| Author: | Jeff Vogel |
|---|
When I am not dispensing my considerable wisdom through this column, I spend my time and earn my money designing fantasy role-playing games. Therefore, I would like to write one column while wearing my Professional Game Designer (tm) hat and describe to you what I think would be the Best Computer Game Ever.
In college, I spent a lot of time playing a classic old text MUD called LPMud. Like most MUDs (MUD standing for Multi-User Dungeon, a more low-tech version of the massively multiplayer games we all hold dear), LPMud was all text. So, if you wanted to kill an orc, you typed "kill orc" and carnage ensued. Yes, this was lame.
Anyway, LPMud was pretty pure hack and slash. Basically, you spent most of your time standing in a room waiting for a monster to appear. When it did, you killed it, took its loot, and waited for it to reappear. If you died, you lost some experience. Otherwise, you just kept killing the same monster.
For people with a combination of common sense and lack of EverQuest experience, I must take a moment to point out that some people find this fun.
The best thing about the LPMud in which I played was what happened when, after many, many hours of play, you reached Level 20. When this happened, you were allowed to build your own dungeon. That's right. If you knew enough C++, the people running the game allowed you to program, stock, and open your own dungeon. You had earned the right to become a DM.
Lots of people at my school did this. We made our own dungeons. Many sucked. Many more were cool. Mine, being made by a larval Professional Game Designer, was fantastic.
I want this game. Someone should do this again. It should be like EverQuest or Ultima Online. You have to play it for many, many hours. Then, when you reach a certain level, you can use tools that ship with the game to make a dungeon for other people to play. They could enter your area from the general game world, wander around, and return to the world at large.
OK. That's the obvious part - The Basic Idea. But now clever game design has to take place. Otherwise, things get really stupid, really fast. One idiot might make a small cave full of monsters that slaughter anyone who steps inside. Someone else could make unending empty corridors and bore people to death. Some munchkin would make goblins that dropped Swords of Ultimate Death. And we can't have live human GMs checking on the dungeons. It would be too much effort. So how do we get this to work? How do we get fun, balanced dungeons and enable the creative designers to rise to the top?
The answer, I believe, is money. To build your dungeon, your character must amass money. Lots of it. Every corridor, every door, every statue, every trap costs you. If someone kills a goblin and gets five gold, that's money out of your pocket. If someone kills a goblin and gets a magic sword, that's lots of money out of your pocket. If you run out of money, your dungeon is instantly shuttered and everyone goes elsewhere.
But, on the other hand, if a character dies in your dungeon, you get a slice of that character's cash. That's your motivation to build a dungeon in the first place, and the source of the lucre with which you will be expanding it.
And, finally, outside the entrance to any user-made dungeon, there will be a sign with the dungeon's statistics. You will be able to read it and see how many people have been in it and how many have died and also get a rating of approximately how lethal the dungeon is. And, finally, players everywhere will be able to get a list of what the largest and most popular dungeions are, so that they can, if they want, skip the chaff and sample the work of the best designers.
So there's your play balance. Dungeon too hard? People get warned off. Dungeon too easy? The costs will bankrupt the maker and the dungeon gets closed down.
I think that this is a great idea. I think that dreams of being the lord of one's own domain will bring slavering gamer geeks from all over the world. I think that the many hours they will have to play to get the right to make a dungeon, followed by the many hours of struggling to finance it, will keep people hooked for a long time. I think getting people to generate content themselves can potentially make the publisher's life easier. I'm sure there will be guilds that pool their money to make huge areas. And eventually, with work, I am sure that some of the user-made dungeons will actually be pretty good.
Maybe players could even make their own towns, with profit-generating shops that they stock themselves. Who knows?
In closing, I would like to say to any prospective publishers out there that, if you make this game, you will lose a ton of money. Therefore, I humbly suggest that you send me a small payment and, in return, I will not design it for you.
You're welcome.