Alex Le’s Blog

I am reading this book called “Designing Virtual World” by Richard Bartle about, obviously, fundamentals of designing a virtual world. I got an ebook so I couldn’t print the entire book out. I began on chapter 3 and read about different characters. The author provides a very nice chart of the 4 quadrants of different type of players (Socializer, Explorer, Killer, and Achiever.) Each type, occupies a quadrant and can interact with each other via “acting on” or “interacting with”. More killers will result in less Socializers/ Explorer, but may increase the achiever, whose focus is to achieve a specific goal.

I can’t help thinking about World of Wacraft which I think I can safely consider as one of the most successful MMORPG right now (FYI: 3/5 of my roomates are playing it, each willing to pay $15.00/month, spending full-day leveling up his character.) Based on the aforementioned aspects of a virtual world, WoW got a little (or a lot) for everyone:

1. For Killers: PvP/ PvE
2. For Socializers: Forming Guilds, group for questing, trading.
3. For Achievers: Questing, leveling up, hunting for new weapons.
4. For Explorers: Questing, Instances, and a ubber large map to roam.

Hence WoW can attract a large number of players both guys and girls and a wide audience. I also come to know that one of the 50-something network administrator guys in my college actually plays WoW. The age distribution is in fact quite wide: highschool, college age to 50-something.

So think about Wars of Earth: What am I offering to the players, compared to WoW:

1. For Killers: PvP/ PvE
2. For Socializers: Forming Guilds, group for questing, trading.
3. For Achievers: Questing, leveling up, hunting for new weapons.
4. For Explorers: Questing, Instances, and a ubber large map to roam (there is no map or geographical boundary for WoE: it’s the earth).

Based on the comparison, I can easily tell that we need to add more community features to the game to attract the Socializer audiences. I am still thinking about adding quests to a Web-based game: global quests for everyone to take (then how can they do it? hunting for Mobs or items?) or individual baby quests which can potentially lead to a mission (a better story line for the game is also required here.) NeoPets actually have quests for players but since I haven’t tried it, I am not sure about their approach, but I guess they have places for people to go hunt for items.

For the Explorers, since this is a 2D, text-based game, it would be hard to create a virtual map. My idea is to build a 2D Ajax or Flash application to visualize the world in a similar fashion as of Heroes III or IV. Here comes the technical challenges: how to present the mobs, keeping track of positions, synching everyone’s movements on the maps, collision detections, path finding algorithms, etc. It is not an easy challenge, otherwise people would have done it. I know MySQL has an implementation of GIS functions, but I don’t know how to implement or to an extend, how I can use it for the game. Nonetheless, MySQL can be use to contain the maps (the coordinations of objects, geometry, etc.)

Anyway, I am still digging the book, so far so good. But if you expect the book to tell you what to do, then you’ll be dissapointed. It mainly talks about the fundamentals of making up a virtual world by asking questions and providing insights on the subject. And I have to admit that it’s hard to play the role of a creationism god.