Introduction to Infrastructure Systems
Roleplaying games share a common set of game systems: character classes, skills, abilities, items, zones, monsters, NPCs, quests … the systems that define player characters and the world around them. If you’re building a game that you plan to kick out the door and never touch again, you can get away with developing content for those systems with hard-to-maintain scripts. But if you’re building a game that you want to sustain as a service, the initial system design takes more forethought.
These “infrastructure systems” are the systems that support content, and content creation and maintenance never ends. They’re the systems we’ll continue to work with, day in and day out, for the lifetime of the service, in every single patch. From experience as MMO developers, we know that player retention improves when updates are faster. And from our experience as MMO players, we know that new content is just plain fun to play.
A great pipeline starts with a system design document. Remember that we’re talking about the system itself, not the content within it. The audience is the programmer who’s implementing the system, and he doesn’t care about the backstory or want a full list of every item in the game. The bulk of this document is a short and sweet bullet-point outline of the system requirements – and most of that is a list of the data we need to define for each bit of content.
We’ll also think about how we want to interact with the system’s data while we create and maintain it. Regardless of the specific system, the data must be easy to query – finding bad data to fix submitted bugs, and searching for potentially bad data to fix before it even gets that far. And compartmentalized data is important too, so changes to a single piece of data don’t have a chance to break anything else.
The document should also discuss tool design, though it’s not strictly part of the system either. It’s good to think about tools design upfront because it ensures that we think through the complete content creation and maintenance process before the system is implemented. It also helps to make sure that we didn’t forget anything in the requirements.
We kick that document over to the coders and a little while later, they kick a completed system back. Now, we start filling in the data. Fortunately, since we spent some time thinking about data needs during the documentation process, the coders have given us something that meets those needs and will be a pleasure to work with for years to come. Even when the live team is three people working in a cardboard box next to the train tracks behind the office. (I kid … but better to be safe than sorry!)
To learn more about designing content infrastructure for the long haul, come see my talk at this year’s ION Game Conference in Seattle, May 13-15.
- Sara Jensen Schubert
April 4th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I just love how you continue to show us steps in your development process. It proves to me that once your game is out it will become great just because of the willingness to have blogs like these. I hope you continue to keep them even after the game releases. “……Even when the live team is three people working in a cardboard box next to the train tracks behind the office.” I sure hope that that doesn’t happen but that sure is commitment.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Correct me if I’m wrong but in analyzing this infrastructure system, it looks very WoW-ish. I mean you even have an area called PVP:BGs (BG = Battlegrounds) with “Instancing” tied into it. If this game is going to primarily instanced PVP and you don’t have some form of world PVP battles then I think you could be crushing a lot of people’s hearts. Particularly since the visuals and story concept for the game look truly unbelievable.
Basically what I’m looking for is something like Warbirds in space or Microsoft Allegiance taken to the MMO level. I mean it sounds like you have certain components of this, like with crafting possibly relating to a tech tree, but the community/factional war aspects are what I can’t find any details on. I mean you said involvement happens at all levels (i.e. “player-vs-player combat that serves all levels of skill “) but the question is “Are all level of skills contributing to one battle or frontline and is individual contributing in their own way, no matter how small the contribution?” In effect, this gives the individual the feel as though they are truly contributing to ongoing global community/faction goal.
And that’s the problem with the World of Warcraft. The PVP battlegrounds are basically the equivalent of individual FPS maps with individual rewards. These individual battles need to directly influence and affect the greater global battle in some way.