A lot of people in that thread are having trouble staying on topic, so I thought maybe it would help if I created a different thread explicitly for people to post their opinions about exploitation of the proletariat, etc..., in. Since this is the off topic forum, post whatever you want, with respect for the rules of the SC2Mapster forums.
About Me
I have had a lifetime goal of becoming a game designer. When I was 18 I left for the US Air Force and spent 6 years there, including 2 in South Korea. I'm almost 30 now, married, and we are talking about having our first kid. I'm running out of time to start a real career as a designer and cannot teach myself everything you need to know to code an iPhone or Android game from nothing. I realize I will have to hire outside help no matter what approach I take.
I'm currently enrolled at Wright State University as a senior, though I will not be attending classes this winter quarter. Instead I will be working to earn enough money to hire the help I need to finish Crater of Carnage as well as save up for the future child before resuming class in spring quarter.
I sympathize with Occupy Wall St. and am a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I have bought food for Occupy Dayton and delivered it to them with my wife (we live near Dayton, OH). In short, no, I am not out to screw anyone who does quality work. I am very disillusioned with our political system in the US and follow Reddit Politics and World News sub-forums regularly. Fuck Fox News and Rupert Murdoch straight to hell. I am an atheist, and a vegetarian. I am not a democrat though, because they are just as owned by private interests as the republicans in the US.
Besides being a project manager for Crater of Carnage, I intend to write all the in game help text and background story, design all 10 initial heroes, and introduce a number of awesome changes that will make people rethink the genre.
Why Starcraft 2?
I've looked into Flash, Game Maker, Stencyl, XBLA, Steam, Unity 3D, Python, and Java, and decided the best platform for me to get started on is the SC2 Map Editor. The following are my primary justifications:
Existing stable network code and infrastructure - This is by far the most important and most difficult thing to achieve when creating online multiplayer games. Since the game I currently want to make requires these things, it makes perfect sense to use a platform that provides them for nearly free. Compare that to trying to create your own game for any of the platforms I mentioned above. You have to do your own net code in ALL of them.
It fits the genre of my game pretty well - I personally love the DotA-inspired genre called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) and feel there are ways I can help evolve it. Since this whole thing began in WC3 custom maps, I don't think there would be a more appropriate place to begin work on a new variation than SC2.
The only thing Battle.net does not offer that I would love to have is the ability to reconnect to games when you've disconnected, but, honestly that is not nearly as big a deal as being able to have observers and record your matches, 2 things League of Legends does not currently have implemented (observers are in beta!), but Battle.net does. My reasoning? The majority of gamers are not on 56k modems any more. They have always-on internet connections and more often than not, disconnections are either intentional, or their internet is so shaky they lag too much to play competitively. In both of these specific cases I am not interested in letting them reconnect anyway.
Design Philosophy and Goals
The overarching priority behind every design decision I make in Crater of Carnage is accessibility. This is a trait MOBAs are notoriously lacking in, leading to typically horrible communities of 14-20 year olds talking trash constantly at new players that are trying to learn a game that doesn't want to be learned. You must spend hours going over online resources to figure out how to play them properly. Valve is trying to address this in DotA 2 via infrastructure and a built in mentoring system, but this seems like a case of not seeing the forest for the tree. Riot has taken a better approach in my opinion by making LoL more accessible as a game, but it did not go far enough. There are 2 specific goals that I have in mind initially, both related to the difficulty new players have getting into the genre:
Clarify Hero Roles - Pick any MOBA you want, you HAVE to go online and do research to figure out how you're supposed to play any given hero in it. There is very little in the way of clear indicators whether your role is initiator, support, carry, etc... Part of this is because some MOBAs try not to pigeon hole their heroes, but usually it is just because it there were never any clear role definitions in the first place. My solution is to establish 4-5 clear archetypes that each hero will fall into, that have a unifying signature ability shared across all heroes within the archetype. This is akin to Summoner Spells in League of Legends, but less easily abused (EVERYONE TAKE FLASH) as they will be fixed to the hero. This is in addition to the traditional 3 skills and 1 ultimate skill exhibited by most MOBA heroes.
