Sketch Quest
From WorkCDN
Social networking, in SPACE.
Image:SketchQuestQuickSample.png
Contents |
Project Goals
- Encourage players to develop their artist skills by directly rewarding them for creating good and popular art.
- Many skills developed with the minigames in the game world should back-translate into the real world.
Target Audience
- Players who like to draw sketch artwork and see it placed into a game
- Players who like to interact in a user-run world and profit from the economic potential therein
- Players who like retro top-down space exploration / trading games
Design Guidelines
From a blog post of Raph Koster's, here are his guidelines for developing a Facebook game. I would like to follow these principles for SketchQuest:
- Make it trivially easy to get in.
- Have something fun to do immediately.
- Don’t demand constant attention.
- Make it easy to get your friends in too.
Abstract
SketchQuest players gives players the power to sketch their imaginations into reality as they explore the universe around them and within them. The better the artwork is, the more effective it is, and this is what moves the game forwards.
Detailed Description
Nearly all content in the game is user-created. The underlying mover of the game world is content creation that is judged by a peer-comparison system. Players have the opportunity to play the critic and rate other player's artwork by judging between two game-selected pieces and the player votes which one they like better. The more good votes a piece of artwork gets, the more effective it is. This mechanic can work in nearly any game environment, but for simplicity's sake, the first iteration of SketchQuest will take place as a top-down space shooter where at first, the only thing that can be drawn is a player's space ship. The better-drawn the space ship, the faster, stronger, and larger it is.
Game Mechanics
Content Creation
This is a flexible part of the game, where you have a content creation mini-app built into your game. For the first iteration of SketchQuest, it will be a simple black-and-white pencil sketching tool. For later iterations, color, animation, interior design, and even 3d modeling could all be things that are created by the users. This is *very* flexible.
Image:SketchQuestQuickSample2.png
Peer Review System
This is the heart of the game, and one of the bigger things I feel is innovative. Because all of the content in the game is user-created, there has to be a way to judge what gets included and what does not. For this, we will introduce a rating system.
Players have so many "votes" per day that they can cast, for which they get rewarded in credits. In order to help people take this seriously, perhaps we should reward the player more credits for accurately predicting what other users like -- this will encourage people to take the voting seriously, and add a predictive element to it. They are presented with two ships to compare, and they can either vote binarily which one they like better (option A or option B), or they can adjust a slider to give more weight to one side or the other (maybe too confusing, but maybe less frustrating for choices where the player is torn in deciding which is better).
Social Networking
The content creation/review system is the real meat of the game, and the following is just to aid in building a sense of community that players will enjoy being a part of, and feel that they can really make a difference.
Home Worlds
Just as the ships are creations of the player's imagination, similarly, the places to visit in the universe are the players' worlds. Every player has a home planet which they can develop and use to create content.
Inter-world Navigation
Connections to other planets are done through friendships. If you have other friends in your social network who have this application, then you can fly to their planets and trade with them. From there, you can fly to your friend's network, and so-on and so-forth. It gives motivation to get to know people that you might not other meet otherwise, but may be connected to in a number of ways.
Visiting Worlds
You can travel to friends' worlds, even if they have not added this application to Facebook. They show up as unpopulated systems. When there, you can send an invite to join SketchQuest in the form of an exploratory research expedition. These "dead" planets are still useful for mining and stuff perhaps, to give players motivation to visit their friends' worlds.
Art Dealing
When visiting another planet, you can browse any artwork that the planet's owner may have put up for sale there in their personal "art gallery". Artists can either fly around, seeking the best offers for their artwork, or they can wait for art dealers to come to them, and wait for a good price. In this way, players can be art producers, art dealers, or a mix of both. Depending on how well connected you are, and how much traffic you have flowing through your particular home world will give you advantages/disadvantages in the trading market.
Minigames
In the game world, there should be a variety of activities that the player can do. There should be a variety with games of chance, strategy, and skill, with the emphasis on the latter.
Skill-based minigames
The minigames should have a purpose of improving people's fundamental drawing skills. This will encourage two things: 1) The creation of better artists 2) The desire to purchase better drawing tools through our affiliate links
Minigame Ideas
- Mining -- trace a pattern of ore as it is tracked through an asteroid
- Ship Repair -- accurately trace damaged circles in a holey piece of armor
- Ender's Game -- tracing a line around your screen as long as possible without it touching (Ender used to do this on his desk in the first book)
- Forgery -- for a criminal element, tracing other people's signatures to forge them, and the effectiveness of the theft is measured by the accuracy of the forgery.
- Other?
Strategy-based minigames
Perhaps a sketch-type version of Go, similar to Goo?
Games based on chance
Not sure about this one. Maybe not necessary?
Implementation
Drawing Tools
- Input Draw looks *perfect*. Free for non-commercial, and we can buy a commercial license when we start putting ad revenue on this game. Control of the image belongs to the server, and is not given to the user. Because it's forms-based, looks like it would be pretty easy to hack to duplicate images through form submission tampering -- we'll have to keep this in mind, but it looks like one of our best bets.
- Web Sketch -- pretty close to being exactly what I envisioned. It's very cheap too -- looks like it would be a good buy.
- Websketch (not the same as the above one) is really cheesy, but simple enough that it might be ideal for getting to work in the interim.
Drawing Sharing/Voting
- To see how an online art community can work, check out Queeky -- it's a lot like SketchQuest, except that you can't shoot bad guys with your art. :)
- Here's a Facebook app that is *very* similar to what I'm trying to do -- in fact, it's nearly perfect. Graffiti Wall -- it works really well, and they even do the same kind of advertising I was thinking of -- selling Wacom tablets and linking to "how to draw" courses.
Social Networking
I think there is great potential for this to be created as a Facebook App. The Facebook API is very powerful and seems very easy to use. I was able to get one of their sample apps of demo code up and running in less than an hour, and it looks pretty easy to modify.
With another partial evening of work, I was able to learn a bit more of how the Facebook API works, and get a not-very-interesting-but-mildly-functional app going. Image:SketchQuestScreenshot1.png
