[MUD-Dev] pluggable MMOGs

[ceo]

Daniel James wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Adam M <ceo at grexengine.com> wrote:

>> Is anyone working on / thought about an MMOG based upon pluggable
>> sub-games?
 
> hopefully somewhat unique. There are also meta-games, like Sea
> Races, which are won or lost through the collaboration of crews
> doing the seafaring puzzles.

I suppose I'm talking about "pluggable games joined by some form of
meta-game" - so that the meta-game provides a context for each game,
and is the medium in which each game interacts with each other.

The two-layer gameplay you describe above sounds like what I'm
thinking of :).

A good example would be North and South (an old 16-colour EGA game),
where your actions in one game triggered different mini-games. If
you captured two states that were linked by a train track, at the
end of the go the train would attempt to carry gold between them;
this didn't trigger a mini-game, but if the other player managed to
capture any of the intervening states along the track before the end
of the go, then when the train ran through that state, a game was
triggered where you were defending the train, and the other player
was trying to hijack it. There were a total of three or four
mini-games like this, plus the main game.

A much more modern, but shallower (only one mini-game), example is
Shogun: Total War (possibly even the sequel, Medieval:TW, as well,
but I haven't played that). The main game is played on a board-game
type map (rather like Risk) of feudal Japan, and you move units
around. Various actions trigger battles in particular states, with
both the geography of the province, and the history of occupation in
the main game so far, affecting various conditions in the actual
battle.

Or the Games Workshop tabletop game Mighty Empires - a reasonably
complex board game (mainly because of the existence of many
expansion packs that acted much like D&D expansions) where certain
situations trigger tabletop battles using the GW Warhammer rules -
and the sizes and compostion of the armies, as well as geography and
any "special" artifacts present, are dependent upon the trigger
conditions.

> It is critical that we avoid your '64k crap film game' scenario,
> by making the puzzles good, and by keeping to games that are both
> in the spirit of PP and 'slot in' to the world (even if only as
> social entertainment, e.g.  poker). So we don't have side-scrolly
> scramble games hidden in there with mode7 car racing. Yet.

Grin.

Adam M


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