Last Hitting - Using LoL as an example again, they did a good thing for new players by taking away denies. It is incredibly counter-intuitive to think you are supposed to attack your own side, so by default they will not even attempt to. The next step is to eliminate last hitting period. How could a new player with zero understanding of DotA know that attacking the enemy team's creeps indiscriminately is a BAD THING sometimes? They have no idea they are just pushing the combat zone into a more favorable position for the enemy laners, and no idea that they are slowly losing the game with every creep death they did not directly claim, even if they did 90% of the damage to that creep. My solution to this is simple, if you are within XP range of a creep or enemy hero kill, you get full credit and any rewards that would typically be reserved for the player delivering the "last hit".
Differences From Blizzard DotA
You would think the elimination of fighting your own team for last hits would make this an ideal game to have support heroes in. I would not agree. Support heroes by definition are detrimental to this genre because they exist to help other players have more fun than you are having. A central figure in DotA-likes is the "star player" carrying their team to victory, but this only happens after their team has done a good job setting them up to do it. Doesn't seem fair does it? Why should one person on your team suddenly become the only one that matters just because they spent all game farming gold that you enabled them to farm?
Crater of Carnage will feature no "support" heroes, every archetype will have their own deadly niche and hard counter. Brawlers that move into combat and recover hp quickly, but are susceptible to enemy focus fire, tanky initiators that both soak and deal a large amount of damage, but are easily kited, and deadly casters that punish careless players relentlessly from afar, but cannot take a punch are just 3 examples of the types of heroes I am designing.
Items are another area that is going to be massively altered in Crater of Carnage, and will not really resemble typical MOBA items at all. Instead of having to memorize weird combinations of arbitrarily named "gear" that you do not actually see your character use, I am going to use a system of direct statistic upgrades. This will also allow me to combine multiple aspects of a hero into fewer stats, again something LoL has done recently with Attack Damage scaling both auto-attack damage and some abilities. I am going to take this further though, for example, Max HP and HP regeneration will be increased by the same upgrade-able Health statistic. Blizzard DotA has a similair approach, but will be more like DotA than LoL because spells will never gain power from items, except in the form of shorter cooldowns.
Have you seen the Starcraft Dota movies and the idea's they put forward there?
They also talk about being more accessible gameplay / removing last hitters / classifying hero roles / sharing money on hero kills / simplifying gear / ... .
Have you seen the Starcraft Dota movies and the idea's they put forward there?
They also talk about being more accessible gameplay / removing last hitters / classifying hero roles / sharing money on hero kills / simplifying gear / ... .
All good ideas, but they have not really released many concrete details outside of "towers will have limited ammo" and "there will be hero roles like damage dealer, tank, support, and siege". I am not really concerned with how Blizzard makes DotA, but I am looking forward to playing it and believe it will be a better game than DotA 2 :P
Ok was just checking to see if you weren't in for a nasty surprise.
They did say more concrete stuff though like that there will be only 3 stats which were health, damage and mastery ( at 28:49) and showed a picture of all the (19) items (Same movie at 29:55). The removing last hitters is also in that movie.
Really great stuff, I'm glad they agree with what I'm saying. It will be interesting to see how different our games will be when they are both playable. I'm glad they're willing to question what makes DotA fun more than Valve has :P I feel like DotA 2 is going to be CRUSHED by Blizzard DotA after seeing that. Icefrog is a hack and we'll all see it when DotA 2 flops.
I'd like to see more people such as the OP around here. Too many projects that don't have the proper fundamentals. People think "oh my game will be the next best thing" but fail to connect the dots. A proper design is paramount.
I know his opening post is short but clearly the guy is thinking in the right direction.
I like that you put together your thoughts and made a good thread about what you want instead of the thread you made in team recruitment.
This thread is far more encouraging.
I also like your thinking on items.
The thing I miss from every dota like map is designing heroes like in TGS :D
Thanks for the encouraging replies. I wanted to be able to talk to the community outside of the recruiting thread when I saw how many people had questions.
So lemme get this strait, you are making a map named Coc... lol
is this dotas CoC?
okay now that the jokes are out of the way,
I would highly suggest that you build up some plans using MS paint or Photoshop or something so whoever you pay can do this the way you want it.
I'll prolly get murdered for this by the people hoping to get paid but ... if you wait long enough you can take a lot of the triggers from Blizzard Dota (which I suppose to be open source like the previous maps) and modify them to your needs.
