Oni Horan

It was my intention to try this with our cardbased game, LOGOS cards, its in theory a turnbased combat system. There's another cardgame in SL, Combat Cards, which I would also consider a turnbased fighting game and has been around successfully for a long time. I believe for Second Life its more suited for fighting, even though not many try to explore this direction, but I'm sure that has something to do with the fact that you need to develop extremly complex scripts to get it working.

I didn't bring up donations for a good reason. Of course it's just my personal observation, but donations are imo a very flimsy way to fund a project in SL. When a project is new and exciting people don't hesitate to support it with money, however as times and freshness passes donations always go back, cutting off the financial liability of the project. I've seen it happen literally to countless of Sims and places which is why it's something I would never bother to try myself.

I'm not leaving here without pointing out something that gets painfully overlooked all the time. Gamedesign can be a complicated process, simply trying out an idea can take a lot of work and effort. For this reason the gamedev community often uses specific script languages that are developed to allow them to express basic game ideas with only a few simple commands. Mostly that happens in simplistic 2D spaces, with bare interactivity, think Flash. Something I never really hear however is people using Second Life for prototyping game ideas, but personally I am absolutely convinced that it's the ideal environment. LSL really is a very simple scripting language and because SL has a sophisticated physics engine and Avatarsystem, it becomes really easy to try out even more complicated 3D ideas here. Personally I have worked on a few very impressive little projects that never got into a finished phase, but nowhere else have I ever been able to put together such concepts with such ease. some things just don't work out for SL as a finished product or game, but that doesn't mean you can't try them out very well here. I kind of hope that Game Designers will discover SL for what it is eventually, a big sandbox to try out endless amounts of ideas in with a big audience that is eagerly waiting for things to do.

From my personal impression people don't like to hear about it. SL-Usership is free, so people usually expect most things associated with it as free as well. Developing games is a very long and complicated process however and from the other perspective, the one of content creators, SL is not free at all. Server costs, cost of proper tools and resources, not to mention all the time and energy that goes into such projects. All of that has to be accounted for and SL offers various solutions to do just that. In my opinion there's two ways to generate income in online gaming: subscription based models and micropayments. Subscription based models work like World of Warcraft for example, as long as you play, you pay a fee on a regular basis. Personally I have not seen this model put to use in SL very successfully so far, but I would be very interested to hear if someone knows any good examples. The other way is by micropayments, which means selling small amounts of content to you, everything you need or want int he context of the game, you have to pay for. Keep in mind though that while your personal interest in a game might fade away, the gamecreator will still have to cover the running costs to keep the game running for everyone. As a result he is mostly dependant on gaining new players all the time, which is ultimately why you experience a lot of SL games as some sort of social scam to drag in more and more people. The question is, what do the players prefer? I know that if you look at SL today the answer is clear, but maybe there are new and different ways?

I realize that this part of the forum won't be read by people who don't speak english, but it's still an interesting point to bring up. SL is used by people from many different nationalities, speaking different languages too. Some of these communities are actually fairly big and it's sometimes hard to be aware of that because they are simply seperated. What I really haven't seen much so far is games being translated into other languages. For example, when we released LOGOS cards we instantly attracted a lot of attention by the japanese community, they made their own translations on the web so they could play, but in the end that is not the same. This is probably where money comes in, translating software is not an easy process, especially if you ask for quality. Personally, I don't know of many games that have been translated into several languages, I wonder if anyone had any experiences with that! Even more importantly, maybe there are games out there in other languages that us english speakers can't play?

I used to work on a prototype for a balltype game that was incredibly fun! I'd like to finish and release it some day, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble. Games that need big setups can only be used by people with a good sim and ownng a good sim means investing a LOT of money. For this precise reason games like Simball are a bit hard to find after a while, as far as I have seen.

I think as a game designer in Second Life this is one of the first and most basic decissions to make: Second Life is so versatile that you can do everything, from shooter, to RPG, anything goes. We see a lot of vastly different ideas being tried out every day as far as multiplayer games are concerned. Personally though, I feel that due to the technological limitations, like latency issues, realtime systems tend to deliver very mixed results. On one hand it's the most direct way of solving game mechanics, easy to understand, immersive and immediate, on the other results may be completely up to what seems to the user as pure luck. So I'd like to ask what your experiences are. Everyone has probably tried some realtime fighting system at some point, what was your opinion on that type of play? Also, I think there's a puzzling lack of turnbased multiplayer gamesystems in SL, so it would probably be especially interesting to hear what experiences people have made with those!

I was under the same impression, I also regret that this ended up being posted on the blog, because for such an audience there would have been a lot more interesting aspects to talk about, but ultimately there's still the event today on the forums and if you want to discuss games in general that is where you should go!