The Game I Want to Play (& Why Project Zutto has Stalled)

I've always loved online worlds: MMOs and, more recently, live service games. I love them to the exclusion of most other types of games: if there's no persistent multiplayer world, I'm likely to bounce right off. But, in this era, a lot of these types of games ... don't love me?

Sure, you've got stuff like Genshin or WoW¹ that prey on FOMO to get you to overspend on meaningless junk. I'm all about paying for products and services, but "unending slot machine for your waifu" is a very different type of transaction. But those are easy enough to ignore, even if it's a shame² to miss out.

But the macrotransactions³ are easy enough to ignore. No, I feel like I'm being left behind because the games just aren't things I want to play anymore.

The promise of online worlds in 2024 is that I can be in $SETTING all day long, right? I'm carrying enough processing power on my belt to simulate every atom in the solar system, twice⁴. Why is every MMO's "mobile client" slow, restricted dogshit⁵? Maybe I can chat in guild if I wait two minutes to authenticate, until I minimize the app, at which point it's time to authenticate again?

And where some kind of PC / mobile hybrid does exist, it's often not cognizant of the fact that I want to do different things on my phone. If I'm at my desk, maybe I want to raid. But there's never a reality in which I want to do that on my phone.

What I really want to see is a webapp⁶ where I could do crafting, market orders, manage some sort of idle harvesting activity ... any kind of small, less-than-100%-focused-attention activities that progress me in the game.

I want to stay connected to my hobby at lunch, when I'm out for a walk! I want to be able to do something if I get a ping mid-day about our POS being under attack, even if that's just moving ammo around.

And the final area I'm not feeling loved: MMOs have generally become adverserial. Guild Wars 2 is a notable exception here, where I very rarely see anyone being a jerk in fractals, and if they are, they get shut down by other players, lightning-fast.

But anything else: people are mad about your build in basic missions, or they're mad you're not higher level/unlocked certain things ... and it's just exhausting. This is a non-steel-path mission on Earth, shut the fuck up and press M1. Even if they're not mad at me, just seeing it is so tired.

You see this not just from players, but game design too. For example: Palia. A "cozy MMO", except if you wanna do some gathering. The nodes are world spawns, and as soon as anyone picks something up, that's it, they've got it.

It's irritating and sets up an adverserial relationship: if I see another player, I want to be excited. Are they a powerful high-level player? Am I gunna see something neat? Will they say hello? But instead of that, it's "oh no, there's other people here, fuck, I hope they go away ASAP so I can finish mining this ore for my new table".

And that's a bummer.

Project Zutto

I started working on a web game a few months ago called Project Zutto, with a mind to make that online world I wanna live in.

Think Neopets meets Cyber Nations meets Trimps, delivered as a single, shared online world. The only adverserial moments I can think of are friendly contests -- factions form and try to contribute the most resources to a megaproject. Everyone gets the benefit of the megastructure, but one faction gets bragging rights too.

But, the key thing is, I want these small, day-to-day activities to feel like they're part of some bigger, community-wide effort. They should make you feel connected to other players, and you should want to help other people optimize or run dungeons, because two people doing well gets the community further than one person.

I have some background in that sort of game, although it was quite a long time ago, when basic HTML toys and a forum made for a compelling game. These days, not so much.

I wrote up some design docs and got on with the business of implementing, despite it being a basic HTML game. If Cookie Clicker or Trimps can be compelling with HTML and JS, then I can make something good too!

The idle game engine largely exists, and pet equipment can influence that or they can switch to combat loadout. I haven't designed the "tech tree" yet, beyond some vague idea of tech eras to progress through before prestiging.

Lots of placeholder art here (and it looks like a stock Laravel Jetstream app), but to show I'm not making this up:

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There's a list of things left to do before it's a complete idle game: implement one-time upgrade unlocks, the prestige system, and build out the entire "tech tree"⁷.

But that's where I started to get hung up, and progress stalled.

The idle game is that thing you can do on your phone during a few quiet minutes at work: harvest my berries, and buy a new garden plot. Maybe check an NPC or player shop for rare paintbrushes to give your pet a cool skin. I've got the low-focus activity part on lockdown, IMHO.

But dungeons are the focused activity, when you're at your desk, giving the game your undivided attention. I need fun gameplay here, and ideally, you can solo or bring a friend (or three) to help fight. Making something that feels like a satisfying social activity, given my constraints of being a Dumb HTML Jackass seemed overwhelming, and I quietly refocused on other projects while I pondered.