I'll prolly get murdered for this by the people hoping to get paid but ... if you wait long enough you can take a lot of the triggers from Blizzard Dota (which I suppose to be open source like the previous maps) and modify them to your needs.
If hes paying someone let them worry about it :P, Just because only taking one or two triggers could make the taken triggers not work right, it could cause alot of problems.
I'll prolly get murdered for this by the people hoping to get paid but ... if you wait long enough you can take a lot of the triggers from Blizzard Dota (which I suppose to be open source like the previous maps) and modify them to your needs.
Blizzard DotA will be great, and maybe when it comes out I can update my map to take advantage of the new editor features to make Crater of Carnage even better. We all know Blizzard and release dates though, so I am hoping to have a testable version of my map ready within the next 2 months.
Really great stuff, I'm glad they agree with what I'm saying. It will be interesting to see how different our games will be when they are both playable. I'm glad they're willing to question what makes DotA fun more than Valve has :P I feel like DotA 2 is going to be CRUSHED by Blizzard DotA after seeing that. Icefrog is a hack and we'll all see it when DotA 2 flops.
People on steam will flock to Dota 2 no matter how much people on Battle.net flock to BDota.
Dota 2 if they don't flock to Super Monday Night Combat which is looking promising to me as a bridge between TF2 and Dota- a rather clever move in my opinion.
Anyway, like I said before, Battle.net doesn't really have a market for it's maps and mods, and B.net 2.0 is kind of in a rut with it's user base, not many users and most of the ones that do play only play SC2. Trying to make a map for the game before they have released some kind of marketing tools so you can at least evaluate the worth.
The current system just doesn't work for publishing maps. Not for anyone.
That much being said, if you are interested in making a proof of concept or prototype using World Editor it could definitely be worth it if you don't spend too much. Granted if blizzard doesn't change their policies and start taking ownership of everything people make on world edit. Doesn't seem like the case since they didn't stop Riot or IceFrog.
If you still want to consider multiplayer for something like Unity3d you can look into stuff like smartfoxserver. I've been contemplating using it to make an mmorpg but it could also be used to make a basic moba. The Interactivity might a little fudgy but it would at least give you something to publish on facebook where you could really get people to play your game. It has a 100 concurrent user license that's free for evaluation and development.
Granted if blizzard doesn't change their policies and start taking ownership of everything people make on world edit. Doesn't seem like the case since they didn't stop Riot or IceFrog.
Blizzard can't own your Intellectual Property (ideas) hence why Riot and IceFrog were never hassled.
It would be a stretch but it could be possible. They could decide to start charging for using the tools as a prototype development platform. Not that they would.
That much being said, if you are interested in making a proof of concept or prototype using World Editor it could definitely be worth it if you don't spend too much. Granted if blizzard doesn't change their policies and start taking ownership of everything people make on world edit. Doesn't seem like the case since they didn't stop Riot or IceFrog.
If you still want to consider multiplayer for something like Unity3d you can look into stuff like smartfoxserver. I've been contemplating using it to make an mmorpg but it could also be used to make a basic moba. The Interactivity might a little fudgy but it would at least give you something to publish on facebook where you could really get people to play your game. It has a 100 concurrent user license that's free for evaluation and development.
Well yes, a lot of my motivation is just to show I have what it takes to design really fun experiences, and enough sense of balance to create highly competitive games. If my map does not take the world by storm I can deal with that, because I know the real money is in phone apps and Steam these days for independent developers. I choose Battle.net and SC2 because they are all I can afford to develop on for now, and have the right built in infrastructure to support this particular type of experience.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Game Mechanics Thread:
http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/development/map-development/29495-crater-of-carnage-play-mechanics/
Team Thread:
http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/general/team-recruitment/29176-crater-of-carnage-team-thread-positions-filled/
A lot of people in that thread are having trouble staying on topic, so I thought maybe it would help if I created a different thread explicitly for people to post their opinions about exploitation of the proletariat, etc..., in. Since this is the off topic forum, post whatever you want, with respect for the rules of the SC2Mapster forums.
