Post by kablizzy on Apr 19, 2013 0:40:53 GMT -6
This thread will be for the discussion of goals and where we want the sim to go. To me, this is by far the most important starting place for everything that we do. I'd love to get other people's input here as a sort of guideline for what we stand for, where we're going, and have one unified idea as to what this sim wants to accomplish.
I want to preface this with the fact that these are some of the things that I think are integral to HoI, but more importantly, I want to hear what everyone else thinks and what everyone else's goals for the sim are. When I say goals, I mean, the bare bones, bottom-line stuff. What do we want to accomplish with running another version of this? Why are we doing this? What types of things define the entire game and where we want it to go? Here are my personal goals and suggestions for HoI in general:
First and foremost, we stay true to Final Fantasy Tactics, and more importantly, Final Fantasy and Square in general. What this means to me is that if we are creating a class, we make that class mesh with what people have in mind when they think Final Fantasy, and more importantly, Final Fantasy Tactics. I wasn't a big fan of the GBA versions (Advance and Advance 2), but their mechanics stayed rather true to the series, and brought about some really cool concepts. I also think it's cool conglomerating information from all of the older and newer Final Fantasy games for use here - This is how we came up with the idea of Red and Blue Magi, and how many of the abilities and spells were brought into play. This was big for me - making spells and skills and classes from other Final Fantasy titles available here made it seem much more grand.
Now, that said, there are some awesome things that aren't true to Final Fantasy, or Tactics in general. For instance, we pretty much all came from SimRTK or HoC or WotD or whatever that sim was that Charlemagne ran that was all medieval and stuff with Gwenivere and all that. So, I would like to stay true to those as well. I think sticking to these two above all else is tantamount to where we want to be.
Secondly, I asked myself, "What does HoI do better than other sims?" and the answer was, honestly, just about everything. When we launched v2, it was the biggest launch in Sim history. We had the entire SimRTK staff register and play with us. v2 lasted for NEARLY SEVEN FUCKING YEARS. One version of a sim, seven years. That's unheard of. But specifically, I see three things that HoI has that no other sim can touch. Number 1, our setting. We're a fantasy sim that has 90% of our homework done for us. We can put a sword in someone's hand and tell them to go fight a demon. We can land a fucking meteor on a city. We're not bound by Guan Yu and Cao Cao and all that. Our number of plotlines are quite literally limitless. Number 2, our player interaction. Propositions were the backbone of this sim, and I want to see that expanded upon. The one thing I hated about sims is that you take a personal turn, and then you either luck into a Kingdom to play with folks who you've known for ten years and you roleplay a few different characters with them, and help their KTs, and you're done. I want the player to have scads of options. I remember the original HoC: China had a betting room and an arena. Locales didn't go over that well, but I think that's because the purpose behind them was obscured. I want players to come here and have 5, 10, 15 things to do every day besides roleplaying. I want them to be able to do a PT, participate actively and fruitfully in their kingdom, maybe go to the Golden Saucer and bet on some Chocobo races, make a sweet-assed new sword in their spare time, go try it out at the arena, maybe participate in a race or a literary battle. The times when I've had the most fun were during the Philosophical event in HoC, actively helping out Omdal's kingdom (AND get rewarded for it), and the multitude of things-to-do here. Things that make each player unique are huge, character growth isn't as important here as other places since we focus so much on that anyway, but allowing someone to be a part of a business or travel the world in search of riches, or give them the option to capture beasts and poach them (Yep, I remember poaching!) are all things that we can explore. Number 3, we have options. This game isn't limited to just sims or just FFT, and while this seems like this goes against my first couple points, I think that we have a unique opportunity to do something that no other sim can do - and this is terribly important to why I want the sim to keep going. Anyway, second goal for me is keeping in line with all of these things and emphasizing on them, because I think that's what we do (and have traditionally done) best.
Third goal is in some ways more important than the others, because the sim can't run without this. I want (and need) staff workload to be at a minimum. Before, I've proposed that we have a fully integrated php menu like Naurek did with HoC: Japan. Imagine running a skirmish or campaign in 15 minutes. Imagine that all you have to do is click buttons to add who all is in the battle, click on buttons according to their tactics, and add some flavor to it, and you're done. Now, this is an enormous undertaking, and probably not all that feasible. But I've always said that the staff here does the work of 50 staffers with 10-15. Which is mostly why most of our staff burns out so easily. So, we need to figure out ways to offer the player more and lessen the workload on staff at the same time.This is not easy.
