1. Take It One Step At A Time

I've decided to give Project Xenoverse a second try. I need to develop a good RPG advancement mechanic and perpetual plot generation engine. If I can do this, the project should be fine.

Part of this is because, after a day of brainstorming on the matter, I decided Project Sentinel is the next step.

I'm not yet good enough to handle a good Sentinel Worlds/Starflight/Mass Effect mechanism taken multiplayer. Handling that transition between space and planet is hard. Not incredibly hard - the theory is sound - but it's a whole additional level of gameplay to implement.

Instead, I'm going to try to keep everything on a single planet. If nothing else, it's something the BYOND engine can handle really well by default. Once I can handle a single planet, then I'll worry about adding layers of space travel between them.

This is probably how everybody should be developing their games: one step at a time. If the current game concept is unreachable, try something simpler, and build your way up slowly.

2. When Designing A Dynamic Game, Expect The Unexpected

I was not aware of this, but apparently there was a game very similar to what I was planning by the name of Lode Wars a few years back. Judging by the players' reaction - many are begging Leftley to put it back up - the design is quite sound in terms of generating that virtual-worldly appeal. However, the creator encountered that fundamental problem with good dynamic worlds:

Players will be players.

Leftley pretty much summarizes it on the Lode Wars page: "teammates were seen as rivals at best, nuisances or even targets at worst, but virtually never as allies".

To an extent, this is fine. Players play a game to enjoy themselves, and often this does not involve playing the game as you may have intended. Good, let them enjoy themselves.

However, there will be times when you want to steer the players' behavior, such as when the way they're enjoying the game comes at the detriment of other players' enjoyment.

In that case, I recommend a careful consideration of "carrots and sticks." If they're being punished (the "stick") for doing the right thing, or rewarded (the "carrot") for doing it the wrong thing, of course they're going to do what you didn't want them to do.

It's tricky, though, because rewards and punishments come from tricky places. For many players, grief play - tormenting others - is a formidable reward in itself. I recently grew to hate Fallout 3, and otherwise awesome game, because they inadvertently punish you by terminating play at the end of it. (Previous Fallouts offset termination at the end of the game with a better set of rewards.)

You don't necessarily have to consider the carrots and sticks immediately at the start of your design, but the easier you start the easier it will be to stop things going in a self-destructive direction later.

There's such a thing as overdoing your carrots and sticks, too. There's a great deal of emergent behavior that can make virtual worlds quite special which can be destroyed by fencing the players off. The more emergent behavior you can harness safely, the better the virtual worldly aspect of your game.

3. If It's Truly Your Dream, It Can Never Truly Be Taken From You.

I'm not endeavoring to copy Lode Wars, a game I never played. I had to search pretty hard to even get an idea what it looked like, coming across another game by the name of BluBomb before I could even find a screen shot that gave me a relatively confirmed match.

It was in BluBomb that I encountered another problem I might encounter. The developer was upset because a bunch of people saw his game and started accusing him of copying Lode Wars.

I'm not really making an 'action mining game,' but I suspect I'm going to end up creating something that resembles Lode Wars regardless. Alternately, somebody could very well try my game, steal all my ideas, and rob my potential audience.

Either way, I think I'm covered.

If my game ends up resembling one that's already been made, I don't really mind so much. I've designed my game entirely with my own desire to "Build Your Own Net Dream" in mind. If my dream game happens to resemble somebody else's, that's just a coincidence. If anyone can't deal with how my game may resemble another, that sounds like a personal problem to me.

Alternately, if I'm copied, what have I to fear? An imitator has not gone through the blood and tears involved in developing the necessary creativity or cognitive faculty to understand what they're copying. A house of cards built on imitation without understanding its foundation is bound to fall. If it doesn't, well, maybe my idea was far simpler than I thought: time to work on something even better.

In the immortal words of the Goonies - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuEyeuuVFTQ - "You know what? This was my wish, my dream, and it didn't come true. I'm taking it back -- I'm taking them all back!"

That's a silly comparison to make, but I'm basically saying is that if it's really Your Own Net Dream, it's still Your Own Net Dream no matter what happens to it. Don't pay any mind to what anyone else is doing: you're here for you, not them. Fame is a fleeting thing, creating your dream game is forever.