmen who have just read Marx for the first time). The best players to attack are new players, they can’t and often don’t know how to defend themselves. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a newbie face — forever.

If you think I’m belaboring a really obvious point, congratulations, you understand game design better than the creators of farming games.

Some designers realize that it’s a problem and have worked to mitigate it. New players receive automatic protection for their first week of play and can’t be the target of any attacks. This just pushes it back, of course, making the most fallow farms players who are seven days and one minute old (and this is usually when the first attack arrives). Some games restrict players from attacking anyone more than a few rankings above or below them, but that just means players shift to farm whichever player is at the very bottom of their allowed range.

Another approach is to give players a hideout, a storage space for resources that can’t be looted in an attack. It’s hard to thrive, though, when you have to spend all of your resources upgrading a hideout to store enough resources to buy the next enlargement for the hideout… and repeat until you can afford to invest in upgrades that allow you to collect resources faster or build an army. (And if attacking players can raze your buildings instead of only military units as is typical, the situation is even more bleak.)

I’ve seen one game that allows you to hire the Imperial Army to come protect you. For 20% off the top of your resource income they’ll send a detachment of soldiers that can fend off the typical army of any player younger than a month or so. For 40%, you regain your newbie protection and can’t be targeted at all. I’ve seen a few games that will cut out the middleman and and build a mechanic to allow you to directly pay the protection money to your farmer in return for this arrangement being prominently visible to other players, the presumption being that others attackers will stay away rather than risk picking a fight with someone their own size.

But these percentages bring up that feedback loop again. If you’re getting farmed or paying protection, you’ve lowered your rate of growth. Your attacker’s stays at 100% or is inflated by the resources they’ve farmed (directly so in the protection racket). The newbie will never be able to challenge established attackers, and players who don’t farm will fall behind and become farms themselves.

Players can band together into guilds for mutual defense, but this only serves to shift the problem from individual players to guilds while making life worse for lone players. All of the above still applies.

I’m going to skip recounting the less-popular and equally ineffective counters and ask: What’s a newbie to do? Quit, obviously.

I can only wish I had metrics for these games (they’re not generally run with the care and attention that lends itself to gathering data for analysis), but the dropout rate is huge. I’d guess most farming games lose at least the bottom 80% of players every month.

The players who grit their teeth and hang in there or have the luck of a little quiet to set up their own farms are typically amoral teenage boys. They’re not good customers and they don’t form a healthy community. The prospect of living in a lawless world populated by violent psychopaths with gutter mouths isn’t generally appealing, further thinning the ranks of newbies.

I didn’t expect to rant at such length, but this is why I didn’t start building a game of my own ten years ago. I couldn’t see how to fix this problem without giving up on persistence altogether. Playing WeeWar was an inspiration because I realized that browser games don’t have to be slaves to persistence to be fun and I read David Sirlin’s insightful blog posts and book on multiplayer game design that I’ll cover in depth in the last post on game influences.

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

WeeWar is a turn-based strategy game for 2-6 players. Starting a game is as simple as choosing a map and recruiting opponents. Each base you control earns you money to spend producing units. You advance across the map and win by smashing enemy units and wresting control of all the bases.

The core of combat is fairly rock-paper-scissors: infantry beats tanks, tanks beat vehicles, vehicles beat infantry. You manage your flow of units to the front to bring the right weapons to bear without ceding ground (and, hopefully, fighting on favorable terrain). Artillery units can decimate opposing units but are weak and must keep their distance. Air and sea units add further complexity.

WeeWar’s mechanism for taking turns is very nicely done. You and your opponents don’t have to be online at the same time for the length of a full game because you get 24 hours to take each turn. If both you and your opponent are online at the same time and taking turns promptly you can play most maps in under a half-hour. But anytime that your turn comes up you have a full day to make your move, so it can play like correspondence Chess where you and your opponent alternate moves once a day. You could play several games at once and only play when you have fifteen minutes free to take your turns.

WeeWar is like a perfect translation from board game to the web (though it appears to be based on the Game Boy game Advance Wars). The interface is crisp and responsive, it’s easy to arrange games and chat with your opponents. The web browser just falls away and only the game matters, a sign that knows how to use its medium to its fullest. The genre couldn’t be more different from web games like Ikariam.

Instead of building up a long-lasting empire or RPG character, you’re in standalone games that each last a few days, nothing carries between battles. It’s a bit of a downside, too: there are no persistent relationships you can form with other players besides adding them to a friends list to see when they’re online. When you finish a game, there’s no mechanism at work to draw you back to the site to play again.

WeeWar (besides being fun to play) inspired me to break from the mold. I hadn’t considered the medium and genre separately, so my designs were all very derivative and uninteresting. I decided to try to find a balance between the long continuity of Ikariam and the short sessions of WeeWar because each is a different kind of fun and a incentive to play.

