Tweet
Reworking our Demo Approach
We definitely aren't getting the interest we really need in the demos from the general public, and even team members... This is clearly a Big problem, since without feedback we run the risk of blowing it Badly in one or more ways. Recently the issue of the complexity of the demo guis, and the learning curve in general has come up. It was the feeling of many that this is overwhelming people who are interested in playtesting. I didn't see that because I'm too close to things, and mostly understand all the models. A case of "small gaming company syndrome" 
One reason we as a project actively solicit feedback is so we can Act upon it, before its too late! This is a proposal to radically change the demo approach to make it easy to learn in small bites what is going on in Clash.
I’ve worked out with Gary a proposal for a sequence of targeted introductory scenarios with things stripped down to make it a bit more comprehensible. (Plutarck also suggested this in the “Everybody Plays” thread.) The idea is that the player will only need to handle a few new things at each level of the tutorials. It will also constrain Gary’s coding more to one new thing at a time, as he would prefer. All the work that Gary has put into the xml initialization files for scenarios is a good enabler for this approach. There will also be room for others to create more advanced scenarios while we focus on the tutorial ones. More on this below.
Essentially this proposal takes much of the previous Planning for Demos 7 & 8, but reprioritizes items so that we can get in something like four or five steps a sequence of easily digestible scenarios. These will guide a new player through the basics (Obviously if that number turns out not to be on balance easily-digestible, we'll slow down.)
Each of these should teach people how to use the appropriate user interfaces. Game events are also an important part of making the tutorial scenarios more accessible.
Events should be based around objectives of the type we’re using in the AI plan. We would test the AI by running it computer only and see how it goes. One thing these objectives could do is, when achieved, come up with a message like "Good, now try this...". Closer organizational ties between the manual, online help system, and the tutorial “ladder” are also part of this approach.
A further goal would be to get each game aspect and its gui going properly, and maintenance-free, before racing off into new things (which has been my personal preference up to now
).
Now some details
The idea is that we focus for the next series of demos on an expanded Dawn scenario. So that's the only one I'll talk about here. This is the one that will best give a ladder of clash tutorials, and demonstrate the models I'm keen to show, though at a more deliberate and measured pace. So here is my and Gary’s first shot at it.
Tutorial Scenario 1
Start with a fixed map and settlers a la Civ as the focus. Here we will hit the first two “X”s in 4x, Explore and expand.
1. Generate the map, which we can already do no problem.
2a. Make the Clash equivalent of a settler unit and WarriorBand, explore then settle. There will be no “units” other than these two. Since there are no opponents, the warrior bands are only used for exploration.
3. Expansion - we need rules for this, but we can use simple versions of the stuff we're talking about in the Expansion thread. For the purposes of this demo the “people-everywhere” rule I have mentioned before will not apply.
4. Economy - At this point you have a cutting-edge stone age economy with advanced carrot-synthesis methods. I think we should mostly stick to "building" the two units. Also players could use a limited economic gui to build just a few other things, like farms (farm kapital) or increase production (production kapital). One possibility is to limit the player to civ-wide orders to cut down on the confusion factor. For this we will need the capability to let scenarios enable and disable game features. My inclination is to have one special such as gold in the economy to give players some unique squares to try and exploit.
That is it for Scenario 1. The player learns to settle land as in Civ and numerous other games, gets to explore, and expand a bit, guided by the help system. The player learns how to move units, and works a stripped-down economic system gui. I am not sure if there’s a point to having victory objectives for this. Since once people figure the basics out there isn’t much stimulation in going further. But we could make a simple easy-to-achieve target like getting your civ to 300,000 people.
Is this a good amount for the demo? Too much? Not enough?
Tutorial Scenario 2 -- Barbarian Horde!
Here the focus is on introducing technology, military units, and battles. Here we will hit the other two “X”s in 4x, exploit and exterminate. But the issue here is to Avoid being exterminated. The scenario ends with a massive barbarian invasion that must be repelled to win.
5. Tech allows the economy to grow thru enlarging the carrying capacities and production of a given plot of land. Tech advances would allow for building of more advanced units with higher effectiveness. Using both of these in a non-trivial manner will be critical to winning the scenario. For this we basically need the tech functionality described in the D7&8 planning thread (tech gui elements, interconnects with military and economy and the base model, which is already coded).