Fourth goal for me is to make sure the sim is done when we launch, and make sure everything makes sense and is in accordance with everything else. Now, no offense to anyone, because the work that people have put in has astonished me in the past, but when we had Lionheart doing classes and Rutee doing items and Jar doing KT stuff and me doing setting, we were all making different games. I've long wanted a sim where you don't have a list of PT actions and a list of KT actions and a list of BT actions and a list of IO actions and a list of movement rules... I've wanted it all to work together. This was my concept with v2, and what I tried to put forth, but there were too many forces pulling in too many different directions for this to work the way it should have. The concept was that whether you were an independent player, in a kingdom, a part of a business, helping out an IO, or whatever, you could pretty much get the same benefits. You could buy mithril and make a mithril sword, whether it be through the grand market, a second-hand shop, a kingdom who is trying to corner the market, whatever. If you wanted to do it in a PT, you can. If you want to do it in a KT, you can. And with this comes a standardization of items, standardization of troops, everything. If you want to go to war, you equip your dudes with mithril swords. If you want to fight a chocobo, you equip yourself with mithril swords. If you want to siege a town, you hire a Black Mage, a Knight, and a Dancer. I hated the fact that we had 11 different systems dedicated to the same goal. So, personal goal is to make everything work together. I think this would also make bookkeeping and numbers-crunching much, much easier and potentially allow us to make a program or tool. Same thing with formulae. We had formula for armies and campaign units, we had formula for 1 v 1 and skirmishes, we had formula for casting Fire 4 on a Water demon, we had formula for casting Fire 4 in Hell if your opponent was Asian... It was just too much. So, standardization was another goal of mine.
Finally, we had a lot of hierarchy problems during v2 development, and even a bit during v1. This kind of ties in to the problems we had in systems and standardization too. Everyone wanted HoI to be their own thing. Which is cool, but it kinda made the game a lot worse. I'm not saying one person's ideas of the game are right, but if we define what goals we want to hit and how we're going to go about hitting them, then there's no wiggle room for making a class based on Vegeta or a crafting system like this one obscure game you played seven years ago. So, I would also want a clear hierarchy and a dedicated staff. The other part of this problem, of course, was that our staff turnover was obscenely high. We had staffers disappear weekly, myself included after a point, and that just made things harder for the rest (And probably contributed to the sim's demise). The fact that the sim stayed up for six years was nothing short of miraculous and amazing.
All that said, I don't know what's been going on for the past six years, but these are my generic goals. I most assuredly want to hear everyone else's as well, because you guys know better than I do what's been up with the game, where it's gone and evolved, and what new issues have arisen. By the by, I'm kind of on a time limit, so this isn't an exhaustive list, but I mostly want to hear from others!
I want to preface this with the fact that these are some of the things that I think are integral to HoI, but more importantly, I want to hear what everyone else thinks and what everyone else's goals for the sim are. When I say goals, I mean, the bare bones, bottom-line stuff. What do we want to accomplish with running another version of this? Why are we doing this? What types of things define the entire game and where we want it to go? Here are my personal goals and suggestions for HoI in general:
First and foremost, we stay true to Final Fantasy Tactics, and more importantly, Final Fantasy and Square in general. What this means to me is that if we are creating a class, we make that class mesh with what people have in mind when they think Final Fantasy, and more importantly, Final Fantasy Tactics. I wasn't a big fan of the GBA versions (Advance and Advance 2), but their mechanics stayed rather true to the series, and brought about some really cool concepts. I also think it's cool conglomerating information from all of the older and newer Final Fantasy games for use here - This is how we came up with the idea of Red and Blue Magi, and how many of the abilities and spells were brought into play. This was big for me - making spells and skills and classes from other Final Fantasy titles available here made it seem much more grand.
Now, that said, there are some awesome things that aren't true to Final Fantasy, or Tactics in general. For instance, we pretty much all came from SimRTK or HoC or WotD or whatever that sim was that Charlemagne ran that was all medieval and stuff with Gwenivere and all that. So, I would like to stay true to those as well. I think sticking to these two above all else is tantamount to where we want to be.
