On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 20:19 +0200, david blanchard wrote: > I spent a little time today discussing with Aurélien on the current state of > hackit gameplay/context.
Cool! I've read the rest of the email before answering, and I really like most of the ideas. Not sure if you're still reading Aurelien, but would be good to discuss this with you too - there are many interesting leads. > - if we assume that the organization that contacts the player is some sort > of eco-warrior NGO, dedicated to many activities related to preserving the > environment (with some official and some secret activity), we can imagine > that there are different departments in this organization Excellent idea - it's true that it makes it much easier to understand, and it opens a few possibilities. Probably something to specify for an iteration, once we have tested a first set of missions. > - I like the idea of having, for each gauge (ie each department if we follow > the idea above), a set of repeatable missions related to the activity of the > department. Yes - I think we already agree here. > I see it like the TV show Alias, for those of you who know it. Nothing > really happened in this show imho, each episode followed the same structure > with a macguffin followed by some infiltration/fighting, with regular > variations related to the kind of macguffin and the place where the fight > took place We'll need to find the balance I think - repeatable missions are unavoidable if we want to maintain a constant stream of missions, but they can also get boring if repeated too much. Imho, we'll get a good feel of this once we have got enough missions in game. > - If we keep the mechanism of the 'scan' feature (do an action on a web page > with a probability of success, but not own the page - this is the 'hack' > action), we can rename it and use it for different purposes in missions : > clean a page from a virus, retrieve an information hidden in a page, attack > a web page and infect it (without gaining control over it). I've added the > latter on the mission page. Definitely. The only thing about this is that "retrieve an information in a page" or "attack a webpage and infect it" could be a result of a hack too I think. I'm not really clear on this yet. > - question about the failure conditions. Can the player fail a mission, I'm > not sure, what do you think ? Well to have a challenge, you must have a way to fail - but I think the important is to avoid punishments. There must be an incentive to achieve, but we'll need to be careful about the frustration failure can create. Btw, the best would be to have a way to adapt the difficulty to the skills of the player. Probably not a good example, but we could for example say that when you're very casual, you get lots of hints and help, but if you get better and succeed without hints, you get bigger rewards. > - The external threat : not very original, but why not start with something > like the trilateral commission > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission) , which could be a > quite natural opponent to the environmental NGO, and with enough power to > create some interesting confrontations. The player might not have direct > interactions with this opponent at the beginning of the game. Uh, not that bad - I didn't knew about this commission. I would *love* to get a few missions to explore what those bad guys are doing ;p Could be good to be tempted to join them at some point, too. > - I like the idea of using card stories in our game, as part of missions. It > would create a nice virtous circle ;) Main issue is how the storytelling can > incorporate it without making it look artificial. Yup, would be great, but it's not easy. : ) We'll probably find ways to cross over anyway - maybe a mission could ask you to look at a given game (to read the sentence, or to look at who played together, etc.). But it's hard - especially because being logged on Facebook without the plugin has technical challenges. > Maybe related to the funding of the organization, which uses opaque circuits > to fund itself, for instance by using web games where people pretend to pay > to play but actually secretly fund the organization. It's a little stretched imho, but it may fit in a mission - more something to keep in mind, and do when we see an opportunity I think. > - To finish with, another idea of mission that can be user generated (adding > it now to the missions page) : hiding information on behalf of the > organization. The organization does not want its secret info to be > centralized, so it's asking the player to hide it somewhere on the web, and > to give in exchange a secret code that should make it possible to retrieve > the information. Then, this can become a mission for other players, who must > retrieve the information with the code. Then we could follow the card > stories gameplay : if some players find the information but not all of them, > it means that it was hidden with the adequate level of difficulty, and the > player who hid the information wins. If no one or everyone finds it, then he > loses. What do you think ? It's interesting, and probably worth testing it yes. We'll need to be careful about exploits though - we don't want to end up having players creating games where only one friend would know the answer, which is otherwise impossible to find... Interestingly, Card Stories will give us some experience about that, probably : ) Xavier. _______________________________________________ Hackit Bar mailing list - [email protected] Wiki: http://community.hackit.cx/ List: http://community.hackit.cx/ml/ Forum: http://community.hackit.cx/forum/ Ideas: http://community.hackit.cx/ideas/ IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#politis
