chicochi
This article collects information regarding the conceptualisation of the gameplay of The Mana World
This article is currently only a proposal
The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It has not been evaluated or accepted by the core development team yet. Feel free to add your personal opinion about them or make counter proposals.
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The personal touch
Players like that personal touch in their games. Knowing that their character is their creation alone and that it is totally unique is an important part of online gaming. This could be in the form of new items, images for items, music, writing, or other things, but this is focusing on images for the time being because that's what I've thought about the most. Feel free to add on.
Goals
Allow players to make their character, if not unique, at least "theirs" in some way. Allow players to change the world by adding new material to it. Improve the quality of things in the game by letting users submit new and/or improved things.
<to be continued>
Non-Goals
Allow players to add new types of content to the game
<to be continued>
Issues that Need Addressing + Potential Solutions
Getting the content to all users, so that all users can see it properly
- it seems that the main issue here is bandwidth; sending images for each player with custom equipment seems prohibitively costly in terms of resources.
- This could be solved by distributing the custom content with the releases and letting players pick which content they use (mix and match sword pieces for example). The result would be less uniqueness (not so good), but much less load as we would only need to sent something like "blade 25, guard 47, hilt 12" instead of three images.
- the other issue would be who to send the information to. Sending it to all users when someone logs in would be O(n^2), which may or may not be an issue. Sending it to just people who are on the same screen as the person would be much "cheaper" but probably harder to implement.
Ensuring that the content is not obscene or offensive
- If the solution proposed for 1) is chosen, censoring offensive content could be done as part of the release process (as could filtering out low quality stuff. Otherwise the release could get weighted down with huge numbers of poorly made images).
Ensuring that the submission process doesn't get overloaded
- Some sort of "community review" process could be set up with people able to vote on submissions
- Limit the number of submissions per release to something manageable
Storing content
- This is both server space and either download size (content included in release) or network traffic (content sent over network)
- Could be addressed by limiting the number of custom images per release (probably a good idea anyway, to avoid making users wade through piles or awful images. The worst ones would get filtered out as better ones became available)
Letting users access custom content
- To allow for more uniqueness, while giving users a good way to access custom content, an "item builder" system was proposed. A (rather poor) mockup of a sword builder is below
http://home.comcast.net/~Catfish_Man/SwordBuilder.png
