KibaBase

Some time ago, I developed a clone called RubyTet. The game was pretty much identical to tetris’ gameplay, except it is poorer in its execution. The algorithm for scoring points and clearing a line is very slow. The down arrow mean pretty much instant drop. Even the blocks, which were very simple to draw, still managed to look ugly. The game background is very plain. Instead of just being ugly, it also gives people seizure because the colors of each shape weren’t even uniform.  The colors of each blocks were generated at random. The game speed grew too slow to provide the player much of an challenge. Later in the game, the speed then simply become too hard with a simple increase.

So I simply told myself that I have no intention of developing RubyTet ever again. It have too much of a quality problem and I rather develop other games. A few month later, I acquired a generous donation of graphical assets from Transberry, hailing from the freegamedev.net. (A game development network dedicated to gaming freedom) The graphics were simply superior to my programmer art. At that point, I decided to work on the game again in addition to my big game project, because I felt it was a waste not to utilize the new fanged graphics. From there, I set upon improving the quality of the execution, starting with making a smaller game field to play in.

However, something is amiss. RubyTet lacks the gameplay factor, even if I improved it to par to the original tetris game. The way tetris increases difficulty is to simply increase the speed. For players, it simply mean that they must solve the puzzles at a much faster rate, instead of  being confronted with ever increasing complexity in puzzle.  At that point, I didn’t know how to make a game profound. So I thought of stupid things like bombs and fighting characters. None of them were very good.

But I always watch things. When you watch things, you are bound to stumble upon some really ideas or some sort of catalyst. Although I don’t always watch all of my favorite developers carefully, somebody inevitably did.  Somebody watched Jason Rohrer. Before the debut of the game Primrose, an anonymous editor posted a wikilink on the Libregamewiki(my gaming encyclopedia) to the not yet created Primrose article on his biography.

Eventually, the game was released. I read much about Primrose and its interesting game mechanic so I can create the article. I was inspiried by the complexitiy that the game created through the interaction of rules. There where my thought proccess begin to clicks. Maybe I could try to design something like the game of Go? After all, the very simple rules of Go create complex gameplay. Still nothing. However, I was going in the right direction.

You would think I’ll be thinking game design all the time. No, I was thinking of something else. I read economics. While economic is not the study of  game mechanics, it help me tremedously to understand the various situation in which people win and lose. One example is the free market.

The free market is  a fascinating entity. It wasn’t like some war game that people imagined the market to be. Certainly, there were losers and winners in the market. The market do indeed roots out losers by a version of drawinistic natural selection. But it was much more than that. The drawinistic process wasn’t evil, it was simply telling people to allocate resource to different sector of our economy. If the bank manager sucks, the market is going to tell him that he ain’t any good at it and maybe he should try a different occupation. The free market manipulate people to their proper place in society and it does so constantly. The foundation of the free market is  the ability to trade. Trade by definition is benefical post ex-ante because simply because two people exchange for something of lesser desire to something of more desire(for example, games for money). This make the free market inheritenly a cooperative enterprise, even among competition. Even losers benefit.

Still. People cheat and lies. They sometime leech off one anothers because they think they might get away with it.  Sometime it work and sometime it doesn’t. In some situation, such as dealing illegal drugs, the temptation to kill one another is very high because who ever have control over certain territories get to make a whole lot of money.  Still, in other situation people will have lot to win by betraying their partners.

This created game theory, the study of strategic interaction between rational actors in different contexts.

At some point in my thought process over the week, I decided to relate the dynamic of the free market, cheating, and backstabbing into new game mechanic for RubyTet.

Thus, the new game design of RubyTet is going to be all about stragetic interaction with other entities. To work, the game will have to be multiplayer.  Players will learn how to intereact with each other, creating interesting dynamics. The object of the game, however, is not to kill other players, but to score even higher points.(Race against the clock & breaking record format) This give players extreme flexibility on how to interact with players. They must decide whether or not to work with a players to achevie higher points or to backstab them.

There is no fixed teams and there’s no indicators to tell whether people are friend or foes. This allowed people to carry out subtle backstabbing.

The game’s complexity come from special gems, which operate as terrorital controllers and allow players to interact with each other. These gems range from totally benign to malicious. For the moment, there’s only three gems.

Red gems are totally benign. They are used to marks shared territory and share points. Each red gem only occupied one block. They are used as a form of apologize, make friends, and antidote to yellow gems.

Blue gems are used for players to use maneuver tetris shapes to whoever territory they want. It could be an act of altruism or to block players from scoring. So when a shape contains a blue gem, this allow complex flexibility in movement. They can also be used to literally steal scores but they can also help set up a player to score big.

Yellow gems are the most complex and poisonous gems. They are used to take people’s territory away from them, allowing you to score bigger points, but they must be at least ten lines long to score anything. However, if used on your own territory, the yellow gem function as a line blocker, disallowing players from scoring a line in their own field.  They can only be canceled out with a red gem. If you want to secede your territory, you can also cancel it with a red gem.

Gems are distributed randomly based on how many lines cleared.(1 to 5 lines) The type of gems that appeared will be completely random. So different kind of gems will tempt players to different actions.

The final change in gameplay will be no increase in speed. Instead, players have only three seconds to determine the location of their shape. Points multipliers are determined by how fast they choose their positions. This force players to at least choose a place to drop shapes. However, as the game continues, players will be forced to process ever more complex relationship and interactions between others to determine the best course of action to get score.

The core mechanic of the game have not change much. People still lose when everything fill up. People still have to fit shapes into lines. There are still concerns though. With a 3 second time limit, the game might not be challenging enough. It might not be enough time to choose

Maybe this design of rubytet will be nothing more than random puzzle placing and deciding who to trust. Or it might actually result in some really cool patterns and strageties in the long run?

It might even be a total  failure in gameplay design. However, you never know until you try.

Still. This said something to me. It shows my interest in designing systems that are totally emergent based on atomic individuals. This interest is possibly a very good game design specialization point.

Where as people argued how weapons should be balanced in games where you simply lose and win, I delight in gameplay that lead people to create something totally awesome on their own.(I still like, love, and make zero-sum games though) I called them stand alone complex, the creation of something seemly purposeful but in actuality are the results of independent actors.(Guess where I got this term?) I supposed those stand alone complexes is one of the theme of anarchy.

Enough rambling for now. I have to code soon so I can implement this design later down the road.

~Kiba

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