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More thoughts on combining stories

Twitter this ----- Reddit this ----- July 17th, 2010 · ----- 6 Comments

I just noticed all the replies to yesterday’s “one big game” idea, and now I’m undecided again. Maybe the situation will become clearer (to me) if I address all the issues raised:

  • “It will make releasing new games (that “plug in” to the existing game) nearly impossible in the future. “

Plugging in is the whole problem :) As far as I can see, it will never be reliable. After extensive testing on different machines, there seems to be a random element of files not being found. One tester reported that maybe one in ten between game moves crashes, and the start menu in Vista sometimes loses games. Today I managed to reproduce one of these problems fore the first time: after happily moving between games about twenty times, one of the games just disappeared! I have no idea why – there is nothing in the code that suggests a reason.

I never plan to charge more than 14.99 for anything, so I don’t think price will be a problem (I can even institute a discount scheme again if necessary – it should be less of a headache if there’s only one product). The only issue I foresee is download size, which is likely to increase by 100 MB per game.

  • It will certainly make the game a lot slower to run. Lastly, remember that a 32-bit machine can never run a program that is more than 2-3 GB in size.

I’m very interested in this – could you clarify? I remember that video files used to be limited to 2 Gig, so I tested and made a 3 gig game (using very large rooms), and it ran fine. The exe file was 3 gig, but when you run the game only the scripts load into memory – rooms are only loaded as needed. Even with the largest conceivable scripts (equivalent to about 200 stories) the game only took up 250MB in memory. Now that is still a lot, and it took 30 seconds to start, but after that the rooms seemed to load as quickly as before. And I don’t expect to reach 100 games for at least 20 years, so by then I suspect that size won’t be prohibitive. It may even turn out that 100 games can fit inside 2 gig – I do want to reuse scenes and have simple backgrounds wherever possible.

  • if the file handling is similar, there should be some way to insert the new books into the game folder and have the program detect and add them to the database.

Unfortunately I don’t have that kind of low level access to AGS (or the skills to tinker even if I did). RunAGSGame is the nearest thing to modularity that the program has, and nobody else really uses it so it’s never been tested in earnest. As I am discovering to my horror. :)

  • Imagine you have 20 stories released, and a new customer comes along. What if he just wants to buy three of the stories?

All games will be $14.99 – even if there are 100 stories in the file. If the person only wants 3 of 20 stories then the other 17 just sit there unobtrusively. The concept of the game is really a world where anything can happen – not a story. The stories are just the hooks. Incidentally, one advantage of having a single file is that it becomes much easier to add stuff to old rooms. (I could do it already with the retro room code, but that was a bit too complex to use all the time)

  • And what about people who have already bought the game? When a new story is released, do they have to download another gigantic file that includes all the stories they already owned, instead of what they’d do now, which is to just download the newest story?

Yes, that’s the biggest downside of this. But I never expected that people would buy every release – my goal is still to release  stories rapidly, and people will just buy a new version every 2 or 3 versions, when something catches their interest. Just like how people upgrade other software – very few people get every release of Word.

  • When I was testing Theogeny, I didn’t have any problems with the between game codes.

    • Neither did I – but the larger and more complex it becomes, the more chance there is of problems – e.g. play the game on 3 different computers, and after about a hundred moves between games the odds of a problem exceed fifty percent. That’s my gut feeling anyway. For a game that relies on exploring, that’s fatal. And for a game that relies on rapid addition of new stories, constant bug fixing means the game will never become what it’s supposed to be.

  • Also, here’s an alternative: instead of literally walking between stories (thus making the computer switch what game it’s playing mid-play), you could have an option to return to the bookshelf with the click of a button (‘s’ for shelf or whatever)

    • That’s already implemented in some games – Q or Ctrl-Q I think – but the idea of exploring a world is central to the big concept. Like I said, I’m selling a world, not individual stories, but it won’t be obvious until I can get the background code to be solid, so I can concentrate on what matters – the stories, the game world.

  • It would also be more convenient, because it would mean you don’t have to walk around for ages trying to find that one room

    • I think that’s more a problem with the game design yet – ironically because I spend so much time on bug fixing, and not enough time on map design. That will change! I hope that when there are, say, five stories based in Paris, nobody will get lost in Paris. Also, there will eventually be a game-wide map on the book shelf. Navigation WILL improve.

    I’m still ironing out the details…

    Of course, if I magically find the solution to the current between Game bugs, that hooray, all my problems will be solved. But after two years of bugs I think it’s time for a rethink.

    Tags: progress

    6 responses so far ↓

    • 1 Marquillin // Jul 19, 2010 at 5:55 am

      So if the only thing holding you back from a stable expanding universe is file size, then how fixed is 100 MB per game? Most semi complex AGS games without voice actors are often 15-30 MB, so I’m guessing the one thing that pushes it up so far is top quality digital music. The music I’ve heard so far has been amazing and integral to drawing me into the story so I don’t think the quantity of different moods should be sacrificed at the risk of being repititious. But maybe the quality can shift? I’m no music encoding expert (I barely make a novice), but I’ve recompressed mp3s to half of their size and found the quality indistinguishable. So maybe your music has room to play with.

