Project X

[Sunny]

Something else to consider is the whole 'public scene' aspect -- I am much more likely to go to a scene in progress somewhere I know is part of the 'public grid' than I am going to be to page someone for RP so I can get a +meetme, or join a room from a list of rooms that I'm not sure is a private scene or what because it's all on a list and are you SURE that I won't be interrupting?

There may not actually be a functional difference between picking a room off a list or just walking into it from the grid, but there are still practical differences to take into consideration.

Yes, once people on a game get established, they're all for asking for +meetmes and joining their friends wherever they are, without a grid...how do you get there? How do you get over being new, a solo player, without an established playgroup? You can't be shy, fuck, no way -- you HAVE to be proactive and ask people directly for RP...

[faraday]

@Sunny On Ares the scene system lets you expressly mark a scene as public or private. So if you see a public scene, you know that it's open and can just do a scene/join straight to it. Personally I find this preferable to the traditional grid where you're like: "Oh, Mary and Bob are in the mess hall... are they doing a thing? Can I crash? I don't know them very well so I'm hesitant to page them and ask." To each their own, of course. But I personally prefer freeform scenes (with a set of pre-made locations to get things rolling) over a grid.

[Sunny]

@faraday

Yeah, that doesn't solve my problem at all. I'm glad that it works for you, though! I just thought it was worth considering, that people like me do exist. If the choice is made to actively exclude, that's fine -- not every game is for every person, and I've certainly got no issues with that.

[faraday]

@Sunny I tried to explain how the system made efforts to address the concern you raised about not knowing if you were interrupting something, because scenes are expressly marked as "come one come all". If that doesn't work for you, that's naturally your prerogative. Doesn't mean anybody's being actively excluded or not considered. But thanks for assuming the worst. I'll just go back to my lurking corner now.

[Sunny]

@faraday

Er, pointing out that something is actively excluding some segment of people isn't actually an insult, and it's necessary for the healthy functioning of a game in many cases by making it plain what you're interested in fostering as behavior on your game. There's a sort of proactivity involved in playing on gridless games that is absolutely a desirable trait in players, and choosing to take the steps to foster that behavior and weed out other behavior isn't a bad thing.

In this case, we're talking about a preference for a grid vs a preference for no grid. Choosing to go with no grid excludes the people that have a hard time playing without one. It's not like, a problem? You're certainly not a bad person, there's no judgment involved here. You explicitly stated it's your preference to not have a grid. What I have trouble with is not addressed by your proposed solution. Either I'm not explaining it well, or it's being misunderstood -- I'm not terribly worried about it, but again, my statement of 'that doesn't solve my problem at all' isn't a value judgment.

[Ganymede]

@Sunny said in Project X:

Something else to consider is the whole 'public scene' aspect -- I am much more likely to go to a scene in progress somewhere I know is part of the 'public grid' than I am going to be to page someone for RP so I can get a +meetme, or join a room from a list of rooms that I'm not sure is a private scene or what because it's all on a list and are you SURE that I won't be interrupting?

@faraday, I concur with this. And this was my experience on your game; I wandered into a few scenes, attracted some attention, and things went from there.

I think it's mostly just mind-set and preference. I don't always get invited to scenes when I start off on games, and that gets a bit frustrating. And there are games with nice grids that people don't RP on, for whatever reason, I don't know. Neither having a large Grid nor having no real Grid at all bothers me once way or the other, and I think I enjoyed Victorian Reverie's stages more than anything else.

[Lithium]

I miss when there was actual open grid RP. I kind of hate the idea of RP rooms because they separate the RP, they remove the sense of community, and it helps promote the idea or perception of clique's. When there is a scene in an RP room it just 'feels' closed, like you weren't invited, don't drop in. They aren't on the public grid, therefor it's not a public scene.

Just how it feels. I run into this a /lot/ on Reno, everyone is in private rooms and RP rooms and the grid just feels... empty. It makes the game feel empty. It makes it difficult to feel involved in much of anything at all.

At least to me.

