Essays
These are full-blown essays, papers, and articles.
Presentations
Slideshows and presentation materials from conferences.
Interviews and Panels
Reprints of non-game-specific interviews, and transcripts of panels and roundtables.
Snippets
Excerpts from blog, newsgroup, and forum posts.
Laws
The "Laws of Online World Design" in various forms.
Timeline
A timeline of developments in online worlds.
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
My book on why games matter and what fun is.
Insubstantial Pageants
A book I started and never finished outlining the basics of online world design.
Links
Links to resources on online world design.
All contents of this site are
© Copyright 1998-2010
Raphael Koster.
All rights reserved.
The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any former or current employer.
Each creature in the game was defined in terms of its needs. For example,
dragons required huge amounts of meat to survive, and sought out gold (and if
they found it, were supposed to carry it back to their lairs). The use case
which was described in the design documents was that a dragon would have alair,
and seek in widening circles for food. Should a player hunt out all the deer in
the environs of the lair, the dragon might end up finding its meat at the local
village. Then you could solve the issue by either feeding the dragon (herding
deer to its cave, for example) so that it didn't need to hunt so far, or by
slaying it. An example of how simulationist design can result in a more dynamic
environment.
In practice, the search radius ended up being a screen or so, pathfinding
couldn't even solve a straight line at that distance, and it was too darn slow
anyway. No dragons ever raided villages, and the UO creatures turned into AIs
stupider than your mobs in a run of the mill text mud.
I still remember how we felt that first day when we walked in and asked what
game would be like, and got our own dragon example from our resumes recited back
to us by Mike McShaffry... I mostly offer this one up as a bit of historical knowledge
about the early days of UO, and the whole "baking bread" controversy.
The "infamous dragon example" was a statement of how the AI hooks into the
resource system were supposed to work.
Bread making made it into U9 in large part to thumb noses at the public who slammed UO over it. Shadowbane's press campaign started out with "We don't play games to bake bread, we play to crush"--that was a reference to those days. There were many critiques that it wasn't heroic enough. :) Legends of Kesmai ran a banner ad which spoofed bread making and carpentry too. There was precedent in the Ultima series, particularly Ultima 7, but not to any large scale. Maybe that web archiving site has some of the old articles that were written--we were, literally, ridiculed for it by press, fans, and competitors.
When Origin asked me and my wife for a design sample when we applied for jobs, we sent them the design for the resource system, which was basically a system for attaching abstract qualities to game objects, so that generalized systems could act upon the qualities rather than hardcoding to any object. For example, any object with the "wood" quality could burn when an object with the "fire" quality came into contact with it.
Crafting was the act of moving qualities from one object to another. This is still in UO to an extent; the ore you mine in UO is METAL resource that spawns in every map chunk (8x8 tile blocks) based on the amount of particular terrain tiles in that chunk. Most of the crafting trees however were changed to be hardcoded to particular pieces of art long ago, which lost a ton of flexibility and gained nothing. :P
The biggest potential value of an abstract quality system, of course, was to hook AI off of it. That's where the infamous dragon example came from.
When we were hired, we were informed on the first day that the system we had sent in with our resumes was the core of the game. During alpha, it actually worked. You saw wolves taking down rabbits and deer and eating them, etc. Eventually, creatures were supposed to pick lairs, hoard their earnings there to be discovered, do area searches for things they desired, and whatever agent lost something it desired was supposed to tell you who had it and what they'd want to get it back.
Taken from Usenet posts in early 2002.