      Or maybe the games are big for another reason.

      Anyway, by the time you get to 20 games, most people might be accustomed to downloading terabytes on a regular basis anyway.

      Or you could ship them on cd/dvd to those willing to pay a little extra.

      I’d say the bottom line is that bugs make a mockery of hard work and having fun (especially if they make the game disappear!).

      And people may think they only want one story, but just let them try to resist when they stumble into a new classic. Resistance is Futile, Muhahaha!

    • 2 Chris // Jul 19, 2010 at 8:13 am

      Thanks. That’s how I feel! It seems to me that the potential market for a good game is infinite (well from the point of view of a lone developer anyway), so no matter how much time it takes to get it right, or to produce that one game that hiots the spot, or to get noticed… it’s worth it.

      Regarding file sizes, my long term goal (more theoretical than anything) is to have a big enough cast (maybe 100 fully movable characters), a big enough world (maybe 3000 scenes) and enough music (maybe 500 tracks) that stories can be made in very little time, just by adding text. In that case an entire story would only add maybe 10 MB or less.
      .
      Current trends are:
      game 1: added 80 rooms, 130 MB, plus 75 MB music.
      game 4: added 40 rooms, 80 MB (+ 40 MB that I think extrvagant – repeating stuff that was in previous games, plus the space animation), + 30 MB new music (curently 170 tracks, from 10 seconds to 11 minutes each)
      game 5 (goal): add 30 rooms, 70 MB + 20 MB new music
      game 10 (goal): add 20 rooms, 45 MB, + 10 MB new music
      etc.

      When you see the long term plan to reuse everything, with smaller and smaller additions, using a single large file starts to make a lot of sense. I love the idea of the same scene having an almost unlimited richness – every door and every window getting used at some point.

    • 3 Marquillin // Jul 19, 2010 at 3:38 pm

      I see, I didn’t think the rooms were that big, but you do have a lot of them for sure.

      When it’s a new part of the world; like when you adapt Treasure Island, Hamlet or the Jungle Book, the the rooms ought to be 100% new I think. Astute players will likely see if you are reusing scenes for locations in a different location. But careful choosing of each of your new stories (like with Two Cities and Monte Cristo) gives a lot of grace in development time and size increases All told, 3000 rooms may be a bit of a low estimate, hard to see that far ahead though.

      And the same for reusing character sprites too, unless you mean reusing the same character over again in a similar way to how you used Jean Valjean/Virgil in Dantee’s inferno (The reincarnation angle is really neat, but it may not be appropriate in most stories).

      Probably the same for background characters, unless the new story takes place at the same place AND the same time, though it may not be too noticeable unless one goes from one story to another where they are reused. Of course, you can also get away with using a remodeling of the same basic character sprite, but even that might be noticeable if overused.

      The music however, I think is great for reusing, for it is the universal art form and is able to point out parallels between stories.

    • 4 Caius // Jul 20, 2010 at 12:55 pm

      What Marquillin says makes sense.

      Regarding the 2GB limit on 32-bit operating systems, two things:
      1. Future versions of AGS will support 64-bit by the time you need it, so you can probably port without too much trouble when you get to that road.
      2. The 2GB limit is for how much memory is addressable by a process. That means that you can only have 2GB of memory allocated at any single point in time. If you’re loading more than 2GB worth in AGS, it’s probably because AGS is good about deallocating that memory (e.g., a music track) once it’s no longer needed.

      So you’re fine. Just bear in mind that download size can be a barrier to entry just like monetary price (it’s why I haven’t gotten around to buying the game yet, but will in the next 2-3 weeks). :)

    • 5 Chris // Jul 20, 2010 at 11:08 pm

      re: download speed. Yes. With extra reusing I should be able to get the combined game size down a bit. Incidentally, on the subject of size, one thing I’d LOVE to do now is just forget the previous four games (well, maybe keep ATOTC) and start fresh: the first three combined games don’t have much overlap, but later ones will. Also, the first 3 have learning quirks that makes combining them (and testing them) time consuming. But I have to resist the temptation to always start from scratch: I plan to ALWAYS be improving, so I’ll always find the older games problematic, but that doesn’t mean users will.

    • 6 Chris // Jul 20, 2010 at 11:08 pm

      re: download speed. Yes. With extra reusing I should be able to get the combined game size down a bit. Incidentally, on the subject of size, one thing I’d LOVE to do now is just forget the previous four games (well, maybe keep ATOTC) and start fresh: the first three combined games don’t have much overlap, but later ones will. Also, the first 3 have learning quirks that makes combining them (and testing them) time consuming. But I have to resist the temptation to always start from scratch: I plan to ALWAYS be improving, so I’ll always find the older games problematic, but that doesn’t mean users will.

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