Next, I’ll talk about a role-playing game called Tactics Ogre.

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

Ikariam is a persistent browser-based game. In a game world shared with thousands of other players, you found and improve cities that grow over weeks and months. Nearly everything takes time to happen: you start construction of a building and it may finish in 40 minutes, you recruit 20 swordsmen and they arrive at five-minute intervals, or you make a trade with another player and the resources arrive in a few hours (depending on how far away that player is). It’s a very slow-paced game, you can enjoyably and play fairly competitively with a few minutes in the morning and evening.

I’ve played a few dozen games in this medium and genre (more on that distinction in a minute), and Ikariam is the best of them. It’s beautifully polished for new players: sharp, consistent graphics, an instructive tutorial in early play to get you started, clear help files, and overall high production values.

It’s also very smart about multiplayer. While building your cities is fun, the multiplayer interaction is the strength of these games. You compete for resources, offer trades, make friends, forge alliances, and fight battles. These things could all happen in a single-player game, but interacting with real people is what enlivens these games. You can see that power in the success of World of Warcraft and Facebook.

Actions cost resources, and there are five in Ikariam: wood (most common resource, for buildings and units), marble (for advanced buildings), wine (for population growth), crystal (for research in the technology tree), and sulfur (for military units). Ikariam has some clever design elements to induce player interactions. It starts with islands that group up to 16 cities.

Each island produces wood in a sawmill and any city can donate towards upgrading it. It doesn’t matter who donates, every upgrade means every city can produce more wood. This uses the free rider problem as a game mechanic: there’s a natural tension between wanting your neighbors to pay and not wanting to aggravate them by under-contributing.

In addition to wood, each island produces one of the four other goods. Because your city needs all four to thrive, you’ll have to barter, trade, beg, extort, or raid them from other players. Eventually you can found cities on other islands and transfer your own resources around, but that’s not always adequate to meet the demands of your growth.

They’re simple mechanics that are powerful in practice. They give players natural excuses to start talking to each other, form opinions of each other, helping or hurting each other. In short: to play.

Most of these games get this wrong, players are self-sufficient or can only interact in destructive competition (eg. military attack). I’ve said “these games” a few times, let me define that a little better. The medium is a persistent browser-based game: the defining attributes are online browser play, hundreds to millions of players, and long-term play. The genre is… well, it doesn’t really have a name. It’s about building an empire, probably crushing other players, moving around resources and military units. I personally call them farming games, but that’s the subject of a later rant.

I think part of the appeal of these games is that people don’t tend to have a lot of productive, creative hobbies anymore. It’s unusual to build a ship in a bottle, knit a sweater, or refinish a table. Building a city, an alliance, an empire, is sort of a virtual exercise of this same muscle. I really enjoy these games and have been half-planning to write one for years.

But as I look at how the genre is has been mapped out I see a narrow playerbase and shallow gameplay. I started seriously thinking about building a game when I realized that I can have the medium I really like without the genre that I am increasingly disenchanted with. My next post about game influences is about WeeWar, a game that does just that.

There’s a lot to that high-level description, so let me unpack it one piece at a time:

web-based

You play in your browser, no plugins or downloads. This opens the game up to the widest possible audience, but imposes a lot of restrictions: no fancy UI, no 3D graphics, limited animation. So the game must be more cerebral than action-oriented, and a turn-based game is a natural fit.

5-20 minutes per day

In a day’s typical session, you’ll issue commands in ongoing operations, give base construction orders, and check the mail and forums for news from your allies. It will fit into your life rather than taking hours to play, though if you particularly enjoy it you could spend more time.

roster of secret agents

You’ll begin with a small team of two or three agents under your command. Agents aren’t like characters in an RPG, they don’t “level up” or have innate skills — what you choose to equip them with determines what abilities they’ll have available for use in…

operations

These are the heart of the game: equip and deploy your agents with and against other players. Make tactical choices and know the mind of your opponent to succeed. Turns are simultaneous, so you make your move anytime during the day and all the action occurs when everyone’s done so.

bases

Base construction works in real-time: you give the command to expand the barracks and construction will finish in a few real-life hours or days. The facilities you construct will let you collect and store resources, produce equipment for your agents, and reach out into the world.

online world

The operations you undertake will influence the world that all players (who speak your language) share.

friends

Form alliances with your coworkers or fellow students, or with players from halfway around the world. You’ll work together on both operations and bases.

hundreds of thousands of players

Typically web games end up sharding to cope with the volume of players. By careful game and system design, I think I can build a single vibrant world split only by language.

My next game post will be about my goal in designing a game about (of all things) commanding a secret agency. Also, I’ve avoided cluttering this with references to the all the games I was influenced or inspired by and will be posting about the most important half-dozen.

And, yes, I badly need to come up with a name for this game.