Secondly, I asked myself, "What does HoI do better than other sims?" and the answer was, honestly, just about everything. When we launched v2, it was the biggest launch in Sim history. We had the entire SimRTK staff register and play with us. v2 lasted for NEARLY SEVEN FUCKING YEARS. One version of a sim, seven years. That's unheard of. But specifically, I see three things that HoI has that no other sim can touch. Number 1, our setting. We're a fantasy sim that has 90% of our homework done for us. We can put a sword in someone's hand and tell them to go fight a demon. We can land a fucking meteor on a city. We're not bound by Guan Yu and Cao Cao and all that. Our number of plotlines are quite literally limitless. Number 2, our player interaction. Propositions were the backbone of this sim, and I want to see that expanded upon. The one thing I hated about sims is that you take a personal turn, and then you either luck into a Kingdom to play with folks who you've known for ten years and you roleplay a few different characters with them, and help their KTs, and you're done. I want the player to have scads of options. I remember the original HoC: China had a betting room and an arena. Locales didn't go over that well, but I think that's because the purpose behind them was obscured. I want players to come here and have 5, 10, 15 things to do every day besides roleplaying. I want them to be able to do a PT, participate actively and fruitfully in their kingdom, maybe go to the Golden Saucer and bet on some Chocobo races, make a sweet-assed new sword in their spare time, go try it out at the arena, maybe participate in a race or a literary battle. The times when I've had the most fun were during the Philosophical event in HoC, actively helping out Omdal's kingdom (AND get rewarded for it), and the multitude of things-to-do here. Things that make each player unique are huge, character growth isn't as important here as other places since we focus so much on that anyway, but allowing someone to be a part of a business or travel the world in search of riches, or give them the option to capture beasts and poach them (Yep, I remember poaching!) are all things that we can explore. Number 3, we have options. This game isn't limited to just sims or just FFT, and while this seems like this goes against my first couple points, I think that we have a unique opportunity to do something that no other sim can do - and this is terribly important to why I want the sim to keep going. Anyway, second goal for me is keeping in line with all of these things and emphasizing on them, because I think that's what we do (and have traditionally done) best.
Third goal is in some ways more important than the others, because the sim can't run without this. I want (and need) staff workload to be at a minimum. Before, I've proposed that we have a fully integrated php menu like Naurek did with HoC: Japan. Imagine running a skirmish or campaign in 15 minutes. Imagine that all you have to do is click buttons to add who all is in the battle, click on buttons according to their tactics, and add some flavor to it, and you're done. Now, this is an enormous undertaking, and probably not all that feasible. But I've always said that the staff here does the work of 50 staffers with 10-15. Which is mostly why most of our staff burns out so easily. So, we need to figure out ways to offer the player more and lessen the workload on staff at the same time.This is not easy.
Fourth goal for me is to make sure the sim is done when we launch, and make sure everything makes sense and is in accordance with everything else. Now, no offense to anyone, because the work that people have put in has astonished me in the past, but when we had Lionheart doing classes and Rutee doing items and Jar doing KT stuff and me doing setting, we were all making different games. I've long wanted a sim where you don't have a list of PT actions and a list of KT actions and a list of BT actions and a list of IO actions and a list of movement rules... I've wanted it all to work together. This was my concept with v2, and what I tried to put forth, but there were too many forces pulling in too many different directions for this to work the way it should have. The concept was that whether you were an independent player, in a kingdom, a part of a business, helping out an IO, or whatever, you could pretty much get the same benefits. You could buy mithril and make a mithril sword, whether it be through the grand market, a second-hand shop, a kingdom who is trying to corner the market, whatever. If you wanted to do it in a PT, you can. If you want to do it in a KT, you can. And with this comes a standardization of items, standardization of troops, everything. If you want to go to war, you equip your dudes with mithril swords. If you want to fight a chocobo, you equip yourself with mithril swords. If you want to siege a town, you hire a Black Mage, a Knight, and a Dancer. I hated the fact that we had 11 different systems dedicated to the same goal. So, personal goal is to make everything work together. I think this would also make bookkeeping and numbers-crunching much, much easier and potentially allow us to make a program or tool. Same thing with formulae. We had formula for armies and campaign units, we had formula for 1 v 1 and skirmishes, we had formula for casting Fire 4 on a Water demon, we had formula for casting Fire 4 in Hell if your opponent was Asian... It was just too much. So, standardization was another goal of mine.
Finally, we had a lot of hierarchy problems during v2 development, and even a bit during v1. This kind of ties in to the problems we had in systems and standardization too. Everyone wanted HoI to be their own thing. Which is cool, but it kinda made the game a lot worse. I'm not saying one person's ideas of the game are right, but if we define what goals we want to hit and how we're going to go about hitting them, then there's no wiggle room for making a class based on Vegeta or a crafting system like this one obscure game you played seven years ago. So, I would also want a clear hierarchy and a dedicated staff. The other part of this problem, of course, was that our staff turnover was obscenely high. We had staffers disappear weekly, myself included after a point, and that just made things harder for the rest (And probably contributed to the sim's demise). The fact that the sim stayed up for six years was nothing short of miraculous and amazing.
All that said, I don't know what's been going on for the past six years, but these are my generic goals. I most assuredly want to hear everyone else's as well, because you guys know better than I do what's been up with the game, where it's gone and evolved, and what new issues have arisen. By the by, I'm kind of on a time limit, so this isn't an exhaustive list, but I mostly want to hear from others!