There was one more problem too: I want global, game-wide goals that everyone can contribute to. Upgrading your homestead vs. contributing to a megaproject should be a decision you have to think about. And there should be social consequences to it: there needs to be some social reason you want to throw your resources into the Resource Sink. Other players should appreciate you for this, and it should have some kind of meaningful in-game impact to show yes, I am a good person, I am contributing to the community!.

And I had no idea how to do that until this week!

One of my friends posted some old neopet-esque sketches in chat. I'm a wise guy, so I asked when her game was launching. But she responded with some ideas on what she'd want to make. It's a smaller, instanced game for maybe a dozen people, running around in a Pokemon Yellow-esque overworld, looking for items to harvest, solving puzzles, etc.

That gave me the missing piece: instead of having a very Web UI with boxes and buttons, make my game into an online world. Duh! If you can see other people's avatars, I can give them prestigous auras so other players will know that Yes, Indeed, You Are a Good Person!!!

Building that seems hard. I've started experimenting with Phaser, Livewire, and Reverb to make her idea happen, since the MVP there is "character that walks around map and can go through doors". That's a bit more approachable than a full-on dungeon + overworld experience.

The Livewire + Reverb (or, well, Echo) part is riffing on an architecture I've used in the past for Serious Business -- but instead of a game world with Livewire'd widgets overlayed, it was a Visio-esque workflow builder. Same concept, really, so I should be able to make something work when I learn how to operate Phaser.

Phaser itself is sort of a new paradigm for me. I usually do web things: request, response, done. All this nonsense about tilemaps and sprites and layers is alien. But it doesn't seem too hard? I've gotten a basic map exported from Tiled into my new-born game engine, compiled through Laravel's asset builder. So that's something!

I'll try and build this simpler idea out and reuse some of the tech for Project Zutto's overworld and dungeon system.

Stars Reach

I had this post in the ideas column of my Planka⁸ all month, but I never started drafting it because I didn't have a conclusion. Doom & gloom, wah wah, all games are bad and I will forever travel the wastes looking for home isn't satisfying. And the "Why has Project Zutto stalled?" section was going to be more bleak than it ended up.

But, not too long ago, I started seeing articles about Stars Reach, a new sandbox MMO in the spirit of Star Wars: Galaxies. I've never played SWG -- I was busy with EVE back then -- and I don't think I would have liked it as a youth. But these days...well.

Here's how they present who this game is for:

As you have maybe read from the other articles in the series, SR is very much a sandbox. That means that it is about living in another world, not just chasing XP pellets to complete gear sets. There is no single goal that a player can pursue, except perhaps to work together with other players to try to solve the large scale thematic problem the game presents.

Sounds a lot like what I wanted to do with Project Zutto. Maybe Stars Reach is a game that I can call home?

Now, a lot of fellow blaugustians have responded with skeptecism:

• Playable Worlds Announces Star's Reach, TAGN
• Stars Reach is Reachin’, In an Age
• And another post I can't find that broadsided them for setting players up as HOAs
  • Please ping me if you remember who posted that!

The gist is: this sounds like a ridiculously hard thing to do. EverQuest Next tried some of this and failed spectacularly. The issues of player-organized governance are also ... well, as a fediverse admin, I think the best way to summarize my thoughts on that are "lol, lmao".

The inspiration for Stars Reach as my post conclusion came from an email I got earlier this week inviting me to their closed playtest⁹. I don't think I'll be able to post anything about it -- it's presumably NDA'd -- but I guess this is the beginning of a new adventure. I hope they figure out solutions to the challenging problems¹⁰.

In a lot of ways, I really just want a world I can feel like I'm part of, even if I'm not raiding every single night. GW2 delivers this, sort of, but there's not a ton of non-100%-engaged gameplay. Contrast to how we played EVE Online for years: semi-AFK mining together on IRC watching TV, with brief periods of 100% focus for missions or fleeting up to roam or whatever.

We all worked together to make progress for ourselves, our guild, and for the whole EVE community. We hauled all of the stuff we built with our artisan hand-mined minerals down to Jita and found its way onto thousands of players' ships. That's really cool¹¹.

I know I read yet another blaugustian's post highlighting the tendency of these sorts of sandbox games to not contain enough "game". That's a real concern too: Palia was basically "timer-based mobile game where other players are annoying and steal your bugs" when I tried it. There wasn't really a reason to do, well ... anything? The MMO aspect was superficial. The NPCs had some objectives and story, but you'd quickly slam into a steep time-gate¹².

Notable thing: somebody set up an unofficial wiki for the game. I can tell these are my kinda people because it's not hosted on fandom.