Game Update
I did some testing this week and found a laundry list of issues with the game. It’s a little frustrating when I’ve been working on something for so long to find so many issues. Luckily we fixed the flanking issue which was working perfectly.
Here’s some of the things that came up.
Balancing experience so that the player can progress more quickly
Enemies are to strong in combat need to re-tool their stats
Not enough money is being produced by the player in stages
Lots of issues in the force organization screen as clicking on buttons isn’t responsive, and deleted characters aren’t staying deleted through saves
Some characters minimums aren’t set properly for class changes
I guess I should expect that this is just part of the process. I knew that there would be some balancing to do. It might be good to build some sort of editing screen for troops instead of depending on spreadsheets. It might also be good to build something to allow us to make characters more quickly.
Personal Update
I did a lot of extra work this week to flex my hours and have some additional time off this week. I’m excited to go see the fireworks with my girlfriend tonight. It’s been quite a number of years since I had the chance to watch them with a love interest. I’m sure it will be special.
I’ve taken to working on getting ready for Dungeons and Dragons as the Dungeon master. Today will be my first time running a session. I’m excited to finally be able to put all my Dwarven Forge terrain to good use. I’m a little nervous about it, but I think that overall it should be a good time.
I also managed to make some time to work with my friend Jacob on his board game. I think he has a lot of good things going on. We started our play testing session by talking about our views on development and I think it was important just like the book “Start with Why” talks about. We need to make sure that we both have the same “Why”. I showed him some of my arcade board game idea, and the more I play test it the less fun it gets. Then again I might need to play it with a human opponent to make it work. That might make all the difference.
Lots of set backs for my game development this week as I found all the bugs with my game, I had an embarrassing showing with my friend Jacob and my board game is really not working right now. I keep seeing the same thing with my players. They are having a hard time with the force organization screen. I figure I can either make a video to explain the game or I can try to develop an actual tutorial stage. I’m leaning towards an instructional video as I feel like I can build that more quickly and easily.
Game Development Insight - Dark Patterns
From competitive ELO there are a lot of dark patterns we can discuss. Interestingly a dark pattern surfaced for the phone game that I play on my phone this past week. It would seem that either players have figured out how to run bots in this 5v5 MOBA style game, which is quite a feat, or the company itself is sending bot teams into the battlegrounds because there aren’t enough players due to recent competition in the market place. Either way competitive matches became auto win for about 4 days with about 1/10 matches being against actual players. I could resist taking advantage however and I pushed up the ladder with a character that sees minimal play. Due to that I’m number 2 in the US on that character as per the way the competitive system in the game works. I wouldn’t say I’m actually the 2nd best at playing the character, I just took advantage of a system. Thus I don’t put much faith into the system giving real feedback on how good or bad a player is.
I suppose this would fit primarily into the dark pattern of grinding. Grind is a mechanic where players are required to perform repetitive tasks to gain experience points, levels, items, money or general power. Somewhere deep down inside most people we like feeling like we “earned” something. Grinding gives us that sensation and like most things I discuss I can see two sides to this issue. Typically, the negative to this is “stealing” players time to get them unnecessarily hooked on your product.
The thing is it would be simple to just give people items or money, but that doesn’t feel very satisfying. It’s a sure way to have people lose interest. A lot of playing any game comes down to a persons belief system. In the self development community this comes up a lot. It’s called “Limiting Beliefs.” Limiting beliefs are things that keep individuals controlled and in some ways they can be good or bad. Having a belief that driving to fast, or while texting is dangerous keeps other people from possible harm. Having a belief that no matter what a person does they won’t be successful will stop a person from trying at all.
The recurring theme I think that I’m going to have for most dark patterns is as long as the individual understands what they are getting into and what’s happening to them they can be fine, or even good. In this case I would say that I enjoy grinding for items in games most of the time. Other times it does push itself into becoming a chore and that’s where I should stop. Often I don’t though and that’s when it’s a problem. This is where I believe we can get into video game addiction. Basically when it’s not healthy to be gaming, and we do it anyway.