| KEY TOPICS -
Technical Considerations -
Where to Start? -
Building the Right Tools -
Host Hardware and Bandwidth -
Player Hardware and Software -
Customer Support: Dude, Where's My Tools? After some six months, plenty of skull sweat, and arguing with stakeholders about the necessity of this or that feature, the team is finally ready to settle in and begin building the game. At this point, the routine should be fairly easy because the design process has laid out a guide map of what needs to be built when and how many people it will take at each stage. Naturally, there will be problems; nothing in this industry ever goes exactly according to plan, and changes will have to be made along the way. With the completed game and technical designs to guide you, however, these dislocations should be solved easily so that development can proceed. As you've probably noticed by now, everything about designing one of these games is a tradeoff between creative design and the plain technical capability to pull off that design. We'll start with the technical considerations, work our way into design issues, and finish up with the testing process and preparing for the launch. This chapter is not designed to be an exact roadmap of how design and development work. Experienced online game developers will sneer at most of what you'll read as basic and, in truth, it is. As we note elsewhere, this chapter alone deserves its own 350-page book, so it is impossible to be complete and definitive in the space allotted. This chapter, at first glance, may look woefully incomplete to those in-the-know. Thankfully, three of the most experienced people in the industry, Gordon Walton, executive producer for The Sims Online , Dr. Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD, and Scott Hartsman, technical director for Verant's EverQuest , agreed to look over the book and point out any mistakes we'd made. Any errors remaining in this chapter belong to the authors, not the technical reviewers. A Note on the Buzzword "Community" Throughout the remainder of the book, you'll be seeing the word "community" quite a bit. There is a misconception in the online game industry and, indeed, in the online/Internet services industry as a whole, that a product or piece of content builds a community around it. Nothing could be further from the truth; the community already exists and may gather at your game, if you provide the proper tools. This may seem like nitpicking, but understanding the difference is crucial to success in the online game industry. Many initial game portal efforts, such as TEN (now pogo.com) and Mplayer, failed by assuming they could create a community by just slapping together a portal and some interface software. This was the "If we build it, they will come" mentality . What they discovered , after throwing nearly $100 million collectively down a rat hole, was that they should have been building tools to facilitate the needs of existing communities ”the community center, if you will. A site must build a community center with a suite of tools that is easy to learn and use, and then make sure the customers know they exist. When the customers know that the tools and center exist, whole communities of gamers ”be they guilds , teams , or squads from other games or one of the broad market niches ”will migrate to see if your community center is easy to learn and use and provides the communications and information tools they require to maintain their existing communities. If it does, and some of the community leaders pick up on them and use them, the community begins to migrate; if it doesn't, they migrate to the best alternative. Among the current portals and individual online games, Microsoft's Zone (or The Zone, found at www.zone.com) is one of the better examples of providing the necessary tools to facilitate a community. The Zone should be closely studied with an eye toward improving the tools and adding new ones, such as web page hosting for teams and role-playing guilds. One of the less stellar examples is Ultima Online ( UO ) ; the chat tools built into the game at launch were so bad that the vast majority of regular players used AOL's ICQ instant messaging software to communicate during play instead. | What we really hope to accomplish is something that has yet to be done, and that is just list the general, minimum requirements for getting through design and development, show where the quicksand pits are, and give some advice on how to avoid the problems others have experienced. |