6. As new unit types become available the player will learn to form functional task forces with them. Ideally some advantage to a combined-arms approach can be demonstrated. Obsolete units will disappear from the build list and new ones become available. Low-level barbarian raids throughout the scenario will keep the player engaged.
Why barbarians? They require basically no AI that isn’t already there, and give a reason for the player to Really use military units. At the start barbs could have a bit of a tech edge, but eventually the player's higher-tech units would give the player a clear edge. We don’t want to move in the direction of the real long-term AI until we are ready to take it on in one focused shot.
7. The economic and other aspects that will be introduced are road building (important for mobilizing troops when the final onslaught comes), Army Supplies which will stop the barbs dead at a certain point unless they capture cities to exploit, and building a variety of units (but more limited than in previous demos).
That is scenario 2.
For scenario 3 there are two alternatives, I will show them a 3, and 4 here, but they could be the other way around. We can pick the one that seems best as we approach that milestone. Listed as 3 here is the one that seems slightly better to me to go first.
Tutorial Scenario 3 -- Internal and External Threats
The purpose of this scenario is to introduce the government model, and ethnicity in the social model to the player. The player will have to master these to hold on at the end. The internal threats are from riots of captured peoples of other ethnic groups, The external threat is, as before, a massive barb invasion at the end.
8. Much of the government and social model will be needed for this. The player’s power to tax will be limited by the governmental setup. The properties of the government will also affect technological and economic growth. Deciding how to balance these issues, and the ethnic-based and other riots mentioned below will be the key to winning.
9. In addition to the player there will be either inert civs, that just sit there to be conquered, or we could make them minor civs per the current Expansion discussion. In either case the purpose of these in this scenario is to provide the player with conquered peoples that need to be administered. The reason is that Discrimination-Based riots are relatively straightforward to implement, and provide the player with a reason to engage in internal power struggles using the govt. model. The short version of this challenge is that there is a strong religious power block in the civ that is intolerant, and the player can only reduce overt discrimination by using the governmental apparatus. Trying to wrest away power from the strong religious political block is one way to prevent extreme oppression of the conquered peoples, which causes them to riot and/or revolt.
10. As before a barb invasion will come at the end. Whether the conquered peoples fight for the player, or the invaders is based on previous player actions. (If this comes after the one called Scenario 4 below then the end would be a battle with a civ as opposed to barbs.)
Tutorial Scenario 4 -- Clash at the Dawn of History
This scenario will introduce dealing with other civilizations to the player. It will use a simple diplomatic approach that does not involve the player greatly. The main goal is to expand and either hold at bay, or conquer other civs per the player’s preference. This will be the first scenario with the new AI, and that is the main selling point. However all the balancing and decisions that the player needed to make in the previous scenarios is expected to be needed with a vengeance here!
11. Several other small civs are placed so they're not too close.
12. When you run into other civs, a permanent diplomatic status is randomly generated. My notion is to have it weighted toward peace for now. If the player should attack an enemy then the status changes to war automatically and stays that way forever. Or perhaps a 20-turn or so lull in the fighting could automatically change it back to peace?
13. AI for grand strategy, expansion, military etc. will be used by the computer players.
This will be a proper AI, completely unlike what has gone before.
14. Victory could be military/economic. If at any point you have 4/5 of both the military and economic power on the board, you win, although there would be an option for you to continue playing anyway. Or alternatively there could be other objectives.
Tutorial Scenario 5 -- The Dawn of History – Complete Scenario
In this one, we’ll include diplomacy, and the first diplomatic interface. At this point we will have a relatively complete game that can be played, and should be quite challenging. I am not going to go into details on this one, since it is quite a ways off, and I want to find out first if there is general buy-in to this approach.
Some features: Diplomacy, random map (first version), military improvements, and whatever else we feel is appropriate. This can be drawn out over several demos, depending on the complexity. We could wind up with a whole game variant called "Dawn of Civilization, the Prelude to Clash of Civilizations" or some such.
Other items
We would like to enlist people (Plutarck seems a good example) to make cutting-edge scenarios for those who have already made it up the ropes. It would take some off Gary’s plate, and others would have more time to spend on the scenarios also. So, speak up if you’re interested in the job!