[Arkandel]

Give me an idea of scale, people. How many rooms would you say an average MU*'s grid is? Don't include OOC or 'inside' rooms (living rooms, bedrooms, etc) in that number, just stuff you can reach straight from a street, streets included.

[skew]

@Arkandel That depends entirely on scale of the game, and how detailed you want those rooms to be. There is no correct scale, but you know all that.

Fallen World recently dropped from 40ish? gridsquares down to 20ish, representing the island of Manhattan. Considering the size and scale and all, I think 20ish is a pretty good number, both to represent a big city and also to house the player base.

Another way to look at it is something like... What are the archetypal "areas" of a city, through the lens of a MU? A park, rich neighborhood, poor neighborhood, hip neighborhood, middle-of-the-road neighborhood, bordering the "wilderness", college area, government buildings. I might be missing a few, but that sounds about right. You then take that list and say you need 2-3 of most of those, to offer an option to players. That puts us nearish 20. So... It's a good number for a base grid!

[golgoth]

During my history of gaming, I have frequently enjoyed pop-up scenes at random locations: LIke in the woods somewhere, on the street outside of the club, -int the club-, sneaking from one gang-held territory to the next, etc etc. I like moving about a grid rather than a scene select. Scene selection type systems (not talking bad about faraday's implementation) generally seems to breed exclusive rather than inclusive RP... But that's just from my personal experience as a permanent newbie-style player rather than some sort of awesome factoid.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Arkandel
Not sure on what average would be but I think the ideal would be fairly small, at least as fair as the map goes. Say 10-20 rooms not counting what players choose to build.
That should be enough to give diverse area and also set tone, after all a well made grid will set tone. Look at HM it's grid was exception and really added to the feel of game being in Vienna. Another example from fiction would be the differences in how Gotham and Metropolis are depicted visually, Suicide Slum the worst part of Metro is often drawn in far brighter colors than any part of Gotham, this ties into the mood and the stories set there.
I have used this analogy before but will repeat it, the grid for a game is like the sets of a play, you can put on show with out any sets and have it turn out beautifully, but when done well sets definitely can add to the quality of a production. A grid is the same way you could likely make a game without one but a good grid can enhance the whole.

[Thenomain]

@Arkandel

I played on a game where I was happy playing in about 5 locations.

I played on a game with 5 places where I felt entirely too cramped and is one of the main reasons I stopped playing there.

Haunted Memories probably had probably over 50 public grid rooms, if not more. It also had roughly four individual games running on it at the same time.

So, say, 15 + 10 per additional game running on the grid simultaneously.

This is not easy for me to say without my usual extended story-time, so here it is.

Consider my favorite game line: Changeling the Lost. You have normal (unenchanted) rooms, you have more secret and political places, and you have completely enchanted areas. What is average for that kind of grid is going to be different than, for instance, Mage, which has only the first two kinds, and D&D which may have an extensive wilderness or even city depending on the game's focus, and Star Wars which enjoys its one-biome planets, and Star Trek which likes its space grids, and so forth.

[Arkandel]

So, some input would be appreciated!

Originally I was planning for my world to be populated by 'floating' rooms. You could just go wherever through a series of categorized menus and the only 'map' connecting them would be a wiki page or flat static graphic in-game showing their relative positions.

I've been taking this thread's input though and some of the ideas here are interesting as coding projects. There's an actual clickable grid now for which I have several interface ideas I think will pay out nicely once they're done, even if I'm currently stuck in back-end GUI hell enhancing the world editor to add point-and-click territories and ways to 'draw' roads to visually connect neighborhoods in different ways.

Anyway, the problem is there's just one of me. Anything I pour time into pushes other stuff back - and I'm well aware until I have the backbone made it'll be hard to recruit help, both because it's easier to get people excited by showing them what's already done (which atm wouldn't look as anything more than lines of code and disjointed semi-ugly interfaces - I'm not an artistic person) and because adding people to a project isn't that simple. Coordination involves an overhead of time and effort, too.

