DEVGAME: GameBrain

Showing posts with label GameBrain. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

GameBrain: the time penalty

In designing the two-tier answer system for GameBrain, it was obvious that correct fill-in-the-blank answers had to be worth more than correct multiple-choice answers because they are much harder. However, when we decided to incentivize faster multiple-choice answers by reducing the value of a correct answer by as much as fifty percent if the maximum amount of time (10 seconds) was utilized, this raised the question of whether we should apply the same point-reduction to the fill-in-the-blank answers as well.

However, we ultimately decided against that, because it would give an advantage to players who read faster and type faster. Reading faster isn't much of an advantage in multiple choice because the question has already been read and the timer starts anew when one moves from FIB to MC. But typing faster is a big advantage, particularly when there could be a 12-point difference in six seconds. So, we decided to keep a flat point reward for fill-in-the-blank no matter what portion of the 12 seconds is used, and start the penalty gradient for multiple choice at the 3-second mark.

This playtests well, and the only potential issue that remains is if there should be any penalty for waiting most of the 12 seconds one has to do FIB before hitting the spacebar and moving to multiple choice.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

The Q&A Forge

Trivia Crack has a feature called Question Factory that permits people to submit and rate trivia questions, a feature that we had independently determined would be desirable. However, because our questions combine fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice, and because we have a much more sophisticated gameplay structure, GameBrain's question submission architecture has to account for some complications that the Question Factory does not.

For example, once the first question for a game is entered successfully, we no longer need the information about the release year, genre, platform, and so forth, and it would be irritating to have to enter it every time, which means that it is necessary to a) skip ahead to the question difficulty, and b) provide a means of checking the game database to see if that information is already there when a user is entering the name of the game for the first time in a session.

Here is the design question of the day. Many games have multiple platforms and some games have multiple genres: Combat Mission is both a wargame and a strategy game. So, would you:

Require the user to enter one platform and one genre manually?
Require the user to select one platform and one genre from preset pull-down menus?
Require the user to enter one platform and one genre, but permit manual additions?
Permit the user to enter as many platforms and genres as he sees fit from preset pull-down menus?

This is not a feature that will concern 99 percent of all GameBrain players. But it requires some design consideration nevertheless. We've already made our decision and the system is already running, but I thought it might prove to be an interesting discussion. For those who are curious to see it in action, or who might like to submit a question or two, I will post a link to the GameBrain Q&A Forge sometime in the next week.

With regards to the 3-Strike Challenge, a few notes on the excellent comments:

The solution is to remove points altogether and fully design the game around the '3-strike-loss' idea.
The problem here is that you have two scoring systems that are at odds with one another: points and strikes. The points act as a reward and the strikes act as a punishment, but only strikes are able to end a round and only points are able to determine the winner.

This would be a very bad solution and would simplify the game in an undesirable manner. Nor is there a problem. Contra some commenters' opinions, combining strikes and points is the basis for many very successful games, beginning, for example, with baseball. This may not be obvious since baseball calls its strikes "outs".

Clarification: A baseball game ends when the losing team reaches 27 outs. This should not be confused with a batter being called out after three strikes. If the home team, which bats second, is ahead when the visiting team completes its 9th inning by reaching its 27th out, the game ends at that point. If the home team is behind, the game ends when it reaches its 27th out.

Could you split this out into separate modes?

Yes, actually, we intend to permit Pro players to decide if their matches will be time-based or point-based. Pro players will be given considerably more ability to bias the match either towards their own strengths or away from their opponent's strengths. For regular players, we'll allow them to simply name their favorite game, so the first five questions they face will concern either that game or the game selected by their opponent. This has the additional benefit of making what is a pretty difficult game a little more accessible for even the casual gamer.

The main problem is that the system is a competitive PvE disguised as a PvP. A player doesn't choose questions for an enemy, it's more like a multiplayer tetris with two bins side by side. I don't think it's viable.

First, this is not a problem, second, while the player can't choose a precise question for his opponent in GameBrain, he can choose the game, the genre, the platform, and the decade by playing cards. As for the idea that it's not viable, this simply shows a complete ignorance of the history of the games industry. From Trivial Pursuit to The Most Difficult Quiz in the World, competitive quiz games have been not only successful, but extraordinarily popular.

What a lot of the commenters don't appear to have given sufficient consideration is to the fact that the primary object of GameBrain is not to determine the winner as quickly as possible, but rather, to make the competition fun for both players as long as possible during the process of determining the more knowledgeable and more tactically skilled player. We are only discussing the multiplayer game here, after all; single-player Mastery mode will probably be the most common way the game is played. And since the player can collect and keep cards in multiplayer, cards that he can use in Mastery mode, the stronger player has a material incentive to keep playing as long as possible, not only to maximize his score and obtain a higher rating, but to give himself the chance to collect more cards.

One of the key things to keep in mind when discussing game design issues: successful precedent trumps theory every single time. One of the things I find most frustrating in the development process is when producers or programmers want to dispute the idea that a feature or a concept will work when it has already been proven to be viable by a successful game with which they happen to be unfamiliar. That is why a deep knowledge of game history is so important for any game designer.

Monday, May 1, 2017

3-strike challenge

The multiplayer competition in GameBrain presently takes the form of a 3-strike system. The object is to wrack up as many points as you can before you, or your opponent gets three strikes by answering three questions incorrectly. There is, however, a design problem with this. First, if you happen to get a big enough lead on your opponent, you have an incentive for intentionally answering the next 1-3 questions incorrectly, thereby ending the game and sealing your victory.

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this de facto mercy option, and it does present the player who is ahead with the choice between a) taking the win at a lower point score and b) playing on and taking the risk of falling behind, it feels wrong to create a gameplay structure where the winning player is encouraged to end most games by intentionally providing wrong answers.

So, there are at least four alternatives.

Require a player to win with either a pass or a correct answer. The downside of this is that it give the player a free strike so long as the opponent gets the answer wrong.
Award the player points for his opponent's strikes; this will not eliminate the problem entirely, but will require a bigger lead before a player contemplates intentionally accepting strikes. The downside of this is that it will give the leading player a bigger lead by virtue of getting points for his opponent's strikes earlier in the game, so it's largely a wash unless the strikes are progressively awarded more points so the third strike is worth more than the first one.
Let the winning player continue playing and adding to his score until he hits three strikes. The downside to this is that the losing player is not going to want to sit around and do nothing while he waits to see how badly he lost.
Throw out strikes altogether and simply play to specified time or point totals.

Discuss amongst yourselves. In a future post, I'll discuss your solutions and reveal how I decided to handle the 3-strike challenge.