So what do you think? Does this plan for tutorial demos sound right or wrong? I would like to hear comments first on the overall plan, rather than getting into specific details of what should go into what tutorial demo. There will be Plenty of time for those discussions later. If you want to post a completely different approach, now is the time also, since if we get agreement to this plan, we’re going to start in on it more-or-less immediately.
One reason we as a project actively solicit feedback is so we can Act upon it, before its too late! This is a proposal to radically change the demo approach to make it easy to learn in small bites what is going on in Clash.
I’ve worked out with Gary a proposal for a sequence of targeted introductory scenarios with things stripped down to make it a bit more comprehensible. (Plutarck also suggested this in the “Everybody Plays” thread.) The idea is that the player will only need to handle a few new things at each level of the tutorials. It will also constrain Gary’s coding more to one new thing at a time, as he would prefer. All the work that Gary has put into the xml initialization files for scenarios is a good enabler for this approach. There will also be room for others to create more advanced scenarios while we focus on the tutorial ones. More on this below.
Essentially this proposal takes much of the previous Planning for Demos 7 & 8, but reprioritizes items so that we can get in something like four or five steps a sequence of easily digestible scenarios. These will guide a new player through the basics (Obviously if that number turns out not to be on balance easily-digestible, we'll slow down.)
Each of these should teach people how to use the appropriate user interfaces. Game events are also an important part of making the tutorial scenarios more accessible.
Events should be based around objectives of the type we’re using in the AI plan. We would test the AI by running it computer only and see how it goes. One thing these objectives could do is, when achieved, come up with a message like "Good, now try this...". Closer organizational ties between the manual, online help system, and the tutorial “ladder” are also part of this approach.
A further goal would be to get each game aspect and its gui going properly, and maintenance-free, before racing off into new things (which has been my personal preference up to now
).Now some details
The idea is that we focus for the next series of demos on an expanded Dawn scenario. So that's the only one I'll talk about here. This is the one that will best give a ladder of clash tutorials, and demonstrate the models I'm keen to show, though at a more deliberate and measured pace. So here is my and Gary’s first shot at it.
Tutorial Scenario 1
Start with a fixed map and settlers a la Civ as the focus. Here we will hit the first two “X”s in 4x, Explore and expand.
1. Generate the map, which we can already do no problem.
2a. Make the Clash equivalent of a settler unit and WarriorBand, explore then settle. There will be no “units” other than these two. Since there are no opponents, the warrior bands are only used for exploration.
3. Expansion - we need rules for this, but we can use simple versions of the stuff we're talking about in the Expansion thread. For the purposes of this demo the “people-everywhere” rule I have mentioned before will not apply.
4. Economy - At this point you have a cutting-edge stone age economy with advanced carrot-synthesis methods. I think we should mostly stick to "building" the two units. Also players could use a limited economic gui to build just a few other things, like farms (farm kapital) or increase production (production kapital). One possibility is to limit the player to civ-wide orders to cut down on the confusion factor. For this we will need the capability to let scenarios enable and disable game features. My inclination is to have one special such as gold in the economy to give players some unique squares to try and exploit.
That is it for Scenario 1. The player learns to settle land as in Civ and numerous other games, gets to explore, and expand a bit, guided by the help system. The player learns how to move units, and works a stripped-down economic system gui. I am not sure if there’s a point to having victory objectives for this. Since once people figure the basics out there isn’t much stimulation in going further. But we could make a simple easy-to-achieve target like getting your civ to 300,000 people.
Is this a good amount for the demo? Too much? Not enough?
Tutorial Scenario 2 -- Barbarian Horde!
Here the focus is on introducing technology, military units, and battles. Here we will hit the other two “X”s in 4x, exploit and exterminate. But the issue here is to Avoid being exterminated. The scenario ends with a massive barbarian invasion that must be repelled to win.
5. Tech allows the economy to grow thru enlarging the carrying capacities and production of a given plot of land. Tech advances would allow for building of more advanced units with higher effectiveness. Using both of these in a non-trivial manner will be critical to winning the scenario. For this we basically need the tech functionality described in the D7&8 planning thread (tech gui elements, interconnects with military and economy and the base model, which is already coded).
6. As new unit types become available the player will learn to form functional task forces with them. Ideally some advantage to a combined-arms approach can be demonstrated. Obsolete units will disappear from the build list and new ones become available. Low-level barbarian raids throughout the scenario will keep the player engaged.
