MAHAKALPA

I’ve posted a blog few days ago in Chinese, talking about an of Spy game. I was too lazy to translate it into English back then. After I discussed it with my friend Phil, I feel a little bit sad about it: It is a game about spy, Chinese authorities probably don’t want this kind of genre to be published in domestic market, the story of the game might taking serious damage in the censorship here. Besides, Console game developing for domestic game market is literally not allowed in china. Alright, this made me sad. But hey, there’s nothing wrong for me to just think about it, it’s a cool practice of creative thinking anyway!

Basically, it is an idea to make a game that recreates the real life experience of an undercover agent, working far behind the enemy line, deep inside hostile territories, enemy major cities and capitals, carry out various kind of secrete missions. Up to this point, someone would say, hey, we already have tons of games that set into the exact genre you are talking about. I know, you might refer games like Hitman, Metal Gear, or even Thief, Tenchu. But these are Stealth Game, not exactly the game style I’ talking about. What I’m talking about is Espionage Game, I couldn’t find a definition for it on wiki, so I gave it one: A video game in which a player needs to avoid his true identity been exposed while interact with enemy. I’m not sure if I make it right or not, but let me explain it to you.

In a sand box gaming environments, sort like in the GTA, where you can do whatever you want, interact with anything inside the game universe, this is important for the fun part of this game. The player is a double agent working inside enemy intelligence agency. You can fill up a really rich background story for the protagonist, but it doesn’t matter for now, I will stick mainly to the game play here.

If you are undercover agent working in enemy intelligence agency, you for sure need to take orders from the employer you ‘working for’. on the other hand, you also need to take orders from the organization you truly belong to. Here comes the contradiction, to get along in the enemy agency while plot against them. Some time you need to meet up your comrades at a dead drop under the heavy surveillance from hostile Abwehr, sometime you might have to make critical decision on whether or not to rescue/kill your fellow comrade under extreme circumstances. All you have, for the most of time, is a pistol and everything you can have in your real life (except you living in warzone). Sometimes you get some fun spy gadgets which you can use them to complete your quests.

Using your own government issued pistol can be dangerous, counter espionage department might have all the ballistics information recorded in their mainframe. But you can get a clean one from local street gangster, but a Auto Rifle might draw too much attention, so think before you do that.   

I already have a simple scenario cooked up in the Chinese version of this blog, maybe I should post it in my next.

Two years ago I had an idea about crafting system I want to have in MMO, basically it was a very complex crafting system which allow player to forge highly customized weapons and items in game. In that concept, if a player want to make a sword, first he has to get all the raw materials needed and then test out different combinations and mixture ratio to gain the perfect outcome, like how much carbon should added into steel to achieve certain strength or flexibility he wants his swords to have. Actually I found out that it would create another problem I don’t want players to suffer. The problem is that geek players will run very fast and excel their results in a spreadsheet, then it will spread amount players, before long every wordsmiths in the server can make best claymore without any test or experiments, the fun parts you want them to experience thus will be greatly cut down. Perhaps there will be measures to prevent this to happen or we can employee an even more complex system that most player can’t comprehend the technique easily. however, this will equally reduce player’s enjoyment in this mechanism.

I’ve recently thinking about another Idea: Offering. This isn’t of my original, actually it is something I learned from another game I played few years ago. In shadowbane, city owners can put up shrines in their city. In a shrine you can offer various sacrifices and stuffs, in return you will gain buffs and blessings. Different shrines can be build to house defferent gods which give different buffs.

What I’m thinking is that maybe we can use this mechanism as part of the crafting system in another game. In a sandbox game universe, player driven economy is the key to make the wheel rolling, in such world we can’t use mechanisms employed in other  popular mmo like wow or warhammer,   because if you can get ass kicking items in a dungeon raid then you won’t bother to craft less powerful items which may take you the same amount of time to grinding for weird materials.

like in EVE-Online, industrialist only manufacture normal items and most items in the game can be manufactured by player. Because in EVE universe things can be destroyed very easily, so you don’t want to to bring any once in a life time ships or items to a chaotic battle where ship lost can be expected in a daily base. It is the high depletion rate in eve-online propelling the gigantic manufacturing industry and the whole economic system pushing forward.

Back to the offering system I was talking about, in a sandbox fantasy game, craftsman can create all sorts of items player needed. architects can build different shrines, player bring offerings required for the weapon buff he want. these buffs will expire over time, by then player can bring more offerings to preserve that buff  or also can switch to other specs  by give offerings to adequate shrines. You don’t have to worry about your home made ass kicking sword been broken in a fight, you can always buy a new one from the nearest Weapon Shop and ask your favorite gods to blessing on it. Meanwhile, quests and missions can have something else to hand out.

further more, you can have plebeian shrine for your guild or nation citizen’s daily use, and then you can have guild’s shrine and nation shrine for special purpose. Like nation’s  shrine can store a superweapon which can only use in a siege battle while it requires expensive daily sacrifices to maintain the power it process and your people will treat it as the symbol of the spirit , lol.
So, how do you think about it.