Mini-games within games

[Marek]

The other day I tried out Puzzle Pirates. It's a MMORPG where the RPG part consists of various puzzle games, in the style of such classics as Tetris or Bejeweled. Each puzzle mini-game accomplishes a certain task in-game. For example: sailing a pirate ship, battling enemies and crafting items are all done by scoring points in their respective mini-games.



It sounded silly at first but soon I was really into it. The mini games are easy to learn and easy to get addicted to. Someone in our IRC channel mentioned Puzzle Quest as a game with a similar Bejeweled-like mini-game for battling enemies. Every mini-game that you play advances you in the "macro" game.

These micro-games are a brilliant format when it comes to game design: they combine simple, approachable gameplay with very short feedback loops. The only thing missing in a mini-game is a slightly longer feedback loop that gives the player a feeling of advancement (particularly relevant in RPGs). Well, not to worry: this missing piece can be filled, as it is in Puzzle Pirates, with experience points and rewards for playing well (and for playing often).

So, I immediately wondered: can this be brought to PBBGs? What do you guys think of a PBBG where tasks are completed by playing mini-games? (for instance, using JavaScript and perhaps the HTML5 canvas) I believe Janne is working on something of the sort with his Magic Elements game.

Does anyone know of any other existing examples of games like this?

[Chris]

The key problem to me are bots. It is usually trivial to write a bot to play it for you (and players will do it the moment the game become a bit popular).
Try to find one flash game where you don't see a few people on the highscore with 2/4billion points (depends if the score is signed or unsigned)...

[dsheroh]

So, I immediately wondered: can this be brought to PBBGs? What do you guys think of a PBBG where tasks are completed by playing mini-games? (for instance, using JavaScript and perhaps the HTML5 canvas) I believe Janne is working on something of the sort with his Magic Elements game.

Does anyone know of any other existing examples of games like this?

Since you were in IRC for the discussion of Puzzle Quest, I assume you were also there for my announcement that I'd just put up my (HTML5 canvas-based) variation on the theme.  I have plenty of plans for it in the way of long-term advancement for player characters, but you asked for existing examples so I won't go into them here...  

[Marek]

Some more thoughts:

One of the great old commandments of game design is to make sure the core action of the game is fun. The core action is what the player spends most of her time doing, over and over. In the case of a MMORPG, for example, it might be fighting monsters. In a crafting game, it could be making items.

In the PBBG sphere there's a tendency for individual actions to be just simple button clicks (e.g. "Attack enemy"). It's a limitation of the platform and players are used to it. The reward cycle for the player is relatively slow as a result, and the fun of the game comes from emergent results of many successive button clicks.

What if the button clicking were replaced by actual interactive, reward-cycle-rich mini-games? If your core action is fun, then a lot of the fluff that surrounds it becomes unnecessary. There was a question asked in IRC about how to make resource gathering fun. Harkins suggested, "Let them play pac-man and collect resources instead of dots." It's a brilliant idea because then the rest of the game complements this already-fun core mechanic, instead of it having to constantly try to make up for the core mechanic being a boring button click.

Of course, the technical limitation is still there because we're working with HTTP. Creating a fun interactive mini-game is a challenge. And Chris raises an important point about cheating. Because the game logic is in the untrusted realm of the user client, the data indicating the result of the mini-game cannot be trusted. For puzzle games that don't require too much computation, it might be feasible to validate the gameplay log on the server-side. But that still doesn't solve the problem of bots.

I'm thinking of taking my roid runner mini-game and making it into a gameplay element of a simple PBBG. It'll be an experiment. Dave, I'd love to hear about your plans for Traspel.

[dsheroh]

Because the game logic is in the untrusted realm of the user client, the data indicating the result of the mini-game cannot be trusted.

This is not a necessary condition.  It's entirely possible for the game logic to be hosted on the server, with the game client serving only as an interface to the server, although it's admittedly a design that's poorly-suited to the HTTP transport, since it really needs a persistent, full-duplex channel to work efficiently.  Flash can provide that today and I'm looking forward to WebSockets providing it tomorrow.

But that still doesn't solve the problem of bots.

Yes, but that's nothing unique to minigames.  If anything, they raise the bar for bots.  Writing something to cheat at the average BBG by scanning a page of HTML and firing off requests corresponding to the "Attack Now" link is utterly trivial.  Identifying the state of a graphical game field and determining the appropriate response is a much more challenging task, although this does get into the question of how much is done server-side vs. client-side.  If an eventual Traspel server were to generate a png of the complete mana field, send it to the client, and then get imagemap clicks back so it could calculate the cell clicked, then that would be extremely difficult to write bots for, especially if random noise is added to the field to prevent simple pixel-matching from identifying the sigil in each cell.  At the other extreme, if the server just sends a list of "1, 1: fire; 1, 2: heal;..." and the client sends back the cell coordinates as they're selected, then that's no more difficult to bot than a regular HTML page and links.

Dave, I'd love to hear about your plans for Traspel.

I could write a short book on that topic, but, within the context of this thread, the highlights are that, in the conventional-PBBG portion of the game, players will be able to create and tune their spells rather than being presented with a fixed set of spells with random sigil orders.  The location of the battle will, of course, be a factor in combat - if you can catch a dragon out on the plains (with an even mix of sigils in the mana field), you'll have a much easier time of it than if you charge into its volcano lair (where the mana field is dominated by fire to fuel the dragon's powers).  I also have some plans regarding player-enchanted items and how they'll interact with the mana field during combat.  PvP wizard duels are also pretty much a given.

The overall picture is somewhat similar to the social wizard tower game that Chris was discussing in another thread, with players spending most of their time in labs and libraries to develop their magical abilities while commanding minions to scout and gather for them.  The combat interface will come into play whenever a group of minions encounters significant resistance in their mission and summons the player out to provide some heavy artillery.

[jannesiera]

I should note that neopets is a great example of this. Also Gaia online uses mini-games to enhance player experience. The concept isn't new to PBBG's at all, I think always flash is (and probably should be) used.

[Chris]

Neopets is for kids, so it might not attract computer savvy users that make bots. As for Gaia online I always thought it was a forum with minigames as an addition only.

But what makes me wonder is Adventure Quest. It is definitely a full blown fantasy MMOG, with combat as a flash minigame. The minigame is the core of the system, actually the only thing that matters. If players were to hack that one the whole game's balance would be broken. They are obviously heavily targetted with high quality bots. How they solved this?

[Andy]

I know a few people who play Puzzle Pirates! I laugh at them, just because of the name, it's not that bad of a game to me though ^^