About Me
I have had a lifetime goal of becoming a game designer. When I was 18 I left for the US Air Force and spent 6 years there, including 2 in South Korea. I'm almost 30 now, married, and we are talking about having our first kid. I'm running out of time to start a real career as a designer and cannot teach myself everything you need to know to code an iPhone or Android game from nothing. I realize I will have to hire outside help no matter what approach I take. I'm currently enrolled at Wright State University as a senior, though I will not be attending classes this winter quarter. Instead I will be working to earn enough money to hire the help I need to finish Crater of Carnage as well as save up for the future child before resuming class in spring quarter.
I sympathize with Occupy Wall St. and am a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I have bought food for Occupy Dayton and delivered it to them with my wife (we live near Dayton, OH). In short, no, I am not out to screw anyone who does quality work. I am very disillusioned with our political system in the US and follow Reddit Politics and World News sub-forums regularly. Fuck Fox News and Rupert Murdoch straight to hell. I am an atheist, and a vegetarian. I am not a democrat though, because they are just as owned by private interests as the republicans in the US.
Besides being a project manager for Crater of Carnage, I intend to write all the in game help text and background story, design all 10 initial heroes, and introduce a number of awesome changes that will make people rethink the genre.
Why Starcraft 2?
I've looked into Flash, Game Maker, Stencyl, XBLA, Steam, Unity 3D, Python, and Java, and decided the best platform for me to get started on is the SC2 Map Editor. The following are my primary justifications:
The only thing Battle.net does not offer that I would love to have is the ability to reconnect to games when you've disconnected, but, honestly that is not nearly as big a deal as being able to have observers and record your matches, 2 things League of Legends does not currently have implemented (observers are in beta!), but Battle.net does. My reasoning? The majority of gamers are not on 56k modems any more. They have always-on internet connections and more often than not, disconnections are either intentional, or their internet is so shaky they lag too much to play competitively. In both of these specific cases I am not interested in letting them reconnect anyway.
Design Philosophy and Goals
The overarching priority behind every design decision I make in Crater of Carnage is accessibility. This is a trait MOBAs are notoriously lacking in, leading to typically horrible communities of 14-20 year olds talking trash constantly at new players that are trying to learn a game that doesn't want to be learned. You must spend hours going over online resources to figure out how to play them properly. Valve is trying to address this in DotA 2 via infrastructure and a built in mentoring system, but this seems like a case of not seeing the forest for the tree. Riot has taken a better approach in my opinion by making LoL more accessible as a game, but it did not go far enough. There are 2 specific goals that I have in mind initially, both related to the difficulty new players have getting into the genre:
Differences From Blizzard DotA
You would think the elimination of fighting your own team for last hits would make this an ideal game to have support heroes in. I would not agree. Support heroes by definition are detrimental to this genre because they exist to help other players have more fun than you are having. A central figure in DotA-likes is the "star player" carrying their team to victory, but this only happens after their team has done a good job setting them up to do it. Doesn't seem fair does it? Why should one person on your team suddenly become the only one that matters just because they spent all game farming gold that you enabled them to farm?
Crater of Carnage will feature no "support" heroes, every archetype will have their own deadly niche and hard counter. Brawlers that move into combat and recover hp quickly, but are susceptible to enemy focus fire, tanky initiators that both soak and deal a large amount of damage, but are easily kited, and deadly casters that punish careless players relentlessly from afar, but cannot take a punch are just 3 examples of the types of heroes I am designing.
Items are another area that is going to be massively altered in Crater of Carnage, and will not really resemble typical MOBA items at all. Instead of having to memorize weird combinations of arbitrarily named "gear" that you do not actually see your character use, I am going to use a system of direct statistic upgrades. This will also allow me to combine multiple aspects of a hero into fewer stats, again something LoL has done recently with Attack Damage scaling both auto-attack damage and some abilities. I am going to take this further though, for example, Max HP and HP regeneration will be increased by the same upgrade-able Health statistic. Blizzard DotA has a similair approach, but will be more like DotA than LoL because spells will never gain power from items, except in the form of shorter cooldowns.
Have you seen the Starcraft Dota movies and the idea's they put forward there?
They also talk about being more accessible gameplay / removing last hitters / classifying hero roles / sharing money on hero kills / simplifying gear / ... .