So the actual question here for people who've gone through these phases before... is it better to have a roadmap made and stick to it ("make a rudimentary <X> even if it means data entry by hand for now" -> "make a +jobs system" -> ... etc) even if other cool ideas come up in the mean time?

In other words what's a good balance between getting the overall project finished in the somewhat foreseeable future and getting some fun toys more polished on the way there?

As it stands I keep having more "holy shit, what if..." ideas than time to code them all. And of course even though I try to keep the design flexible once fundamental enough changes are added, sometimes I have to go back and change things which were already working.

Thoughts?

[skew]

We (try to) use Agile at work. It's a methodology for project work based on the idea of fixed time periods wherein you work on certain things. They're called "sprints", and you generally make a sprint one to three weeks long. In Agile, you have a planning meeting, wherein you set the goal of the sprint. Every day, you have a status meeting, wherein you discuss where things are, what got done, what didn't, etc. Then, at the end of the sprint, you have another meeting to wrap up that sprint.

One of the reasons to use Agile, and the reason you'd divide time into blocks like this, is to allow flexibility. During a sprint, you set your plan for the sprint at the beginning and you stick with it, no matter what. If additional ideas come up, additional tasks get assigned, etc, you do not divert from the plan, not until the sprint is over, and then you reassess where you're at and what needs to be done.

I think there's a lot of value in it, and in the idea of setting your plan and sticking to it. In my own personal coding experience, drifting between ideas and tasks often means nothing gets done. I pause one project to look at another, and when I return to the first, I cannot remember what the heck I was doing, or how this all was supposed to work.

So, my advice, would be to borrow some from Agile. Give yourself some time, and give yourself a task or two you want to work on. Work exclusively on the plan for that unit of time, and do not take on anything new, do not move in any new directions, etc, until that time period has ended. Then, look at your list again, and decide. This should keep you focused and out of the situation where you need to re-familiarize yourself continually, but also prevent you from stagnating (we all know if you get 'stuck' on something, it's easy to shelve everything).

[Bobotron]

@Arkandel
The floating rooms thing just makes me think of chat-based things like Wanton Wicked, where every room is a 'location' and there's a 'click to go to it by name' interface. What are you planning to do that's different from say, a digichat like WanWic set up in that manner, what are you doing that'll make it closer to a MU* in order to draw in people who would try it?

[Arkandel]

@Bobotron For starters, and to be honest, I'm not extremely worried about making things closer to a MU* per se just for the sake of drawing people based on the familiarity alone; if that was all that kept me from not having a grid at all I'd have spared myself a few weeks' worth of work and just wouldn't have an interactive one in-game, and let people pick them the way you describe.

But the grid is useful in retrospect. Immersion in the world is a big one, but I want to bake territories into the game from the ground up since then that opens the door to all sorts of automated resource-management options later on, which many kinds of games (L&L, Vampire, etc) could use.

To answer your question though, there is a hexagonal grid on which you can see 'neighborhoods'. On the most basic level a neighborhood is just a room that contains other rooms, which makes the interface more convenient if you want many locations geographically close to each other. So a neighborhood might be "The Eaton Mall" which contains a bunch of stores and businesses, "Casterly Rock" which again has living rooms, bedrooms, meeting rooms, etc and so on. You can see how many people are in a neighborhood right away, or mouseover one to get an image and general description as well as how many people are per location in it.

I'm currently working on the GUI to edit the grid and add custom non-interactive elements to it such as displaying roads but, more importantly, editing each hex square's properties. So the grid map could show the area around Casterly Rock is House Lannister territory - by color - and how much resource each square can produce, what its upkeep is, etc.

Games could then simply use this feature to display territory and that's it. Werewolf pack X has the light blue squares... done. It's a convenience. But if they want to they could also use the resource management for political/strategic purposes; maybe that 12,15 square of land is a copper mine, and if House Tyrell convinces the King to hand it over to them, they now increase their weekly yield of resources.

There are other advantages of coding this but they're out of scope for this answer... I hope it helped, and obviously if you have suggestions please feel free.