Why barbarians? They require basically no AI that isn’t already there, and give a reason for the player to Really use military units. At the start barbs could have a bit of a tech edge, but eventually the player's higher-tech units would give the player a clear edge. We don’t want to move in the direction of the real long-term AI until we are ready to take it on in one focused shot.
7. The economic and other aspects that will be introduced are road building (important for mobilizing troops when the final onslaught comes), Army Supplies which will stop the barbs dead at a certain point unless they capture cities to exploit, and building a variety of units (but more limited than in previous demos).
That is scenario 2.
For scenario 3 there are two alternatives, I will show them a 3, and 4 here, but they could be the other way around. We can pick the one that seems best as we approach that milestone. Listed as 3 here is the one that seems slightly better to me to go first.
Tutorial Scenario 3 -- Internal and External Threats
The purpose of this scenario is to introduce the government model, and ethnicity in the social model to the player. The player will have to master these to hold on at the end. The internal threats are from riots of captured peoples of other ethnic groups, The external threat is, as before, a massive barb invasion at the end.
8. Much of the government and social model will be needed for this. The player’s power to tax will be limited by the governmental setup. The properties of the government will also affect technological and economic growth. Deciding how to balance these issues, and the ethnic-based and other riots mentioned below will be the key to winning.
9. In addition to the player there will be either inert civs, that just sit there to be conquered, or we could make them minor civs per the current Expansion discussion. In either case the purpose of these in this scenario is to provide the player with conquered peoples that need to be administered. The reason is that Discrimination-Based riots are relatively straightforward to implement, and provide the player with a reason to engage in internal power struggles using the govt. model. The short version of this challenge is that there is a strong religious power block in the civ that is intolerant, and the player can only reduce overt discrimination by using the governmental apparatus. Trying to wrest away power from the strong religious political block is one way to prevent extreme oppression of the conquered peoples, which causes them to riot and/or revolt.
10. As before a barb invasion will come at the end. Whether the conquered peoples fight for the player, or the invaders is based on previous player actions. (If this comes after the one called Scenario 4 below then the end would be a battle with a civ as opposed to barbs.)
Tutorial Scenario 4 -- Clash at the Dawn of History
This scenario will introduce dealing with other civilizations to the player. It will use a simple diplomatic approach that does not involve the player greatly. The main goal is to expand and either hold at bay, or conquer other civs per the player’s preference. This will be the first scenario with the new AI, and that is the main selling point. However all the balancing and decisions that the player needed to make in the previous scenarios is expected to be needed with a vengeance here!
11. Several other small civs are placed so they're not too close.
12. When you run into other civs, a permanent diplomatic status is randomly generated. My notion is to have it weighted toward peace for now. If the player should attack an enemy then the status changes to war automatically and stays that way forever. Or perhaps a 20-turn or so lull in the fighting could automatically change it back to peace?
13. AI for grand strategy, expansion, military etc. will be used by the computer players.
This will be a proper AI, completely unlike what has gone before.
14. Victory could be military/economic. If at any point you have 4/5 of both the military and economic power on the board, you win, although there would be an option for you to continue playing anyway. Or alternatively there could be other objectives.
Tutorial Scenario 5 -- The Dawn of History – Complete Scenario
In this one, we’ll include diplomacy, and the first diplomatic interface. At this point we will have a relatively complete game that can be played, and should be quite challenging. I am not going to go into details on this one, since it is quite a ways off, and I want to find out first if there is general buy-in to this approach.
Some features: Diplomacy, random map (first version), military improvements, and whatever else we feel is appropriate. This can be drawn out over several demos, depending on the complexity. We could wind up with a whole game variant called "Dawn of Civilization, the Prelude to Clash of Civilizations" or some such.
Other items
We would like to enlist people (Plutarck seems a good example) to make cutting-edge scenarios for those who have already made it up the ropes. It would take some off Gary’s plate, and others would have more time to spend on the scenarios also. So, speak up if you’re interested in the job!
So what do you think? Does this plan for tutorial demos sound right or wrong? I would like to hear comments first on the overall plan, rather than getting into specific details of what should go into what tutorial demo. There will be Plenty of time for those discussions later. If you want to post a completely different approach, now is the time also, since if we get agreement to this plan, we’re going to start in on it more-or-less immediately.
This is great !
(in a good way, of course)
Comment