Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Need to Produce Content
When you're building a single-player game to be sold in retail stores, your job gen-
erally finishes when the gold master disc goes off to manufacturing. The players
buy the game and you can go off to work on another project.
Online games don't work this way; they earn money either through advertising rev-
enue, micropayments, or subscriptions. To keep people interested, you have to
change things, and that means producing new content on an ongoing basis. This is
expensive for the service provider and ties up skilled development staff. The prob-
lem is most obvious with persistent worlds, but even simple games need to be kept
fresh.
Mafia Wars
, a popular browser game available via the Facebook social net-
working web site, does not use 3D graphical environments or sounds, but the
developers regularly add new gear for players to buy and things for them to do.
Customer Service
All game companies require customer service staff to help players with problems,
but online games need far, far more of them. With offline games, players mostly
need help with technical difficulties; for gameplay problems, they can buy strategy
guides or find hints on the Internet. But in a live, online environment, players
expect to get help immediately, and they demand help for a much larger range of
issues than they do in offline games. Players expect customer service people not
only to solve technical problems but also to explain the user interface, answer ques-
tions about game content, and enforce justice by investigating and punishing
misbehavior by other players. With thousands of players logged on at any one time,
providing these services can become very expensive.
This section addresses some design issues peculiar to online games: the problems
presented by players arriving or disappearing during play, the pros and cons of real-
time versus turn-based play, things to consider when providing a chat feature, and
a variety of issues regarding security and the prevention of cheating.
Arriving Players
Players can log on wanting to play your game at any time, and the game must be
capable of dealing with them intelligently. In most noncomputer games, all the
players must be present at the beginning of the match or it won't be fair. In
Monopoly
,
for example, anyone who entered the game late would be at a significant disadvan-
tage—the others would have already grabbed the best properties, and the game's
built-in inflation would swiftly bankrupt newcomers.
The usual solution for this problem is to start new matches at frequent intervals
and to have a waiting area, or
lounge
, where the players can hang around while they