All good ideas, but they have not really released many concrete details outside of "towers will have limited ammo" and "there will be hero roles like damage dealer, tank, support, and siege". I am not really concerned with how Blizzard makes DotA, but I am looking forward to playing it and believe it will be a better game than DotA 2 :P
Ok was just checking to see if you weren't in for a nasty surprise.
They did say more concrete stuff though like that there will be only 3 stats which were health, damage and mastery ( at 28:49) and showed a picture of all the (19) items (Same movie at 29:55). The removing last hitters is also in that movie.
@RandomNoExit: Go
Thanks, didn't see that video yet :D
Really great stuff, I'm glad they agree with what I'm saying. It will be interesting to see how different our games will be when they are both playable. I'm glad they're willing to question what makes DotA fun more than Valve has :P I feel like DotA 2 is going to be CRUSHED by Blizzard DotA after seeing that. Icefrog is a hack and we'll all see it when DotA 2 flops.
Wrong forum, This should have been put in project workplace, or general.
Also I hope you checked out Unreal Devs Kit. It can be very useful and can be brought to a much wider user base.
I like you Lone Vandal. No homo.
I'd like to see more people such as the OP around here. Too many projects that don't have the proper fundamentals. People think "oh my game will be the next best thing" but fail to connect the dots. A proper design is paramount.
I know his opening post is short but clearly the guy is thinking in the right direction.
@LoneVandal: Go
I like that you put together your thoughts and made a good thread about what you want instead of the thread you made in team recruitment.
This thread is far more encouraging.
I also like your thinking on items.
The thing I miss from every dota like map is designing heroes like in TGS :D
Thanks for the encouraging replies. I wanted to be able to talk to the community outside of the recruiting thread when I saw how many people had questions.
So lemme get this strait, you are making a map named Coc... lol
is this dotas CoC?
okay now that the jokes are out of the way, I would highly suggest that you build up some plans using MS paint or Photoshop or something so whoever you pay can do this the way you want it.
I'll prolly get murdered for this by the people hoping to get paid but ... if you wait long enough you can take a lot of the triggers from Blizzard Dota (which I suppose to be open source like the previous maps) and modify them to your needs.
If hes paying someone let them worry about it :P, Just because only taking one or two triggers could make the taken triggers not work right, it could cause alot of problems.
Blizzard DotA will be great, and maybe when it comes out I can update my map to take advantage of the new editor features to make Crater of Carnage even better. We all know Blizzard and release dates though, so I am hoping to have a testable version of my map ready within the next 2 months.
I lol'd.
I'll say it again, Icefrog is the next John Romero :3
People on steam will flock to Dota 2 no matter how much people on Battle.net flock to BDota.
Dota 2 if they don't flock to Super Monday Night Combat which is looking promising to me as a bridge between TF2 and Dota- a rather clever move in my opinion.
Anyway, like I said before, Battle.net doesn't really have a market for it's maps and mods, and B.net 2.0 is kind of in a rut with it's user base, not many users and most of the ones that do play only play SC2. Trying to make a map for the game before they have released some kind of marketing tools so you can at least evaluate the worth.
The current system just doesn't work for publishing maps. Not for anyone.
That much being said, if you are interested in making a proof of concept or prototype using World Editor it could definitely be worth it if you don't spend too much. Granted if blizzard doesn't change their policies and start taking ownership of everything people make on world edit. Doesn't seem like the case since they didn't stop Riot or IceFrog.
If you still want to consider multiplayer for something like Unity3d you can look into stuff like smartfoxserver. I've been contemplating using it to make an mmorpg but it could also be used to make a basic moba. The Interactivity might a little fudgy but it would at least give you something to publish on facebook where you could really get people to play your game. It has a 100 concurrent user license that's free for evaluation and development.
Blizzard can't own your Intellectual Property (ideas) hence why Riot and IceFrog were never hassled.
It would be a stretch but it could be possible. They could decide to start charging for using the tools as a prototype development platform. Not that they would.
Well yes, a lot of my motivation is just to show I have what it takes to design really fun experiences, and enough sense of balance to create highly competitive games. If my map does not take the world by storm I can deal with that, because I know the real money is in phone apps and Steam these days for independent developers. I choose Battle.net and SC2 because they are all I can afford to develop on for now, and have the right built in infrastructure to support this particular type of experience.